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Anticipation mounts! Over at Vulture they list 29 books to read this summer, and Charlie's is among them.

Charlie Kaufman is the rare screenwriter who is as celebrated as the directors who have brought his mind-bending scripts to the screen. Now he’s a novelist too. Antkind follows a failed film critic who stumbles across the greatest film of all time — a three-month-long, stop-motion masterpiece that took 90 years to make and has since been destroyed, save for a single frame. If you loved Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I shouldn’t have to tell you anything else to convince you to read it. (Source)

I just hope the release date doesn't get changed again.

Hey all! Just a little site-related heads up.

Back in 2016, Felix created the excellent r/kaufman sub on Reddit--it's the go-to place for CK fans over there--and while BCK's not officially affiliated with Felix's page, I do pop in there from time to time with a post or a comment. Last week he asked if I'd be interested in becoming a mod, so I said Okey doke! and now it's done. Which is why you see a link to Reddit in the sidebar here.

This changes nothing over here and not much over there, but if you're a Redditor I figured it was worth a mention.

Back soon with more stuff!

Nothing but fantastic reviews for Antkind so far. This one's from Alexander Moran at Booklist, and you probably shouldn't click it if you're avoiding spoilers:

[...] this novel is magnificently imaginative, bringing to mind Beckett, Pynchon, and A. R. Moxon’s more recent The Revisionaries (2019). With this surprisingly breezy read, given its length, Kaufman proves to be a masterful novelist, delivering a tragic, farcical, and fascinating exploration of how memory defines our lives. (Source)

I haven't come across a single negative or mixed review yet.

I don't know how long this has been online, but Publisher's Weekly gives Antkind a big thumbs up. Avoid if you're spoiler-shy:

The Pynchonesque scope of Kaufman’s novel gives him liberty to have his opinionated narrator comment on innumerable cultural touchstones, especially in cinema, where B. throws shade with tongue firmly in cheek at filmmaker Charlie Kaufman, whom he derides as “a monster unaware of his staggering ineptitude.” B.’s outsized personality and his giddily freewheeling experiences make this picaresque irresistible. (Source)

Coronavirus has messed things up. Says indieWIRE:

As awards groups adjust to the evolving post-pandemic reality, so will the studios. And the first up is everyone’s favorite Oscar insurgent, Netflix: While it will provide sponsorship for some major festivals in 2020, it’s not planning to send any of their films or talent to attend them.

Among the titles this removes from the circuit are David Fincher’s “Mank,” starring Gary Oldman and Amanda Seyfried; Ron Howard’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” starring Amy Adams; Charlie Kaufman’s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” starring Toni Collette and Jesse Plemons; George C. Wolfe’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” starring Viola Davis, Denzel Washington, and Chadwick Boseman; Radha Blank’s Sundance debut “The 40-Year-Old Version”; and Ramin Bahrani’s “White Tiger.” (Source)

Here's a good way to spend 75 minutes: listening to Charlie's Q&A with Mark O’Halloran at the Dublin Film Fest from earlier this year. It's on Spotify. Lots of interesting nuggets in here that we haven't heard before.

- Charlie used to be a stand-up comedian! (Sort of.)
- He starred as a gangster in a film called Junk Mail! (Sort of.)
- Spike Jonze stood him up on their first date. (We may have heard this before. But it's still funny to hear.)
- Not a big fan of Christopher Nolan.

O'Halloran brings up almost all of Charlie's ouevre. Ending Things comes up at the 64-minute mark. Antkind at the 65ish minute mark.

Big thanks to Terry!

Eternal Sunshine is about memory. Charlie's upcoming Antkind, too, is about memory. "The Case of the Missing Hit" has absolutely nothing to do with Charlie, but it is an episode of the great ReplyAll podcast, and it happens to deal with memory as well. I think a lot of you would dig it.

A man in California is haunted by the memory of a pop song from his youth. He can remember the lyrics and the melody. But the song itself has vanished, completely scrubbed from the internet. PJ takes on the Super Tech Support case.

PJ is one of the show's hosts, and he takes on the job of trying to figure out if this song ever really existed. The episode is fantastic and the conclusion is pretty incredible. Reminds me of Antkind's protagonist, who spends 700 or so pages trying to recall every frame of a movie. The guy in the podcast even goes to the trouble of recreating the entire song, including music and lyrics, himself. And, well...

Vulture calls the episode "instantly legendary" and The Guardian somewhat hysterically wonders if it's the greatest podcast episode ever. I dunno about that. (And don't read those articles yet, cos they'll spoil things.) I'm just putting it here because it's fascinating and amazing and Kaufmanesque.

Joshua Landy takes an in-depth look at Adaptation in his paper, Still Life in a Narrative Age: Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, and you can grab it for free online (sign-up required, PDF download). Here's the summary:

We are living in an age that is narratively obsessed: both in the academy and in popular culture, temporally articulated phenomena currently exert a vice-like grip over the collective imagination. Under such conditions, how may non-narrative sources of aesthetic power be made available once again to human observers? Charlie Kaufman’s response, in Adaptation, takes the form not of statements but of actions, of “philosophical therapy” for our insatiable narrative hunger. It leaves us, in the end, with two phenomena that have (in the full sense of the word) no history at all: the beauty of flowers and the intricacy of a human soul. (Source)

Awesome! If your brain is ready for that sort of thing, head on over for a look!

Screen Rant listed their "10 Best Looking Animated Films Of All Time, Ranked By Photorealism," and Anomalisa comes in at #8. WOOHOO.

Anomalisa tells the ironic tale of a customer service expert that is unable to connect with people. The film is mature and features writer/director Charlie Kaufman's unique brand of dark humor and melancholy.

Through stop-motion, Anomalisa aims for photorealism, with every piece of clothing and hair rendered in minute detail. Made on a small budget the film archives a stunning level of realism and was described as one of the most human films of the year. (Source)

The Garden of Words nabs the #1 spot.

There is not a lot going on in the world right now, other than COVID, hence little Charlie news to report.

American Cinematographer recently re-ran an old feature on Eternal Sunshine, though, so here's that. (I assume it's old, and I assume they re-ran it. It showed up in my alerts for some reason a few weeks ago, and I don't think it's a new piece.) It's a good read if you haven't seen it before. Lots of pics and interesting insight.

The film’s director of photography, Ellen Kuras, ASC, notes that director Michel Gondry, whose acclaimed music videos “often deal with the morphing of time and space,” was ideally suited to visualize a story whose primary setting is the boundless realm of its protagonist’s memory. However, Gondry was eager to depart from the hermetic, studio-bound experience he’d had on a previous Kaufman project, Human Nature. With its slippery shifts between reality and distorted memories, Eternal Sunshine required a look that could blend location shoot authenticity with unpredictable flashes of whimsy. Kuras, whose own work often strikes a balance between raw and stylized imagery (notably on Summer of Sam; see AC June ’99) proved a perfect match. (Source)