Charlie Kaufman movies that don't involve Charlie Kaufman

When you saw the trailer for Dream Scenario, your first thought may have been "Oh, this must be Charlie Kaufman's latest." The presence of Nicolas Cage, star of the Kaufman-written Adaptation, might have cemented that impression.

Of course, if you follow Kaufman with any degree of closeness, you'd know that Dream Scenario could only represent an earlier incarnation of the writer-turned-director. His 2020 film I'm Thinking of Ending Things -- which was my #1 of that year -- certainly indicates that he's on to much less accessible fare.

In his film about a man who suddenly starts entering everyone's dreams, even the people who don't know him, Dream Scenario director Kristoffer Borgli is certainly successful in the homage he's paying to this earlier version of Kaufman. If you want to know how successfully, you'll have to wait until my rankings are up on January 23rd. (Or, wait a few days until I write my review, which will be linked to the right.)

What I can write about today, without spoiling my impression of the film, is that it reminded me that we have a whole subgenre of films that seem as though they should have been written or directed (or both) by Kaufman -- and that Dream Scenario feels like the first we've gotten in a while. Just as soon as I venture the idea that these sorts of mindbinders might be approaching extinction, though, I think of a second one from this very year, in addition to Dream Scenario.

Here are the ones that immediately came to mind, in no particular order. In order to narrow things down a bit, I'll limit this to the time period Kaufman was actually working. 

Stranger Than Fiction (2006, Marc Forster) - Will Ferrell can hear the woman who is narrating his life as she speaks. An existential conceit straight out of the Kaufman playbook, released during the peak period of Kaufman's influence on popular films.

Cold Souls (2009, Sophie Barthes) - Is it possible Paul Giamatti has never actually appeared in a Kaufman film? He's Kaufman's perfect schlub. Here he plays an actor trying to disentangle his emotions from the emotions of his characters, who pays for a service to have his soul placed in cold storage. I can only remember this being a bit disappointing. Anyway, shades of Synecdoche, New York all over this. 

Fingernails (2023, Christos Nikou) - Here's that one from this year. People in relationships have the ability to test whether they love each other by having a fingernail torn out and analyzed. The low-fi analog technology in this film is very reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as is the theme of star-crossed romance.

Vanilla Sky (2001, Cameron Crowe) - I think the cold storage of Cold Souls got me thinking about the ending of this film, which I won't spoil even though the movie is now 23 years old. It's just the sort of intricate script with high concept elements about identity that Kaufman would have dreamed up, though I actually have this ranked higher than any Kaufman film on my Flickchart, so kudos to Crowe for that.

The Truman Show (1998, Peter Weir) - This is a bit of a cheat in that it came out a year before Being John Malkovich. Kaufman was working in television but he had not yet made a movie. But the premise is similar to Dream Scenario in that the world revolves around a single ordinary man, so if Dream Scenario is like a Kaufman film, so is this. 

Click (2006, Frank Coraci) - If it were someone other than Adam Sandler in the title role here, I think this story about a man who literally fast forwards through his life would strike us as more of a Kaufman high concept mindbender. As is even with Sandler, it's pretty poignant and potent at certain parts.

Vivarium (2019, Lorcan Finnegan) - Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots are trapped in an apparently empty neighborhood of identical houses from which there is no escape. The title suggests they are being watched for their reaction. Very Kaufman, and Eisenberg is another who should play a Kaufman surrogate at some point.

Her (2013, Spike Jonze) - It feels like a technicality that Kaufman is not actually involved with this. Jonze directed two of Kaufman's films, so this is sort of a cheat. And while we're cheating anyway ...

The Science of Sleep (2006, Michel Gondry) - If I'm going to list the future work of one Kaufman collaborator, I should list the future work of another. 

Swiss Army Man (2016, Daniel Scheinert & Daniel Kwan) - A buddy comedy between a suicidal man and the talking corpse that helps him find a reason to live? Yep, Kaufman could have written this.

Ruby Sparks (2012, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris) - While we're already on Paul Dano, this is another one in the Stranger Than Fiction/Adaptation neighborhood, where a written character comes to life and tries to make a Kaufman-like schlub with writer's block happy. 

Moon (2009, Duncan Jones) - I'll let this stand in for a whole category of films featuring clones, as a clone gets at the existential concepts in which Kaufman always dabbles. 

It's becoming clear I could go on for quite a while listing films that narrowly qualify, with diminishing returns. But instead I'll wrap it up with the thought "You get the idea."

