Taking the Pepsi Challenge with my streamers

I said in Thursday's post that I should not have chosen Stan as my streamer to watch Eat Pray Love. How right I was*, and how many other choices I didn't realize I actually had.

(*read on, there's more to this story)

Suspecting but never definitively proving that the video quality on Stan was worse than on my other streamers, I decided to do a little test. And the results of that test were definitive indeed (*but maybe not in the way I originally thought).

I'm calling it the "Pepsi Challenge," a bit of a misnomer but I'll explain my thinking.

In the actual Pepsi Challenge from the 1980s -- and was it this that prompted Coke to roll out the ill-fated "New Coke"? -- people tasted unidentified colas to determine which one they liked the best. There may have been more than two, or it may have just been Coke and Pepsi. Allegedly, a lot of people decided they liked Pepsi better. And, speaking of things that stayed in the zeitgeist, as I was when talking about Eat Pray Love, so did the Pepsi Challenge, as seen in such places as Pulp Fiction: "I'll take the Pepsi Challenge with that Amsterdam shit."

My Pepsi Challenge does not have the same blind element in that I already knew which streamer was which, and I already had a bias going in. However, it does involve comparing like things to see which is the best. Plus, there would be less inherent subjectivity to it. While it's a personal assessment what flavor of soda you like the best, the crispness of an image, in most cases, is not a matter of preference. 

So first I checked to see if Eat Pray Love was available on one of my other streamers. It was. Amazon.

Then I decided to watch the first few minutes of the movie, just to get an idea of how much better I thought it looked. 

Then I decided I would actually take a picture of the same scene from both movies, one on Amazon and one on Stan, to make a side-by-side comparison all the easier. 

There was no comparison.

Before I show you the pictures, I'll tell you I selected this particular scene because it was a party Julia Roberts' character attends early on -- in theory, where she starts to get the idea she's not happy. An indoor scene, making the lighting all the more important to get right. This was the where I noticed how dark the movie looked. I particularly wanted a shot featuring Viola Davis, because her complexion makes the phenomenon all the more pronounced, as when the image is as dark as I perceived it to be during my viewing, you basically lose the ability to distinguish the features on her face. 

So I paused the movie at the 4:26 mark on Amazon and here's what I got:

I believed this was much brighter than my experience had been with Eat Pray Love. You can see the details of Davis' face just fine. However, I need to go back into Stan to be sure.

Oh no.

Never mind that I didn't get the depth of the shot just right. By comparison, the image on Stan is, frankly, awful looking. The right side of Davis' face is completely indiscernible. I've heard that due to their complexions, it is especially important to light Black actors correctly, otherwise this is what happens. 

On a lark, I decided to see if Eat Pray Love was also available on Netflix. It was.

If we were looking for infinitesimal differences between two like products, as Pepsi was in its comparisons with Coke, the only contest here would be between Amazon and Netflix. These two images look slightly different, but the preference on which one is better could reasonably be in the eye of the beholder.

Whereas Stan would finish a distant, distant third -- or perhaps fourth, behind the option of not watching the movie at all.

There is one other thing I haven't even told you about this. When I started watching Eat Pray Love the other night, I did try to fix the image within the movie, after I'd been watching it for maybe 20 minutes. I determined that Stan allows you to adjust the video quality between the settings of Low, Medium, High and Auto, to optimize your experience based on the speed of your internet. Ours was set to Auto by default, so I changed it to High. I noticed a slight uptick in the quality, but not to Netflix or Amazon levels.

Perversely, I also watched a few seconds of this movie in both Low and Medium. Lordy.

I am now asking myself:

Can I even watch movies on Stan anymore? Should we even still be subscribing to it?

There is no doubt that I like having this extra streamer available as an option for when I'm looking for a movie I can't otherwise find, and that Stan has come through for me in the past. Just earlier this week, I learned that my #1 of 2024, The Substance, will begin streaming on Stan starting ... well, starting today in fact. I thought this was my occasion to finally show the movie to my wife.

But can I even do that if it's going to look like this?

Here's the biggest problem: As a critic, I rely on having no details that are beyond the control of the filmmakers impacting my ability to assess the film. You can already see how this has failed me with regards to Eat Pray Love. In my post Thursday, I mentioned the lighting problems multiple times. Fortunately, I did also mention my suspicion that Stan could be part of the problem, as I already had reason to suspect this. More on that in a minute.

