Being John Malkovich (1999)
Directed by Spike Jonze
One day at work, unsuccessful puppeteer Craig finds a portal into the head of actor John Malkovich. The portal soon becomes a passion for anybody who enters its mad and controlling world of overtaking another human body.
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What critics compared Being John Malkovich to
STBY taps into a glorious cinematic history, joining the ranks of films like Dr. Strangelove, Network, Fight Club, and Being John Malkovich as satirical touchstones that define an era of American history.
After the delirious highs of Get Out , we get the uproarious Sorry to Bother You , which plays like the demented offspring of Office Space and Being John Malkovich.
Instead, it’s a gleeful kitchen sink throwback to the satiric, absurdist, wildly inventive indies of the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s like “Repo Man”, “Being John Malkovich”, “Bamboozled”, and “Fight Club” combined with a dash of Mike Judge’s 2006 comic (yet eerily prescient) dystopic fantasia, “Idiocracy”.
The references to Michel Gondry (Mood Indigo) and Spike Jonze's (Being John Malkovich) palette and framing are explicit, and deftly acknowledged.
Though they would be apt comparisons, likening Riley’s film to a Michel Gondry movie or Being John Malkovich won’t get you anywhere near its vicinity, especially once a massive half-man/half-horse penis shows up on the screen (I swear, I am not making this up).
Channeling the existential refractions of Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich) as well as the barbed surrealism of Terry Gilliam, Riley sends his movie right off the rails, creating a kaleidoscopic descent into the unreal (and yet hyper-real) nightmare of modern capitalism, American style.
Not since Spike Jonze’s send-up of John Malkovich’s pomposity in Being John Malkovich (1999) has such a strangely tender homage sought to self-reflexively commend celebrity as in Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent curious reputation, unspooling reality tinged meta analysis on the film industry enrobed in what amounts to a zany spy spoof.
There’s a reason we get used to it so quickly: Movies with a meta dimension have been with us for years — movies like “The Player,” where Robert Altman cast a galaxy of Hollywood stars as their real-life selves, or “Being John Malkovich,” where John Malkovich played John Malkovich, or “Adaptation,” where Cage played Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of the film we happened to be watching.
The result is a perfect little capsule of a movie, like Charlie Kaufman films "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation" without the darkness.
He has no interest in breaking his no-laziness streak, especially in his own little “Being John Malkovich.”
Early on, there’s hope this film will achieve something along the lines of Spike Jonez’s mind-bending “Being John Malkovich,” but it plays things relatively safe most of the time.
The conceit – to wed a Being John Malkovich-style experiment to a plot that eventually must also function as a watchable Nicolas Cage action movie – is bold.
Kaufman is best known for his work with director Spike Jonze on films like “Adaptation” and “Being John Malkovich,” as well as his collaboration with Michel Gondry on the amazing “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
As recounted by the “Being John Malkovich” writer in a post-screening Q&A at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, he and co-director Duke Johnson went against decades of voice acting tradition, staying true to the picture’s roots as a sound play.
“Anomalisa” is another fantasia from the perfervid imagination of Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of “Being John Malkovich," “Adaptation," and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
That’s exactly the kind of morose, surreal premise you’d expect in a film written by Charlie Kaufman, whose credits include “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation” and the relatively upbeat “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
Kaufman, who has a tendency to ramble off in too many directions at once (as in “Being John Malkovich,” for instance), has never before managed so elegantly to contain and structure the products of his fertile imagination.
Before delving into Anomalisa (a created word used by the main character), realize that Kaufman has written only a smattering of theatrical motion pictures: Being John Malkovich; Synecdoche, New York; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Confessions of a Dangerous Mind; Human Nature; and this new one.
…eschews the whole “pillars of light from the sky” routine in favor of ripping off “Being John Malkovich.”
…the film has the heroes navigate a winding maze of Yelena and Bob’s darkest memories in a cerebral jailbreak straight out of Being John Malkovich…
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Welcome to the very near future, as depicted in this strange, funny, slightly unsettling and utterly visionary film written and directed by Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich").
Previously responsible for the singular "Being John Malkovich " and "Adaptation" as well as the self-indulgent "Where the Wild Things Are," Jonze is a director who goes his own way with ideas no one else could have imagined.
Yet his films, which have included Being John Malkovich and Adaptation , almost always work because they take chances and don't underestimate the viewer's intelligence.
The visionary film from director Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich) explores the notion that increased reliance on technology in every aspect of our lives has made simple human interaction more difficult.
And coming from Jonze, the soulful eccentric who made Being John Malkovich , the movie is also an intimate departure, maybe even a personal one.
And it's reminiscent of another auspicious debut: Spike Jonze's helming of the intricately structured "Being John Malkovich."
Assuming a world in which such technology exists, he doesn’t imagine a Machiavellian contemporary “Manchurian Candidate” scenario, in which malefactors remote-control political leaders, or a deeper dive into “Being John Malkovich” territory, where super fans (like the ones in “Antiviral”) can “become” the celebrities they idolize.
As the mysteries of the film unfold, you'll surely be reminded of experiences like Being John Malkovich or Inception , but rather than attempt to surprise the viewer with unexpected or complex mythos to support the concept, only minimal explanation is offered, adding a timeless element to the journey.
In 2009’s “Coraline,” stop-motion maven Henry Selick saw no fear in the waking-nightmare elements of Neil Gaiman’s book and created an eerily enjoyable “Being John Malkovich” of sorts for fifth-graders.
Coraline discovers a small door in the living room that opens to a brick wall while waking and a Being John Malkovich corridor while ostensibly asleep that connects her house to a mirror-world in which her Other Mother and Other Father (John Hodgman) live.
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While Everything Everywhere All At Once feels reminiscent of several films, including The Matrix and Being John Malkovich, it’s also like nothing you’ve ever seen before.
Kafkaesque, a “Matrix” adrift in the “Spiderverse,” a hint of “Brazil” at its most “Buckeroo Banzai,” with the whimsy of “Being John Malkovich” and the some of the pathos of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Everything” is a self-mocking/self-aware dive into the “multiverses.”
The entire second chapter of this three-part movie unfolds like an exponentially more complex version of the memory chase from “Being John Malkovich,” and yet Yeoh never allows us to get lost as she careens across the multiverse — through everything, toward nothing, and possibly back towards a new understanding of “how things are supposed to be.”
Kaufman had earned his notoriety by penning Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, but to attribute the brilliance of Eternal Sunshine mostly to him struck me as unfair, since Gondry himself is a unique talent and visualist.
Kaufman, the rug-pulling screenwriter of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, provided the literate and intricately plotted script, but the achingly beautiful images—the fence that disappeared, post by post, as the two lovers ran alongside it, or the house that crumbled around them as their shared history rushed toward oblivion—came from French director Michel Gondry, best known for making music videos for the likes of Beck, Björk, and the White Stripes.