One thing I'll say, though, is that even when they fail, they fail in interesting ways. If someone wants to try to make a Charlie Kaufman movie, I'm always game for it -- and I don't want us collectively to forget how to do it, especially now that Kaufman himself doesn't want to be quite so on brand as to have a whole genre unto himself. 

Valentine's Days with Zoe Kazan

In the tradition of classic posts like "Father's Days with Richard Linklater," The Audient proudly presents "Valentine's Days with Zoe Kazan." We hope you enjoy it.

I don't know if it's her heart-shaped face or what, but we have spent each of our last two Valentine's Days with Zoe Kazan.

Last year I chose Valentine's Day as the time to expose my wife to my favorite movie of 2012, Ruby Sparks, which Kazan wrote and in which she stars. I might have been planning that particular viewing for a couple weeks, and made heart-shaped meatloaf to accompany it.

This year, Kazan's involvement in our Valentine's Day viewing was considerably more accidental. After I flamed out in an attempt to borrow romantic movies from the library -- I interpreted Anna Karenina as an appropriate choice, and am embarrassed I don't know more about the story -- I turned to good old iTunes as an option.

Actually, I'm lying a bit about the sequence of events. I didn't realize I'd flamed out on my choices (which also included Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and an inarguably romantic movie we'd both already seen, Moulin Rouge!) until after I'd already downloaded this week's 99 cent rental, which was on my list of movies to see in time for my 2014 rankings. And only after starting to download it did I recognize it as a good match for Valentine's Day (which is why Apple made it this week's 99 cent rental in the first place, I'm sure).

What If is one of about three different 2014 Zoe Kazan romantic comedies which, on their surface, might be easily confused for one another. In fact, if I'd seen any more than one of them I surely would have written a post about Kazan's ubiquitousness in 2014 indie romantic comedies. The others are The Pretty One (which I did see but did not like) and In Your Eyes (which is actually described as a "paranormal romance"). What If turns out to be the straight romantic comedy in the bunch. (One hopes it was the success of Ruby Sparks that got her these roles, in kind of the same way Matrix fans enjoy seeing Matrix knockoffs -- it confers a certain significance to the movie that I'm still hoping the larger world will retroactively assign to Ruby.)

There's nothing high concept in What If like there is in Ruby Sparks, but it also goes down more easily if your desire is not to be too challenged by your romantic movie. It's basically the story of a med school dropout (Daniel Radcliffe) who has been burned by love enough that he approaches every new potential romantic entanglement with wariness and cynicism. Until he meets the plucky Chantry (Kazan), whose only fault is that she already has a serious boyfriend (Rafe Spall) of five years. However, the two enjoy each other's company enough that they fall into the "friend zone," that relationship purgatory that they have varying degrees of interest in trying to escape. Advising them on their lives and decisions are a group of best friend types, who include Adam Driver and Megan Ward.

Pretty standard, right? But What If is elevated by intelligent dialogue and winning performances. The characters feel pretty fleshed out, and the scenarios they find themselves in give you good doses of both comedy and romance. One particularly nice moment on the latter front involves Kazan's character getting stuck while trying on a dress that's just barely too small for her. She's stuck at the point that the thing is mostly pulled off, but it's covering her eyes and she can't move in either direction at this point. She summons Radcliffe's character (Wallace) to the changing room to help with the emergency, but doesn't want him to see her bra and panties so requires him to close his eyes. It's a nice and tender scene. (I also like the fact that when she first calls out to him, he's checking his phone. I like movies that take the time to get the details right. If you're waiting for a female friend to try on a dress, you check your phone. It doesn't mean you're some kind of self-obsessed boob or that you can't devise more idealized ways of passing the time.)

So it was quite a lovely way to pass a Valentine's Day that also featured our favorite delivery pizza, beer, and ice cream treats on sticks to finish off the evening.

If it's still Valentine's Day where you are, enjoy this Valentine to you in the form of Zoe Kazan's heart-shaped face:

A Ruby red Valentine's Day

I've been stalking Ruby Sparks for months now.

Walk into almost any business that sells videos, and I'd glance to see whether they were carrying it. If so, whether it was at a miraculously cheap price.

Though I didn't want my third viewing of my #1 movie of 2012 to be a rental, I did take note at nearby Video Ezy of when it might leave the new release shelves and become a weekly rental. That would mean a lowering of the price to $1.90 (it's otherwise around $5) and a whole week as opposed to only three nights (and only one night when it's brand new.)