As it turns out, those lighting problems had nothing to do with how Ryan Murphy shot the movie. They only had to do with how Stan projected it. 

Stan does not show a huge number of original films, though I did use it last year to watch and rank the Nicolas Cage film Arcadian, which I did not happen to review. But let's say I had reviewed Arcadian. I might have spent some valuable real estate in the review dinging the movie for a thing that was not its fault. I don't think Arcadian would have been a good movie no matter where it was projected, but being projected on Stan certainly did it no favors. 

Similarly, I don't think I would have liked Eat Pray Love much better no matter where I'd seen it. But I can't be sure. With movies, a first impression often sticks with you. And my first impression of Eat Pray Love was of a dark movie that looked bad. 

This is a worry that has come up for me before related to sound. I remember specifically discussing it (on this blog, I think) in relation to Clint Eastwood's Gran Turino, which had an unfortunate mix between its music and its dialogue such that you had to turn up the volume to hear the dialogue and then rush to turn it down again any time the music came on. At the time, I wondered if there was any way to know whether this was the movie's fault or if it had something to do with my TV or other aspect of my individual viewing experience. Fortunately, another person independently confirmed they'd had the same experience with this movie.

But as a critic, I don't want to be constantly confirming my impressions of movies with other people. I want to know I've got a high-quality streamer presenting it, like Netflix or Amazon. 

But I also don't like to give up on products that I have subscribed to and in many ways like. I am actually involved in a similar problem with my tennis club right now, poor service and considering not renewing my membership, but vastly preferring the option to renew. 

So I decided to dig deeper on this. 

I looked back into our viewing history on Stan. At first I actually did this to see how much we were really using the service, but then that morphed into something else.

And this discovered for me that in the past year, I have watched exactly seven other movies on Stan: Throw Momma from the Train a few weeks ago, the aforementioned Arcadian, three Halloween movies when I was watching those during October, a revisit of The Crow in preparation for watching the new version, and a random revisit of The Truman Show. 

Seven movies in a year is not a lot for paying a monthly subscription fee. Of course, I am not the only one who uses Stan. My younger son randomly binged the entire Henry Danger series last year, most of which he had already seen, and my wife has watched a half-dozen series in that year, most notably Hacks. There's value in that. 

But there may not be continuing value for me. Even when I watched The Crow, I remember thinking it did not look very good, though I think I put that on my memory of the movie. The weird skipping forward and doubling back by a second or two, which happened a number of times throughout the movie? Well of course that was on Stan. 

I thought I might do the Pepsi Challenge on The Truman Show, but of course, this one was not available on either Amazon or Netflix. Thereby clarifying the conundrum I am in about the service Stan provides me.

But I did decide to click into it to see if the "Stan effect" was visible here. Indeed, it did not look great, though obviously I had not noticed it at the time I watched it last year. That assessment could have been complicated by the fact that I was watching it on my projector, so it was reasonable to imagine there would be differences in the projection. 

The experience of watching movies has to do in large measure with the quality of how they look. That may be an obvious statement, but I'm making it anyway. A good script can drag a movie past its visual components, but it needn't. Movies are first and foremost a visual medium.

So, in light of the definite value I get from a movie like The Truman Show -- not to mention the three Halloween movies that were not available to me any other way, and now The Substance -- I took this whole thing one step further and contacted Stan customer support, including the three stills of Eat Pray Love you see above.

Their first response was to tell me my email address was not associated with a Stan account and to provide further information to prove I was a customer. I was a little annoyed by this, but I get it. They don't want to invest time in a customer unless they know it's really a customer. I intentionally did not provide the additional information about myself because it would still not match up to anything in their system, only telling them the account was associated with my wife's email address, and providing them that address. I did this in part to see if they would come back to me again to prove I was associated with the account holder, as at this point, Stan's customer service, or lack thereof, might be a factor in whether we keep it or not.

They then sent another response asking me to cc in my wife, so yeah, I guess that was sort of the thing I didn't want them to do. But I guess I have to admit I still get it, and sure, this approach is more secure for us. When I responded and cc'd her in, they then responded again (different person this time) confirming what the first person said about needing to verify. Getting more annoyed. Also, when that second person replied, they forgot to cc my wife so I had to reply again, ccing her again. The guy replied apologizing for not ccing her, but then also did not cc her on that response. I guess the net result is a state of annoyance remaining constant.

