From the Chicago Reader (October 16, 2008). — J.R.
Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) makes his directorial debut with this feature, but it seems more like an illustration of his script than a full-fledged movie, proving how much he needs a Spike Jonze or a Michel Gondry to realize his surrealistic conceits. Tortured and torturous, it centers on a theater director from Schenectady (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who wins a MacArthur Fellowship but whose wife (Catherine Keener) leaves him; in response he tries to create a play that will represent his entire life experience, building a replica of New York City inside a warehouse. The usually resourceful Hoffman can’t sustain interest even after developing a receding hairline to make him resemble Jack Nicholson, and the other able players — Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, Tom Noonan, Hope Davis, and Jennifer Jason Leigh — mainly tread water. R, 124 min. (JR)
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1. The preceding four images, and apparently thousands more, come from moviemags.com, “the site of movie magazines,” which Chicagoan Bill Stamets has just alerted me to. The gaps are in some ways more awesome than the inclusions, and the taste may seem closer to zines and the Video Search of Miami than to the usual library indexes and bibliographies, but there’s still a lot of information squirreled away here, and the search engine certainly helps.
2. The other site, Moving Image Source, is already mentioned elsewhere on this site because they’ve been commissioning several articles from me, and because they’ve featured an article that I’ve recommended by Chris Fujiwara. (Actually, two articles if one includes a postscript about his more recent piece on Jacques Tourneur’s Stranger on Horseback—a piece I still like, though I wish I liked the film more.) But I’d like to call attention here to two other features there, Research Guide and Calendar, both of which are invaluable. Below are abbreviated versions of two items included in each:
Pinewood Dialogues
An archive with downloadable audio and transcripts of talks with filmmakers and actors, including Robert Altman, David Cronenberg, Mira Nair, Forest Whitaker, and more.
Millenium Film Journal
Published since 1978 by the Millenium Film Workshop, the Millenium Film Journal focuses on avant-garde cinema and practice, and covers a range of moving image technologies. Read more