And so it was that I was in Video Ezy this past Tuesday, and it was finally gone from the new release shelves. Two of the three copies could now be found in a spot reserved for new weekly rentals, the movie's last stop before its final destination in the comedy section. (At least, I assume the comedy section is where it will belong.)

The third copy? For sale as an ex-rental, for only $9.95.

Ooh.

I had it in my hands. I was really going to buy it.

But then I thought about how I still don't have a job, and how our reserve of cash is seriously dwindling. I figured I'd have a lot easier time selling my wife on her first viewing of the movie if it cost me just under $2 rather than just under $10. And I didn't want to give her any external cause for carrying a bias into her viewing.

So I did something I rarely do: I rented a movie I knew I was going to one day buy.

That's alright. If I'm moving back to the U.S. in two years, I'd rather have a copy that can play there anyway.

Now that I could get the movie for a whole week, that made it a perfect candidate for our Valentine's Day viewing three nights later. Ruby Sparks may not profile as your typical Valentine's Day movie, but that's kind of what made it the perfect choice -- in the neighborhood of what a typical couple might rent, but far more challenging and intellectually stimulating.

It was one of those weeks where it was just one thing after another, one small defeat following on the heels of the one before it, and by Friday night we both seriously wanted to open a bottle of wine. It was hard to tell whether it would resemble anything like your typical Valentine's Day, with my wife only six weeks removed from a Caesarian and neither of us thinking of any of the usual Valentine's Day activities.

Well, I started things off on the right note with this ...

... (that's heart-shaped meatloaf, in case you're wondering) ...

... and after an episode of Brooklyn Nine Nine (a fairly romantic episode at that), it was time for Ruby Sparks.

I must admit, I was nervous. Nervous like you get when you are finally putting your money where your mouth is. What if I showed this movie to my wife -- trying to avoid those surreptitious glances, constantly assessing her most minute reactions -- and she didn't like it? And had to strenuously find nice things to say to endorse my #1 ranking? Let's put it this way: I feared that high soprano lying voice. "YAA-uh. I LIIIked it."

Well, my reputation for recommending films is safe for one more day. "I really liked it" was her immediate reaction. It wasn't the "I loved it" I was hoping for, but you don't add the "really" if you don't mean it. Unless it's a soprano "really," but this wasn't.

Having talked about it for ten minutes afterward, she may have been tiptoeing toward "loved it" territory.

At the very least, it went nice with our wine.

Happy Valentine's Day to you and yours.

The last sparks of 2012

Last night was List Closing Eve, and I did something I've never done before on this special day:

I re-watched the movie that I thought might be my favorite of the year, because I wasn't sure how it could possibly be.

And though I don't usually like to go into details about my list in this obligatory preamble, I think I've already ruined the surprise with my title and poster art.

I didn't think much of the ads for Ruby Sparks. In fact, it might have been the movie I was most cynical about seeing this year. In fact again, I may not have seen it at all except that I made a rushed pick from Redbox when getting a couple movies for my wife and me to see. She had spoken on a panel with someone involved with this movie, so I thought she would probably want to see it. She didn't. So I watched it alone, starting on Christmas night, falling asleep, and finishing it the next morning.

So this was only two weeks ago. Can't get much fresher than that in terms of a fresh perspective.

Yet how? How could this be my #1? I hadn't seen it on a single other critic's top ten list. I hadn't even heard it discussed as an honorable mention. You might say I spent the last two weeks trying to figure out a way for it not to be my #1. And my #2 temporarily crept in there for a few days, just to give myself an out -- just to give myself a choice that would in some way have the respect of other critics (though I didn't see that one on any top ten lists either).

But I kept coming back to Ruby Sparks, and I knew I needed to watch it again before I closed this list. Last night, I did.

Fifteen minutes in, I knew it was still my #1. Thirty minutes in, I liked it even better than the first time. Forty-five minutes in, the DVD had a glitch that I thought might kill the viewing -- and nothing seemed more important than making sure I could keep watching.

And I discovered what I probably knew ever since I finished it two weeks ago: It has the most layers of any movie I saw this year, and it is by far the most adaptable.

