Ghosts Are Us: Charlie Kaufman’s new film is difficult and unique, but is it any good?

Charlie Kaufman’s having a busy summer: his debut novel, Antkind was released in July and his latest directorial effort comes to Netflix this Friday. Kaufman adapted I’m Thinking of Ending Things from lain Reid’s novel of the same name. Kaufman is best known for his surreal screenplays for films like Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Kaufman’s directorial debut came with Synecdoche, New York (2008), a film the late great Roger Ebert called “the best movie of the decade.” I’m Thinking of Ending Things is an emblematic of Kaufmanesque filmmaking: meta contextualizing of stories-within-stories; characters breaking the fourth wall; characters aware of their own narratives; non-linear storylines, to say the least. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a difficult, complex movie, but is it any good?

I was taken aback when I saw that Kaufman’s new movie was being released as a “psychological horror” film. The movie is ultra-weird and often creepy, but I wouldn’t call it scary. You could say that I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a haunted house film, but the house is time itself and the ghosts are us. The whole plot of this film revolves around a Young Woman (Jessie Buckley) on a road trip with her newish, almost-boyfriend, Jake (Jesse Plemons). They’re on their way to a remote Oklahoma farmhouse where the Young Woman will meet Jakes parents (Toni Collette, David Thewlis) for the first time. Here’s the problem: the Young Woman is already thinking of ending things with Jake.
A horror film, after all.

Of course, this is a Charlie Kaufman movie where simple ideas are given free reign to spin into ever more complex webs of philosophical questions and cultural allusions – everyday reality is undermined, and travelers stop for milkshakes in the middle of a blizzard. Viewers watch Kaufman’s film through the lens of the Young Woman’s ennui over her own lack of self-determination. But before we’re even through the first act character identities begin to shift, circumstances begin to repeat themselves, and the Young Woman looks directly into the camera to recite a poem to the audience. She’s a poet. Or she was a poet. Or she will be.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a Kaufmaneque film from Charlie Kaufman, which is exactly what I was hoping to see. That said, this movie’s value only equals the sum of its sometimes outstanding parts: Lukasz Zal captures an otherworldly lensing of the bleak Oklahoma winter-scape that perfectly frames the characters’ dislocated experiences. Collette’s performance alone is worth streaming this film for, and I’ve grown to appreciate Thewlis’ recent roles having never enjoyed his earlier work. Plemons does a lot with a little to bring the brooding Jake to life, making him relatable despite his awkwardness and angry outbursts. Buckley, not so much. She’s a game actor, but she’s in the unenviable position of playing an unsympathetic character in a lead role. The Young Woman’s decision to meet Jake’s family even though she knows she’s leaving him creates the whole plot of the film. But how can a viewer connect to such a weak, unmotivated character? To make matters worse, Kaufman gives the Young Woman reams of pretentious dialog and a torrent of internal narration which spools out in endless droning voice-over. Many people have made the bad decision to take a step forward in a relationship they knew was over. And almost everybody was smart enough not to make a movie about it.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things streams on Netflix beginning this Friday, September 4

This is a review of a documentary feature called Nightcrawlers. The movie makes its world premiere at the Defy Film Festival in Nashville, TN this weekend. This review originally appeared in print in The Contributor.

In the opening scene of Nightcrawlers, a young man sits cross-legged on a bathroom floor. He glances at the camera in a lo-fi image that reads more like a video found on a phone than the first scene of a documentary feature. He wraps a belt around his arm and bites the end between his teeth to keep a tight squeeze above his elbow. He picks up a hypodermic syringe before the shot cuts to the same young man looking into the same camera, sitting against a block wall in a hoodie with a black backpack, and seemingly homeless.

Filmmaker Stephen McCoy received his first camcorder in 2011 in the last semester of his senior year in high school. After the sudden death of his father, McCoy began obsessively documenting his everyday life in a small town outside of Boston, MA. In Nightcrawlers, McCoy ceaselessly films his friends and teachers during a day at school. It’s a bleak and wintry spring day, but the kids are already restless to graduate. He lenses his adorable toddler little sister who shouts “baby!” when she recognizes herself on the camera’s display. Then we cut to a swing music dance at a public park. Nightcrawlers began as a visual diary, but evolved into a film about street people in Boston. Before long drugs and an unraveling personal life found McCoy living among his subjects, swallowed by addiction, poverty and his own dangerous art.

