Thoughts?

nonsense to impress dummies like you

i cannot begin to express how much i hate this movie and its cuck director/writer

Wishing on A Star.

Years of following music video did not prepare me for Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich. Music video skeptics might easily have predicted Fight Club, a flashy, incoherent extravaganza, cuz that's all most videos come down to. But Jonze's feature film debut makes him Hollywood's unpredictable Spike. While most critics use the term "music video" cynically and ignorantly to disdain visual stylization (yet fall for Fight Club's vacuous sensationalism), Jonze vindicates the form. He shows its integrity to be an adroitly chosen visual style. This is different from the goosed-up Madison Avenue spectacle that Fight Club's David Fincher specializes in along with Michael Bay (Armageddon) and Simon West (Con Air). Being John Malkovich doesn't look like anyone's idea of a music video except Spike Jonze's. And yet, for two hours, it works like the best music videos: making high-concept philosophies graspable, marvelous and fun.

First, understand that Jonze has consistently been a pomo parodist. A music video whiz, but from the Beastie Boys' Sabotage to Bjork's It's Oh So Quiet he's demonstrated a new way of seeing through old ways. Just as Jonze's videos reconceive old tv shows, movie musicals and the home video (Fatboy Slim's Praise You, the video-cam stunt Blair Witch Project should have been), BJM turns conventional Hollywood features like Brainstorm, where characters travel to other dimensions, on their head.

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With screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, Jonze satirizes high concept itself by taking seriously Craig's (John Cusack) desire to express himself artistically. Craig's medium is marionettes, but his playtime drive signals a deep dissatisfaction, a need to be accepted and understood that is not answered by his marriage to Lotte (Cameron Diaz), whose longing matches Craig's. As a pet store worker she sublimates her desire through parenthood, bringing home parrots and chimpanzees. Having blotted each other out of their private lives, Craig seeks his ideal in Maxine (Catherine Keener), a brittle, manipulative co-worker, sharing his discovery of a secret doorway in their office that leads, fantastically, to John Malkovich's head.

This otherworldly trip is a postmodern, nonreligious version of the afterlife fantasies in movies like Brainstorm and Made in Heaven and Heaven Can Wait and Here Comes Mr. Jordan. The idea carries its own skepticism, but Jonze's humor suggests: maybe... Instead of the afterlife, BJM wishes upon a star (a correction of Camille Paglia's notion that movie stars are pagan gods) to examine how another life might answer Craig and Lotte's dissatisfaction. They seek to assuage their distemper by entering Malkovich's consciousness. It fulfills Craig's puppeteer's desire, and Lotte discovers new sexual fulfillment, along with Maxine, whose use of the real Malkovich for sexual stimulation realizes her narcissism. It's easy to talk about BJM as a satire on identity crisis. But Jonze's typically askew vision sees something more. The film is most poignant on the things about which it is least specific, marriage and celebrity.

Jonze probes Craig and Lotte's post-slacker emotional vagueness. These young, stringy-haired marginals recall the ex-hippies of Mike Leigh's High Hopes but without political commitment, just frustration. Craig envies a commercial puppeteer who stages The Belle of Amherst to his personal street corner production of Heloise and Abelard. Craig whines, "All I want is the chance to do my work, and they won't have it because I raise issues", a typical unempowered person's complaint. His lonely puppetry suggests the displaced fantasy life of Tim Burton's most original characters, and the opening scene of Craig's puppet ballet evokes the masturbatory isolation Matthew Broderick sneaked off to in Election (but that Kevin Spacey sardonically trivialized in American Beauty).

Jonze x-rays this fouled-up marriage when Craig invites Maxine to dinner after Lotte has seen her through Malkovich's eyes. The pitiful triangle of crossed agendas climaxes when both mates pounce on their idealized prey. This double adultery on sofa (like a Twin Peaks outtake) would never have been dared by classic screwball comedies; it bypasses the sanctity of marriage to scoff at the foolishly betrotheds' delusions. Illustrating a new, non-cynical sensibility, the scene reifies Jonze and Kaufman's absurdities, becoming more humane and poignant, yet keeps rollicking. Similarly, when Craig takes a corporate job for his nimble fingers, on the seventh-and-a-half floor of an office building, Jonze crunches white-collar banality into haunting, jokey mythos. (The film's only disappointment is that Lance Acord's photography favors this fluorescent-bulb staleness over more expressive lighting.)

cuckkino

I have such mixed feelings about this movie. At the end, all I could think of was 'what is the point of this?'.

God this is such a pleb board.
How could you not enjoy this film
Go watch antihero gun fight film #678
Or superhero movie # 567
You don’t deserve film

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Interestingly as 'postmodern' and reflective as the narrative may seem - a meta-film involving a famous actor that literally puts his name in the title and explores ideas of fame and impersonation - I've found analogues for it going back to literally the earliest days of cinema.
There was a 1914 film called 'The False Max Linder' about the then-superstar Max Linder being impersonated by a random guy that starts raking in fame and attention by doing his films, and also a 1915 film called 'The False Asta Nielsen' about the then-superstar Asta Nielsen somehow (the film is lost) getting a doppelganger much like the doppelganger sequences in BJM.

So basically Kaufman's a hack.

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Okay, so I'm being 100% genuine and sincere here, what's the big deal? I bought the Criterion release cause everyone said this is an amazing movie, and it just feels pretty average and shallow? It feels like surface level clever, if that makes sense. The film wants me to root for the most deplorable woman ever, but in a way that makes it seem like I'm supposed to empathize with her? Not that I'm opposed to the idea of a villain protagonist or sympathizing with a villain, but the film acts like these chicks are the heroes of the story when they're just as bad as the dude? I fucking hated everyone in this movie except for John, who does an amazing job and borderline carries the movie. And its not that I don't mind a film where I hate every character, I quite enjoy those sometimes, but it also feels like the film was genuinely trying to get me to like em? Idk man, am I missing something?

A bunch of hack scumbag liberals dickriding a genuously talented limousine liberal as an unintended portrait of socialism eating its own: its priceless.

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It made me uncomfortable, how it ended.

Its garbage.
The ending is trash.

Use liberal in the socialist sense, drop the nonsensical anti-socialism, and you would be correct.

>the ending
Why because it wasn’t some happy ever after make believe?

What did they mean by this?

Kino. Very original. But kinda cheap technically. All substance no form. Wish it could have been directed by PTA or Lynch or Fincher.

I unironically love this man.

I'd respect armond more if he was this critical of shitty adam sandler movies but his reviews just makes the think he's more contrarian than about telling the truth

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>contrarian

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Anyone else had a raging boner whenever Katherine Keener's character was on screen?

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His whole schtick is being a contrarian. He's not even particularly good at getting the point of the movies he reviews but he uses big words and make people angry and that's good enough for Yea Forums.

>His whole schtick is being a contrarian. He's not even particularly good at getting the point of the movies he reviews but he uses big words and make people angry and that's good enough for Yea Forums.

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Please have sex.

kys sheep

Enjoyed it for the most part but fuck the shit ending

quirky, dark comedy
turns into twilight zone horror.

Cool argument fag.

I don’t think it aged well, but I can’t verify that, because I don’t want to watch it again.

Movies don't age

You do

Idiots cry about this movie being babbies first existential drama while in the same breath they'd happily espouse the depth and meaning of the hipster garbage fire that is apocalypse now.
In short you're all pretty fucking shallow.

I did not like it. watched it recently

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I liked the movie, but what was up with the ending?