My wife replied and things were finally allowed to go forward.

Finally they said they could not duplicate this in their analytics and asked what our TV model number is. I replied. 

A third person (they work in shifts, and I do appreciate someone keeping the thread live while the others are off) got back to me and asked if the same issue were happening on any other devices.

Duh. I'm an IT guy and I didn't even think to check this. 

So then I did watch a little bit of Eat Pray Love on Stan on my laptop, and this time, it looked fine. I mean, it looked equivalent to how the other services looked. The way Ryan Murphy filmed it. Which also explains why my wife, who tends to watch Stan through her devices, does not notice the things I've noticed. 

Okay, so this is some sort of interaction effect between Stan and my TV. Maybe we can blame the intermediary, which would be Fetch, the conduit through which we access a lot of other TV-related things on our HDMI2 port. I suppose it's like an AppleTV. 

We actually do also have AppleTV, but unfortunately, it's through my U.S. iTunes (which I need to keep in order to access movies that have not been released here yet) and therefore I can't get the Stan app in the app store.

Well at least now I know what I'm working with. And I know that Stan is not just some purveyor of shoddy streams. 

Stan support responded again (they're right on it, really) asking me to go to a URL on my TV to run a speed test. I tried and tried but I can't figure out how to type in a URL on my TV. So I did the native speed test on Fetch, which came back fine. I told them this.

And then a lightbulb went off, and I finally started to really think like an IT guy -- on my own this time, without the prompting of anyone else.

I thought, if Fetch is the problem, I'll see this problem also when I go on Netflix through Fetch, rather than through the native Netflix app on my TV. I can't get Stan through AppleTV, which I had hoped to do to put it on a level playing field with Amazon Prime. But I can go the other way around, signing into Netflix on Fetch. 

And you know what? Eat Pray Love looked like shit on Netflix through the Fetch box, too. 

So now, ultimately, Stan is completely exonerated in this. Fetch is the shoddy service, or maybe it's just something about the settings. I've already gone through and tried to tweak a lot of settings that I think could relate, to no avail. But at least now I know for sure where the problem lies.

The scientific method involves changing only one variable at a time, but also, knowing all the variables you can and should change to get your answers. I do this without even thinking about it in IT, and now I've finally done it at home too.

The Pepsi Challenge is a useful starting point, but you have to know what it is that you're actually comparing. I thought I was comparing streamers, when I was actually comparing ... digital media players, is I guess the right way to refer to AppleTV and Fetch, as I just discovered from the internet. 

You may be able to tell this post was written partially in real time, as I got the first part of it out without knowing what the problem was, before coming around to the right answer in the end. If I'd done all of this before I started writing, I surely would have structured this post differently. But I can't be bothered to toss all the writing I've already done and start anew. 

However, I think there's something useful about having gone through this the way I did, in terms of where I ended up. Maybe if I hadn't been writing about it, and feeling like I demanded a definitive answer for you, my reader, I wouldn't have gone the extra steps that helped me put my finger on the true problem here. 

And Stan -- poor, innocent Stan -- might have gone bye bye.

Now, if I can just figure out how to get a good Stan stream through Fetch in order to watch The Substance ... 

Ed Harris in the control room double feature

With the projector still set up in the garage for the Oscars yesterday morning on Labour Day, I decided to make use of it with two more movies. Which is actually a lot less than I would usually watch, but this is one three-day weekend where we didn't get the projector set up until the final of the three days, in part due to my wife's preference for watching Spaceman together on Saturday night in the living room rather than on the projector. (It's been the hottest three days of the summer, even though it is now autumn. And even though the garage is the coolest place in our house if all else is equal, it doesn't stand a chance against an air conditioned living room.)

One of the movies was one that my son and I started the day before, watching only half of it. The other was a classic from the 1990s that I've seen only once.

Both had Ed Harris occupying a position of dominance in the command center for a project involving the coordinated efforts of thousands of people. 