The film includes footage McCoy captured over his first five years out of high school, and seeing his transformation from a sweet young kid to a desperate heroin addict is like watching a horror movie monster metamorphosis in slow motion. But McCoy also captures the decline of America in the background of his scenes: the 2008 economic crisis and the Occupy Movement, the Boston Marathon bombing, and the opioid/heroin epidemic are all contemporaneous echoes of McCoy’s own exodus on the nightmare side of the American dream. Many of the images in this film are almost a decade old, but Nightcrawlers feels up-to-the-minute timely despite is beautifully dated hi8 camcorder images. The film is never preachy or moralizing, and McCoy even brings some humor to the proceedings in his naturally charismatic, very respectful interviews and interactions with a gallery of Boston street people whose stories are captured in the film.

Nightcrawlers‘ structure dismisses common narrative and editorial presumptions. The film’s unscripted capturing of actual people in real situations certainly qualifies it as a documentary film, but there’s a surreality to the nomadic days of homeless artists and wandering subway singers, and there’s a twilit somnambulism to the scenes of McCoy’s strung-out subjects living on junk time. Nightcrawlers definitely doesn’t glamorize drugs, but McCoy and editor Luc Benson’s gorgeous, repetitive, free-associative montages communicate a feeling of what attracted McCoy to this life in the first place. And the inventiveness of McCoy’s lensing and Benson’s cutting finds this project hovering between journalism and an art film. McCoy gives viewers a seductive mix of sounds and images that range from the grimly realistic and difficult to watch to the purely poetic. And even though he acknowledges debts to filmmakers like Werner Herzog and Harmony Korine, McCoy’s movie stands on its own merits as the relentlessly intimate memoir of a uniquely obsessed filmmaker.

See the world premiere of Nightcrawlers on Friday, August 23 at 8:10 P.M. at the Defy Film Festival at Studio 615 in East Nashville. Stephen McCoy will be doing a Q&A immediately following the screening. Go to www.defyfilmfestival.com for tickets and a full schedule for this two-day experimental cinema celebration.

Watch a trailer for this weekend’s festival…

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In September of this year we’ll recognize 35 years since poet Richard Brautigan shot himself in the head, committing suicide at the age of 49 in 1984. I was thinking about Brautigan today because a link to the excellent Adam Curtis documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace popped up on my Twitter feed. The BBC documentary series outlines the spread of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophies into America’s Silicon Valley, and it examines the cybernetic utopia promised by the virtue of selfishness at the speed of integrated circuits. The series takes its name from one of my favorite Brautigan poems…

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Watch Part 1 of the series on Vimeo but first check out this great interview with Curtis talking about his unique style of storytelling…

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I just bought two tickets to see Quentin Tarantino’s new film Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. It’s playing in 35mm at our local arthouse and I’m very excited for this one. I’ve grown to really like Django — especially Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance — but The Hateful 8 is probably my least favorite of Tarantino’s films and I predict history will mark it as a low point in the auteur’s filmography. Suffice to say I’m glad we’re out of the Western genre and back into a dark drama set in a moment when Old Hollywood faded and New Hollywood rose to ascendancy on a wave of countercultural filmmaking that spoke to a youth culture that asked us to “Give Peace a Chance” even as it delivered up Altamont and Helter Skelter. The film tells the story of a fictional washed-up television actor, but it overlaps with the story of the real life Manson murders. Right after I purchased my tickets I saw this post at The Psyco Path that caught my eye. It’s about a special that’s coming to the Oxygen channel that features interviews with the Manson murderers. Here’s a taste…

Manson: The Women, a new Oxygen special premiering August 10, which features interviews with four women who belonged to the Manson family—Dianne Lake, Catherine Share, Sandra Good and Lynette Fromme—as well as experts, including Lis Wiehl, Nikki Meredith and Deborah Herman, weighing in on the infamous murders.

“What was it about Charlie Manson that made these women join his family?” Wiehl asks.

The special aims to answer that very question.