How adaptable? It's both a romantic comedy and a deconstruction of a romantic comedy. It's about how we wish we behaved in relationships, and how we actually behave. It's about the creative process, equally about the writing of novels and the writing of screenplays, and about how the writer is the God of the universe he or she creates. It's also about writing and re-writing drafts until you get to writing what you know, instead of what you think you know. It revels in stereotypes and also explodes them. It takes one of the most inescapable cinematic cliches to be identified in recent years, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and turns it on its head. It's about genius and madness and mental illness. It's about the expectations we place on others and the realities of which they are actually capable. It's observant in both its grand strokes and its minor details, with even throwaway lines of dialogue carrying impossibly dense thematic relevance. It features probably my favorite ensemble acting group of the year (Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Chris Messina, Annette Bening, Antonio Banderas and Elliot Gould). It's both a cynical look at the emotional brutality we inflict on the ones we love, and an incredibly optimistic fable about our capacity to love them despite their faults. It's also really funny, though sometimes it is devastatingly painful. It's a fantasy, it's a metaphor, and it's achingly, wonderfully real.

But the best indication of how I feel about Ruby Sparks is that I started watching it at 10:15 on a night that followed three straight mornings of waking up before 5:30 a.m., twice because of being paged awake for work emergencies and once because of a sick son, yet I didn't for a moment feel like falling asleep. And, as inspired as Paul Dano's protagonist, I'm writing this now at 12:37 a.m., even though I will be awake in less than five hours to watch the Oscar nominations announced live on TV.

If that's not a #1 movie of the year, I don't know what is.

In fact, it's not only my #1 movie, it's my #1 by a long shot.

Here's the complete list, from first to worst:

1. Ruby Sparks
2. Your Sister’s Sister
3. Silver Linings Playbook
4. Wreck-It Ralph
5. Argo
6. Looper
7. Lincoln
8. Beasts of the Southern Wild
9. Headhunters
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
11. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
12. Amour
13. The Do-Deca-Pentathlon
14. The Impossible
15. Killing Them Softly
16. Oslo, August 31st
17. The Cabin in the Woods
18. Monsieur Lazhar
19. Jeff, Who Lives at Home
20. Bernie
21. Newlyweds
22. Cloud Atlas
23. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
24. The Hunger Games
25. Wanderlust
26. Magic Mike
27. The Five-Year Engagement
28. Life of Pi
29. The Queen of Versailles
30. Django Unchained
31. Beyond the Black Rainbow
32. Indie Game: The Movie
33. Sound of My Voice
34. Klown
35. The Grey
36. Flight
37. 21 Jump Street
38. Compliance
39. Zero Dark Thirty
40. Turn Me On, Dammit!
41. A Cat in Paris
42. Killer Joe
43. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
44. Get the Gringo
45. The Pirates! Band of Misfits
46. Nobody Else But You
47. Moonrise Kingdom
48. The Avengers
49. The Master
50. Seven Psychopaths
51. The Dictator
52. The Kid With a Bike
53. Silent House
54. Arbitrage
55. The Watch
56. Sparkle
57. The Secret World of Arrietty
58. Sleepwalk With Me
59. Skyfall
60. Friends With Kids
61. The Campaign
62. The Odd Life of Timothy Green
63. God Bless America
64. Gerhard Richter Painting
65. The Loved Ones
66. Jiro Dreams of Sushi
67. The Dark Knight Rises
68. How to Survive a Plague
69. Take This Waltz
70. Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Witness Protection
71. Prometheus
72. The Paperboy
73. Goon
74. Men in Black 3
75. Lockout
76. John Carter
77. Damsels in Distress
78. The Loneliest Planet
79. For a Good Time, Call …
80. The Innkeepers
81. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
82. Contraband
83. Lawless
84. The Tall Man
85. Les Miserables
86. Safety Not Guaranteed
87. Vamps
88. Rock of Ages
89. Ted
90. Casa de Mi Padre
91. Mirror Mirror
92. Rise of the Guardians
93. One for the Money
94. Brave
95. Alps
96. 2016: Obama’s America
97. Dredd
98. The Three Stooges
99. Being Flynn
100. This Means War
101. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
102. Haywire
103. Celeste and Jesse Forever
104. The Deep Blue Sea
105. Dark Shadows
106. Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax
107. Jack Reacher
108. Alex Cross
109. Hick
110. Chronicle
111. Red Hook Summer
112. Total Recall
113. Stolen
114. The Raven
115. Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie
116. The Pact
117. Piranha 3DD
118. Gone
119. Cosmopolis

Most regret not seeing in time to rank them: Anna Karenina, Hitchcock, Holy Motors, The Sessions, This is 40, Wuthering Heights

Was sure I would see, but somehow didn't: Battleship, Savages, Snow White and the Huntsman

If you're looking at any patterns, I can see one right away: My top three movies are all about an impossible form of love. I guess the (twisted) romantic in me really came out in 2012.

As always, would love to hear your thoughts.