If I had been looking for a true thematic double feature for Apollo 13, I might have gone with Space Cowboys, which I have never seen and which was one of the "if you liked this, you'll like this" offerings from Stan after Ron Howard's film had finished. But in the time we paused to have dinner and usual nightly chores, I decided I wanted to fish for a previously seen film that I hadn't seen recently -- and The Truman Show, which I only saw that one time in the theater, was a good match.

First how we got on to Apollo 13, which is my #57 film on Flickchart but which my records tell me I haven't watched since before 2006. 

A few weeks ago, my ten-year-old started telling me what he had learned about the doomed Apollo 13 mission, possibly collected from YouTube. (Hey, maybe if YouTube is educating our children on NASA, it isn't all bad.) Of course my mind immediately went to one of the five 1995 best picture nominees, which had such an impact on me the last time I saw it -- which was probably the second time overall -- that it rocketed up (no pun intended) into the stratosphere (pun intended this time) of my Flickchart, where it regularly beats films you'd think I might like more. Probably a good time to test my loyalty to it.

I did wonder if it would be over the head of my son, but he was the one who was telling me about little things they had to do aboard the ship in order to save it (and themselves) from becoming space junk. Plus, he's pretty advanced for his age, and an interest in space exploration seems like the sort of old-school ambition I'd like to nourish in my children.

I then wondered briefly, given that it is obviously a film intended for adult viewers, whether there would be any language that I wouldn't want him to hear, understanding that he has heard it all before -- just maybe not in films sanctioned by me. I didn't think so, and true enough, there was only the "mild coarse language" promised in the trigger warnings at the beginning. (He asked me why it didn't say "mild curse language," allowing me to define "coarse" for him and explain that "curse" is a noun rather than an adjective.)

What I didn't properly calculate, in a movie all about calculations, is that this is still a ten-year-old and many of the concepts being discussed would be way over his head. Many of the concepts are way over the head of even a 50-year-old.

I'm sure this contributed to the fact that we watched only 55 minutes of a 2 hour and 20 minute movie on Sunday afternoon, when finishing it off would have taken until about 8:20. Even in the air conditioned living room for this portion of the film, I was still secretly grateful that I properly interpreted his squirming and asked him if he wanted to continue the next day. With the heat and with us having gone to the beach earlier, I was all too eager to curl up with one of my late afternoon cat naps.

My son is at an age where he never wants to disappoint his daddy, so he elected to continue on Monday, even though I'm sure his various soccer games on his Nintendo switch and YouTube soccer videos on his tablet held more sway over him than the near-fatal misadventures of Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert. (The first two of whom are still alive, I was pleased to see on Wikipedia after the film ended.) So we continued watching on Monday, this time in the garage on the projector, and this time with about the same amount of squirming, but only slightly more than half the movie to go.

In the end he said he liked it, and he did make a couple spontaneous comments along the way that proved his investment. However, he admitted that he didn't understand most of what was happening. I suppose the question is with a film like Apollo 13, is it important to understand exactly why their current crisis endangers their lives, or do you just need to know that they need to think quickly in order to save themselves? For me, I benefit from a pretty good understanding of the former, which makes the latter all the more tense. For my son, maybe it didn't quite reach that level.

I also think it is probably interesting for a child to watch a movie whose outcome they already know. He knew right from reporting to me the basic details of the Apollo 13 mission that they survived, otherwise he'd be talking about a morbid space tragedy and that's not the sort of thing that tickles the intellect of this particular kid. I tried to address the issue by saying that I thought the movie was incredibly successful and that the proof of this is that you feel tense and excited even though you know the astronauts made it back safely. Again possibly in an attempt to say what I wanted to hear, he co-signed this, albeit somewhat unenthusiastically. 

As for me, I think the #57 ranking on Flickchart was basically supported. Maybe it'll fall down into the 60s or 70s, but not much more than that. I had to fight back the tears when they finally splash down in the South Pacific. 

As an interesting side note: Apollo 13 is the fourth movie I have tagged on this blog that starts with the word Apollo, the others being the documentary about the first moon landing (Apollo 11), Richard Linklater's rotoscoped coming-of-age story centered around that moon landing (Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood) and a found footage horror about a hypothetical moon mission that never happened (Apollo 18). That Apollo 13 should be the best of those films -- though in a smaller margin over the first two than the third -- and only just now be getting its first tag on my 15-year-old blog is interesting indeed, and maybe a little sad. 