See the full post at the link above and connect to the original article there. In the meantime, here’s an interview with authors Peter Levenda and Whitley Strieber discussing the connections between the Manson Family the Process Church and the CIA. I hope Tarantino alludes to an Intelligence conspiracy in his film…

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By Amrei-Marie – selbst fotografiert von Amrei-Marie, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6273518

T.C. Boyle’s new novel, Outside Looking In, revisits the 1960s and 1970s scenes where the author first experimented with psychedelic drugs. The book sews the experiments and careers of pioneering psychonauts like Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert into a fictional tapestry that reads like a magic carpet ride buoyed on the Utopian impulses inspired by the early days of American acid. Here’s a bit from the L.A. Review of Books… 

Set in the backdrop of the Harvard Drug Scandal of 1962 and 1963, Outside Looking In chronicles the experiences of Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology graduate student who gradually becomes a member of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s psychedelic inner circle. After Leary and Alpert’s dismissal from Harvard, the psychedelic enthusiasts migrate to Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and eventually Millbrook, New York, where they attempt to create utopian research centers that promote the exploration of expanded consciousness and experimental forms of communal living. Although the exploration of consciousness is a central occupation in Outside Looking In, Boyle’s novel also focuses on how the defrocked academics and Harvard graduate students must navigate the return to “reality” once the trip has expired.

The LSD experience is ripe for novelistic exploration because the medical community is currently reexamining the therapeutic benefits of LSD and psilocybin. In recent studies at Johns Hopkins University, UCLA, and NYU, researchers examined how psychedelics can be used to treat end-of-life anxiety, nicotine addiction, depression, alcohol dependency, and other ailments. 

Read the full review at the link above and check out this recent interview where Boyle discusses god, LSD and MAGA…

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The film Hereditary was scary successful last year. Writer/director Ari Aster’s feature debut delivered an incendiary performance by Toni Collette and a tightening noose of a story that gradually strangled viewers in supernatural sights, occult symbols, real life tragedies and heavy themes about the generational traumas that can ripple though family lines. Hereditary is a work of art that transcends the horror genre, and it belongs in the same conversation as The Shining and The Wicker Man. The Wicker Man is the ultimate example of the folk-horror sub genre, and while Hereditary eventually found its way to a pagan place, Ari Aster’s new film is one long fertility rite freak-out, and it’s probably the best bad boyfriend revenge movie we’ll see this year.

Christian (Jack Reynor) and Dani (Florence Pugh) are a young couple on the rocks. Christian is sort of a shiftless jerk who can’t decide what his graduate thesis should be. He’s been with Dani for four years, but he constantly considers breaking up, but he constantly doesn’t have the courage to do that. He can’t remember how long they’ve been together and even forgets her birthday. Christian is a boy-man who won’t commit to decisions because he doesn’t want to face their consequences. That said, Dani is not an easy person to be with – her family brings sky-high drama, and she’s steadily popping anti-anxiety meds and sleeping pills throughout the film. Christian should leave Dani in the first act of Midsommar so he and his buddies can go stag on a secret trip to a summer solstice festival in Sweden. He should be the selfish loafer that he really is and leave Dani and her troubles to their own fates. Instead he chickens-out and passive-aggressively takes his frustrations out on her. He claims to apologize but doesn’t say sorry and he gaslights her until she’s the one apologizing to him. Dani joins Christian and the guys on their trip to the communal Swedish farm where their friend Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) grew up.

Midsommar’s greatest strength is its ravishing visuals. Cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski points his camera at a frozen Swedish forest in the throes of a howling twilit blizzard in the film’s first frames. The shot gives us foreboding trees, ominous winds and announces the central trope of folk horror: the isolated landscape. It’s a great opening, but this is a movie that takes place in Sweden over the summer solstice when there are only a few hours of darkness at night. One of Midsommar’s gimmicks is that it’s a horror movie taking place in broad daylight and the beauty of the Swedish countryside, the colorful designs decorating the farm buildings, and the embroidered robes and masks worn by the revelers positively sparkle in all that mountain majesty. Add to these colorful sights throbbing and shimmering psychedelic hallucination effects and a totally disorienting upside down camera shot that announces the group’s arrival at the festival and there is plenty to trip out on here.

