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The trailer will drop some time in the next 24 hours. Possibly I'll be asleep when that happens, but I'll post it as soon as I'm able. And then... September 4!

Longtime friend of BCK, Davide Romagnoli has a new book out, Sineddoche, Charlie Kaufman, and you'll never guess what it's about! Says the Amazon blurb:

"Sineddoche, Charlie Kaufman" non è un libro biografico per spiegare chi è Charlie Kaufman, dove è nato e cos'ha fatto. E non è nemmeno un compendio esaustivo o una completa esegesi delle opere del regista, produttore e sceneggiatore statunitense. "Sineddoche, Charlie Kaufman" è un invito a conoscere uno degli artisti più interessanti della sua generazione e rivedere, leggendole, le sue pellicole. Tutti titoli ben noti al grande pubblico, come Essere John Malkovich, Il ladro di orchidee, Synecdoche e Anomalisa. Un libro che racconta i retroscena dei suoi film seguendo il filo rosso delle dichiarazioni più interessanti e geniali dell'autore di Se mi lasci ti cancello. Per approfondire i suoi virtuosismi espressivi o anche scoprirli per la prima volta. (Source)

... which Google Translate turns into:

Synecdoche, Charlie Kaufman "is not a biographical book to explain who Charlie Kaufman is, where he was born and what he did. Nor is it an exhaustive compendium or complete exegesis of the works of the American director, producer and screenwriter." Synodoche, Charlie Kaufman "is an invitation to get to know one of the most interesting artists of his generation and review his films by reading them. All titles well known to the general public, such as Being John Malkovich, The Orchid Thief, Synecdoche and Anomalisa. A book that tells the background of his films by following the red thread of the most interesting and ingenious statements of the author of Se mi mi ti ti cancell. To deepen his expressive virtuosity or even discover them for the first time.

Neat, no? Davide sent me a copy, and I can't read a lick of it, but the cover is great!

Another review! This time it's Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian:

This debut novel from the award-winning screenwriter of movie masterpieces such as Being John Malkovich and Synecdoche, New York, is funny, exhausting and very, very long. Reading it is like watching (or being) someone trying to sprint to the top of an Escher staircase.

[...] Finally Antkind comes to its crazy, hellzapocalypticpoppin ending, and this twilight of the puppet-gods dwindles into darkness, leaving me with the punchdrunk feeling I have after all Kaufman’s movies. He may be someone for whom anxiety and sadness are a personal ordeal, but he transforms them into bleak, stark, unearthly monuments to comic despair. (Source)

indieWIRE's David Ehrlich chimes in with a film reviewer's review of Antkind. It's mega-heavy on the spoilers, though, so be warned. (His verdict, if you don't want to read: he really liked it, with a handful of qualifiers.)

Kaufman’s 720-page Globster of a novel initially feels like it’s trying to split the difference between Haruki Murakami and Hollywood Elsewhere (and later flirts with the likes of Pynchon and Borges on its way toward settling down as an adventure that can only be described as Kaufmanesque). (Source)

Was it released on Blu-ray at an earlier point, somewhere in the dim dark past? I can't remember. [Update: it was. Thanks to Bryan for confirming.] No problem, though, cos Adaptation will be coming to Blu-ray later this year thanks to Shout! Factory:

Bonus Features:
· Original Featurette
· Trailer
· Still Gallery

So nothing new, but if you need to update or upgrade your collection of CK paraphernalia, this one's for you!

Two bits of cool fan-created CK art! First one comes via a Redditor who commissioned this piece:

The artist is tan.drine on Instagram.

Charlie's new look in the City Arts &Lectures interview inspired our friend and BCKster Sarah, whose other work you can check out here:

Nice, eh?!

Antkind proved too much Kaufman for Miller:

I’ve long had a weakness for obsessive, neurotic, paranoid, and comically vain narrators, but Charlie Kaufman’s overstuffed, formless first novel, Antkind, may have finally cured me of it.

[...] Yet Antkind also has flashes of wit and even beauty, often just at the point when the reader has started to wonder if Kaufman wants her to suffer as much as the benighted B.

[...] Why, then, is Antkind so often tedious when Kaufman’s films are, for the most part, entertaining and delightful? Could it be something so simple as the constraints of cinematic form, the fact that you can’t make a three-month-long film because every minute of a movie costs a lot of money, typically other people’s money? That the limitations collaborators impose on a genius can end up rescuing him from his own hopelessly dithering solipsism? It could. Other people may be hell, according to Sartre, but sometimes they can save your ass—or at least stop you from crawling up it. (Source)

She was a little drunk, and the resulting tweets were trending.

The thread began with a tweet that simply read “Drunk” and began ending with one that read, “I am goi f to sleep. My husband has asked me five hundred rimes@if I am alright. That means it’s go to sleep o’clock.” At some point in the middle, she tweeted: “Ok a newborn colt rocks it totally and he thought my hand was his mom. It was not. He has tasted life’s infinite tragedy. As I mentioned Earlier I am inebriated.”

Entertainment Weekly pronounced that she stole “our hearts with drunken tweetstorm.” The A.V. Club dubbed the thread a “choice read,” and Vogue called it “the pandemic comic relief we needed right now.” Comedian Craig Cackowski performed a dramatic reading. (Source)

Drunk, or smoking orchids?

Here's what I think is so far the best Antkind video interview with CK. Pulitzer-winning author Andrew Sean Greer read Antkind twice, so maybe that accounts for it. It's a fun watch with some interesting tidbits, questions we haven't heard before.

He'd probably hate hearing that his By the Book is as Kaufmanesque as you can get, but oh my god it's true. If you do not like Charlie, you will not like this. If you do like Charlie, you might like this.

What books are on your nightstand?

Not to split hairs, but I don’t have a nightstand. I’m living in a temporary place for reasons too tedious and painful to get into here. There’s not much furniture. In the bedroom, such as it is, I have only a sleeping bag and a floor lamp. There are a few books next to me (I’m currently in the sleeping bag), books I ordered for research purposes. I’m reading Toynbee’s “A Study of History” and Tsiolkovsky’s “The Will of the Universe,” although the truth is, I am having trouble focusing lately. I spend long hours staring at the old, stained mattresses in the dump outside my window, as I shelter in place in this unfamiliar apartment. There is so much unexplained in my new, small world. The strange noises emanating from my neighbors’ apartments; the constant dropping of large items on the floor above me, the clinking of hundreds of wine bottles, as the neighbors across the hall carry them daily to the trash room. The screams. (Source)

I love how the next line is the question "What’s the last great book you read?" YEAH, LET'S JUST IGNORE THE THING ABOUT THE SCREAMS.

Anyway. It all gets weirder from there, but it's a good way of giving you a little taste of the oddball humour that lies within Antkind.