Landing (again, no pun intended) on The Truman Show was something I did after about five minutes of further scrolling on Stan. I wanted something short enough (since I do have to return to work today) yet also something with a bit of a grander scale to match the scale I'd just been watching. As an only one-time viewing, with that first viewing coming more than a quarter century ago, The Truman Show fit the bill perfectly. (And I noted that if The Truman Show were made today, it would have failed my first test for length, as it certainly would have been Apollo 13's 140 minutes rather than the 102 minutes it actually is.)

I was not necessarily the biggest fan of The Truman Show in 1998, in that there were people who embraced it more wholeheartedly than I did. Even as I say that, though, I'm checking my rankings for that year and find it at #10 overall -- which is more an indication of the number of films I ranked that year (58) than a true affection for the movie. I did always like it, but something had left me a little hesitant on it -- a feeling that has resulted in never watching it a second time.

Well, I'd say I probably liked it just a touch more than I remembered. I didn't have some big revelation about it, or a reading on it that seemed new to me. It's about what it's about tightly and efficiently, and I think it interestingly anticipates our fascination with reality TV, and sometimes our inability to separate a real person from a character we want to be subjected to dramatic things. 

Something I hadn't maybe considered about The Truman Show was its relationship to another Jim Carrey movie from that era that I adore, which is my #16 on Flickchart, The Cable Guy. Until this viewing I wouldn't have made the connection that both movies are about our desire to watch, and both movies feature a moment at or near the climax where a rapt audience effectively opts to change the channel and ask what else is on. As the more praised of the two movies, The Truman Show surely gets the credit for these thoughts that The Cable Guy does not -- but let's be real here, people. The Cable Guy predates The Truman Show by two years.

Two more quick thoughts:

1) I liked that before we have really been introduced to this world, we already see it falling apart -- literally as a way to preview its metaphorical collapse. One of the first things that happens to Truman is that he is almost hit by a light falling from the top of the dome, which might have not happened for ten minutes in a less efficient film. This also sets up how they explain away the weird phenomena Truman witnesses in the form of news broadcasts.

2) The efficiency of the script does, though, have a few narrative disadvantages. For one, I was sort of surprised that Truman never has it out with his "best friend" -- or so he thinks -- since he was seven, Marlon, played by Noah Emmerich. (Incidentally, Emmerich's entrance where he leads with a six-pack of beer has always been one of my enduring memories of this film.) Albeit only reading the dialogue that Harris' Christof is feeding into his ear, Marlon tells Truman that if everyone was in on a conspiracy against him, he'd have to be in on it too, and the last thing he'd ever do is lie to Truman. Clearly the actor playing Marlon does not like to read these lines, but he reads them, and he's never held accountable, which would certainly happen in today's longer version of this film. Then again, I like the fact that it is implied, through what happens in the story, that the betrayal of Truman by Marlon is so total, so callous, that he isn't even worthy of a big scene where Truman tears him a new one. Instead, Truman will just leave this world and never look back. 

And what about Ed Harris in all this?

Harris has a similar function but a very dissimilar status as a hero in the two films. In Apollo 13, he personifies the tireless, sleepless, unwilling-to-accept failure dedication of the many NASA employees not to lose these three men in space. Whether it's a particular sense of humanism or just his somewhat jingoist determination not to lose the first American in space on his watch, Harris' Gene Kranz does what needs to be done and does not rest until it's done -- and because he's such a cool customer, nary a hair on his head seems to be out of place.

In a film containing a lot more shades of gray than Apollo 13, The Truman Show's Christof is a lot more of a monster -- but he's not an uncomplicated monster. Yes, he is mostly driven by the vainglorious trappings of having created the most popular and longest running television show of all time. But it's also clear that on some level, he views Truman as a son, closer to him than any real person in his real life. When he therefore risks killing this surrogate son upon Truman threatening to leave him, it reveals significant complexities in the dynamics of this relationship. 

It is clear, though, that Harris was born to preside over a control room, because there is a third movie -- at least a third, possibly more -- I could have added to make this double feature a triple feature. It occurred to me that although his identity is not revealed until late in the movie, Harris plays the same role once again in Snowpiercer. Whether this was a conscious quotation of either of these two previous performances, or just something in Harris that suggests a man in (and possibly losing) control, only Bong Joon-ho may know. 

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.