Unfortunately, Midsommar disappoints in fundamentals like story and characters. Aster’s characters are exactly the “smart ass,” “nerd,” “jerk,” personas we find in the most cliché horror films where we know all those city kids are going to go into the countryside to die. Aster could have set the audience up with those expectations, but that would result in shock or surprise or some other experience that you won’t find here. Midsommar is a new skin for an old ceremony. It dresses up like a folk horror classic, but it’s better enjoyed as a simple, predictable female revenge film that hinges on a combustible third act performance from Pugh.

Here’s a great short introduction to the folk horror sub-genre and the revival we’re witnessing in pictures like Midsommar…

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Before Pride Month is over, I wanted to share a movie review I wrote for a Nashville publication a few weeks back. This new PBS doc examines a lesser-known civil rights struggle from the 1950s that found homosexual federal employees forced out of positions with the government for fear that their sexuality made them vulnerable to coercion by those filthy communist Russians.,, 

In 1953, during the first freeze of the Cold War, newly-elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower took the White House in the midst of chaos. The so-called Red Scare found Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy leading a government purge of supposed communists and soviet sympathizers that famously reached all the way into the entertainment industry, destroying lives with accusations and blacklists along the way. A new public television documentary, spotlights The Lavender Scare – a lesser-known purge of gay employees of the federal government. TheLavender Scare demonstrates how gays were seen as vulnerable to communist blackmail because of their sexual secrecy. The film quotes Joseph McCarthy, “Homosexuals must not be handling top secret materials. The pervert is easy prey for the blackmailer.”

It’s ironic that an executive order from President Eisenhower ultimately blackmailed thousands of federal employees into resigning quietly for fear that their sexual orientation might be made public. The Lavender Scare revisits a time during the 1950s when gay men and lesbians sought to blend in and not be visible. Fear of anti-gay laws, homophobic violence, and social alienation all meant that many American men and women found themselves leading double lives.

During the purge American citizens were exposed to targeted legal investigations that peered into every part of a person’s life: a government worker’s fellow employees and supervisors were interviewed; a worker’s minster, priest or rabbi would be contacted; social habits were monitored and connections were made between known homosexuals. By the time F.B.I. agents confronted a suspect they already had extensive insights into every aspect of a person’s daily habits. Suspects were not allowed to confront the confidential informants who often outed them, and they weren’t allowed any legal representation or due process.

The Lavender Scare’s deep historical documenting is one of its best strengths, and its educational value alone make this an important film to watch in June. The movie retraces the footsteps of large populations of gay men and lesbians who moved to Washington, DC in the 1930s. Those young men and women sought the 1000s of government jobs created under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. They also sought the sophistication and freedom of an urban lifestyle in the nation’s capital over the provincial backwaters and small-minded hometowns they fled. The Lavender Scare also examines the revolutionary effect World War II had on the lives of gay Americans. The total mobilization of the country pulled thousands of young men and women into the military’s same-sex environments. For many gay American soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines the war was an opportunity to meet like-minded friends and lovers. One former sailor interviewed for the documentary flatly states, “I didn’t know how many people were gay before I joined the Navy.”

 Director Josh Howard’s take on David K. Johnson’s book combines found footage and stills with lots of Ken Burns-esque voiceovers to bring public documents, letters, diaries and the people behind them to life. He also uses “Dragnet” style narration and the files, folders, and photos asesthetics of a police procedural to bring a paranoid, crime film tone to the investigation scenes in the movie. The Lavender Scare is narrated by Glenn Close and features voice acting from Cynthia Nixon, Zachary Quinto, TR Knight and David Hyde Pierce.

Howard is an entertaining filmmaker, but the story that’s the real star of The Lavender Scare. If there is any real value to observances like Pride Month it’s that they can focus our attention on people and issues that many of us may only be cursorily connected to in day-to-day lives. For me The Lavender Scare is an invitation to discover a story from a chapter of our country’s recent history that I’ve never known about. It’s a love story and a tragedy, but it’s also a story about workers’ rights and civil rights and the pursuit of happiness. The Lavender Scare is a valuable addition to queer cinema, and its an important American film.

