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I thought this piece by Jon Baskin was going to be an Antkind review, and then as I read I thought Oh, it's an essay on Charlie's use of post-modern techniques to explore ideas of self and whatnot... and then it turned out to be indeed a review of Antkind. But it's a pretty cerebral review, taking in the wider context of Charlie's work and other post modern writers who hit it big around the late 90s/early 2000s, and it's an interesting read. Contains spoilers, though.

In their most successful works, artists like Wallace and Kaufman reassured their audiences that earnest emotion remained possible, even at the end of history. That these artists used so many postmodern techniques in the first place, however, testified to their sense that sincerity in an age of irony was no simple matter.

[...] It makes sense that Kaufman, one of our deepest and most imaginative thinkers about the self, would want to write a novel, one of our most conspicuous channels for self-investigation. That novel, "Antkind", has arrived, and, due to its length and slapstick sense of humor, it has already been labelled Pynchonesque. But the author referred to most often in the book is Samuel Beckett, and this offers a better clue about the tradition Kaufman aspires to belong to. In contrast to Pynchon’s political epics, Beckett’s work is one of the landmark achievements of literary introspection. "Molloy", the first book in his mid-century trilogy (and the one most often alluded to in “Antkind”), contains no secondary characters and hardly any events. It is famous partly for showing that great art can emerge solely from a mind wrestling with itself. (Source)

An Ames window is an optical illusion, and the guy who invented it--Adelbert Ames Jr.--is perhaps better know for inventing the Ames room, which is the kind of forced-perspective illusion Michel Gondry used in parts of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Boing Boing posted a couple of cool videos about the window and the room today, as well as a relevant Eternal Sunshine clip.

That's Dean Hutton on The Curiosity Show. Man, I used to watch that show when I was a kid. Was cool!

And here's an Ames room:

And here are Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet getting all Amesy in Joel Barish's childhood home:

Aaaand now I want to watch the movie again.

NEAT. Way back in 2014, Charlie was attached to write an adaptation of Arthur Herzog's 1978 science fiction novel I.Q. 83. Six years later we've heard not much else about it until today. Collider reports that Charlie might bring an adaptation of the adaptation to HBO:

In an interview with Collider’s Steve Weintraub about his upcoming Netflix film I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Kaufman revealed that he’s currently developing IQ 83 as a limited series, although he stressed that there’s no telling whether or not the show will actually get made.

“I’m developing this thing for HBO, which is a limited series about a virus that causes stupidity. And it’s based on a screenplay I wrote, which is based on a novel called IQ 83. And I’m actually developing it for them, so it’s possible that it’s going to happen, [but] I don’t know that it’s going to happen. But I’m very interested in it because of the circumstances in which we live. I’m very interested in exploring the notion of that, and treating it as kind of a metaphor.”

The novel follows Dr. James Healey, the head of a group of scientists that conducted DNA experiments which resulted in the release of an airborne disease that gradually lowers the IQ of those infected. Healey is in a race to develop a cure for the virus before succumbing to its effects himself. (Source)

And I mean, no offence everybody, but that sounds pretty damned timely because there's an embarrassing amount of stupid in the world right now.

I can't find that interview with Steve Weintraub, by the way, otherwise I'd link directly to it. Maybe it'll be published closer to Ending Things' release, or maybe I'm just terrible at finding things.

Behind on your I'm Thinking of Ending Things info? Screen Rant have a little feature covering everything they know about the film. (OR YOU COULD SCROLL THROUGH BCK, but you know. Up to you.) Release Date, cast, storyline, it's all there.

Little snippet:

I’m Thinking Of Ending Things comes at the opportune moment in horror where family and relationship dramas have been central to the plot. For instance, Ari Aster’s highly successful Hereditary (2018) deals with a family attempting to cope with grief and mental illness. His follow-up, Midsommar (2019), features a relationship that is slowly disintegrating and growing tenser by the minute. The original novel deals with a couple whose relationship is only several weeks old when Jake decides to take his girlfriend to meet his parents. As expected, the novel takes a dramatic dive towards psychological horrors that each character undergoes while the reader grapples with the intensity of every twist and turn. (Source)

The Collider podcast talked Being John Malkovich a couple weeks ago! You can check it out over here.