The Lavender Scare premiered on National Public Television stations on Tuesday, June 18

Check your local listings and Public Television sites to see the new film, but go ahead and watch this great little primer from Step Back History while you’re here…

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/uPsPPnJ-XNE” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>

I left early this morning for a coffeehouse counter top where I like to write in the mornings. Dose on McGavock in Riverside Village in East Nashville has good coffee and a pretty elaborate cafe menu. If I’m hungry for something more than black coffee I usually just get a plain bagel with butter and jam. They make their own preserves and you should try the strawberry/orange spread they’re serving now that we’re getting into berry season. Anyway I was listening to Democracy Now and Amy Goodman was talking about a new very dire report about climate change and species extinction. It reminded me of this article I found this weekend. It talks about how the stories we tell ourselves about climate change increasingly cast eco-terrorists as sympathetic protagonists…

But that’s not the role that environmental radicals play in First Reformed, or in Richard Powers’ recent Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Overstory. The novel stretches over an array of characters, many of whom will eventually converge as activists fighting to save ancient forests in California in the 1990s — and engage in strategic acts of arson against a logging company, one of which results in a death. They are students and artists, veterans and engineers, pried out of regular society by loss, and set loose to make their way high up into the branches of a threatened redwood. In these stories, it’s the ecoterrorists who are at the center, and if it doesn’t feel quite right to describe them as the heroes, they’re certainly not the antagonists.

They are, instead, people grappling with the conviction that they are standing in the middle of a room, screaming about how the building is on fire, while everyone else goes about their business by weaving around the flames. These are not narratives for the world we used to live in, in which a crisis will be narrowly averted and the day saved. They’re narratives for a reality in which climate change has already started to disrupt the way we live, and in which acceptance of and anxiety about climate change has reached record highs. They’re narratives for a reality in which we may have already gone past the point of no return.

Here’s a great interview with actor Paul Bettany talking about playing Ted Kaczynski in the excellent series Manhunt: Unabomber…

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I just got back from a preview from the new Tolkien film which tells the story of the life of J.R.R. Tolkien, the creator of Middle Earth and author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I’ll be reviewing the movie in next week’s Nashville Scene so no spoilers. Instead I’ll just say that bookish movies are notoriously difficult and I enjoyed the movie more than I thought I might. And when I came across this article about Tolkien’s own recordings of his works I was in the mood to share…

In the clips here, you can listen to Tolkien himself read from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, including a recording at the top of him reading one of the fantasy languages he invented, then created an entire world around, the Elvish tongue Quenya in the poem “Namarie.” Some of these YouTube clips have received their own cinematic treatment, in a YouTube sort of way, like the video below with a montage of Tolkien-inspired media and a dramatic score. This may or may not be to your liking, but the origin story of the recording deserves a mention.

Shown a tape recorder by a friend, whom Tolkien had visited to pick up a manuscript of The Lord of the Rings, the author decided to sit down and record himself. Delighted with the results, he agreed to read from The Hobbit. He liked the technology enough that he continued to record himself reading from his own work. Tolkien may not have desired to see his books turned into spectacles, but as we listen to him read, it’s hard to see how anyone could resist the temptation to put his magnificent descriptions on the big screen.

Check out the full Open Culture piece at the link above. Before you go see Tolkien at the theater — if you’re reading this post you’d likely enjoy the film — listen to the man himself read his famous words. Try to imagine what he imagined when he wrote them. That’s the stuff at the center of this new movie which is an important entry in the saga of Middle Earth on screen…

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Photo by Jim Summaria – Contact us/Photo submission, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5574716

This year we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Who’s pioneering rock opera, Tommy.

The Who were a re-working of an earlier band, the Detours. With their classic lineup in place and a new name, The Who — Pete Townsend, John Entwistle, Keith Moon and Roger Daltrey — became an instant hit. The band’s first single, “I Can’t Explain,” hit the top 10, and “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” managed similar success while also introducing radio audiences to new sounds like guitar pick scratching and toggle switching courtesy of Townsend’s inventive approach to rhythm guitar. By the time the band released “My Generation” in the fall of 1965 they scored their biggest hit ever and cemented their place among the best bands in rock’s greatest era.

For me, Live at Leeds is the definitive The Who platter. That said, Tommy is a truly unique project and one of the most ambitious albums ever made. It boasts a wide-ranging song cycle by one of rock’s most ambitious tunesmiths including classics like the title song and “Pinball Wizard.” Playing the character Tommy also gave Roger Daltrey the inspiration he needed to push past his stage fright and become one of the most dynamic front men of the rock era.

Check out this long interview of Pete Townsend talking about Tommy…

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