This week on The Collider Podcast we’re joined by Associate Editor Greg Smith to talk about Being John Malkovich. We kick things off talking about Greg’s article about the essential films of director Billy Wilder before moving into a discussion about what Being John Malkovich is all about, how it relates to the larger filmographies of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze, the skill and craft of John Malkovich‘s performance, and much more. We then finish up with Recently Watched. (Source)

Longtime BCKster David Rosen is a musician and podcaster, and he points us to a recent episode of Piecing It Together, in which he and Kris Krainock tackle Antkind and discuss the other books and art they believe may have been an influence on CK's novel. (Ordinarily this is a film podcast with the same approach, but this is CK, and for CK exceptions can be made!) It's a great listen but it's spoilery, so beware.

Couldn't find a way to embed it here, but you'll reach it if you follow the link.

On the 137th episode of Piecing It Together, we do something that we’ve never done before… Cover a book! But it’s not that surprising that I’d want to talk about Charlie Kaufman’s first novel on the show, considering he’s the writer of my favorite movie Adaptation and a number of other films I love. Joining me is returning co-host Kris Krainock who did a great job of filling in the literary gaps with some puzzle pieces I’d have never been able to come up with unless I had another decade or two to read some more books… Did I mention I’m a slow reader? (Source)

It's heeeere:

LOOKS AWESOME. September 4!

It makes sense if you've read Antkind. Or if you've seen Malkovich, for that matter.

Thanks to @catnip2221!

The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh makes a convincing argument that now's the time TV networks should bring out some of their unaired pilots, like for instance Charlie's How and Why and Game of Thrones' reportedly horrible original pilot.

One of the problems with trying to resuscitate those pilots long after some suit pronounced them dead is that they can’t fill a time slot week after week. “I think the issue is to just have a single episode of something,” Tarses says. “There’s really no way to promote and market it without spending money that you don’t want to spend on something that’s a one-off.”

There might be one way: Package the pilots together. At HBO, the original Game of Thrones pilot could conceivably serve as a pilot for a series of previously unseen pilots.

[...] Showtime passed on Ridley Scott’s The Vatican, which starred Kyle Chandler and would have marked Scott’s small-screen debut. CBS passed on Nick Stoller’s Entry Level, a cubicle comedy with a cast that included Michael Angarano and Brie Larson. ABC passed on a Brian Cox fantasy detective drama called Gotham (not the Batman one). NBC passed on Brad Anderson’s Midnight Sun, a Julia Stiles drama about an Alaskan cult being investigated by an FBI cult specialist. Comedy Central passed on David Gordon Green’s Black Jack, starring Ving Rhames as a decommissioned special ops agent. FX passed on Charlie Kaufman’s How and Why—a half-hour comedy starring John Hawkes and Michael Cera—as well as Hoke, a Scott Frank vehicle starring Paul Giamatti as a homicide detective in mid-1980s Miami. (Source)

Holly Williams from The Observer:

Antkind is 706 pages long. It offers a maximalist satire of a contemporary America defined by fake news, corporate bullshit, vacuous pop culture and performative wokeness, but one so excessive, surreal and repetitive that it is itself tiresomely bloated and absolutely exhausting. If anything can happen without consequence, stakes are lowered. It’s absurdism ad infinitum.

Where Kaufman’s films are playfully mind-bending, they usually have real heart. But although Antkind is skippingly clever – saturated with comic allusions, puns, linguistic inventiveness and wildly unfettered imagination – it is sorely lacking characters you actually care about or any emotional narrative to cling to. (Source)

BOOOOO.

Ah well. The initial universal acclaim was bound to give way to a few negative reviews, eh. Charlie is never for everyone.