Tired of studios and suits for obvious reasons, Community creator Dan Harmon has taken his next project directly to the people through the crowdfunding website Kickstarter, and brought screenwriter Charlie Kaufman along with him.
She got married last weekend, but Ivanka Trump will be getting another big stack of presents today. It's her 28th birthday. Also celebrating: Simon Doonan, Barneys' inimitable creative director, is turning 57 today. Mega-agent Binky Urban is 63. Fashion photographer Mario Testino is 55. Gavin Rossdale is turning 42. NBC News' Andrea Mitchell is 64. Private equity bigwig Wes Edens is turning 48. Former Page Sixer Paula Froelich is 36. Henry Winkler turns 64. Actress Nia Long is turning 39. Kevin Pollak is turning 52. Harry Hamlin is 58. Cash Cab host Ben Bailey is turning 39. And Olympic gymnast Nastia Liukin is 20. A few weekend birthdays after the jump.
Charlie Kaufman's directing debut Synecdoche, New York is the most inaccessible, challenging, infuriating, stupefying, heartbreaking film of 2008. It's also the best American movie we've seen this year, and as noted here this morning, it's required viewing this weekend for anyone who wants to be on our good side. Or history's good side, for that matter — and here are five reasons why.1. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Period. When we called our shot for Brad Pitt as the likely winner in a crowded Best Actor field, we hadn't yet seen Hoffman as Caden Cotard, a Schenectady, N.Y., regional theater director at odds with his painter wife Adele (Catherine Keener) and his own chronically afflicted body. When Adele and his young daughter leave him for new, famous lives in Berlin, Caden spends the next 30 years funneling a Macarthur "genius" grant into staging his masterpiece: A city within a city, populated by himself, his doppelganger (Tom Noonan), his doppelganger's doppelganger and those of the people closest to him. Yet nobody and nothing is as close to Caden as his own admitted psychosis, the layers of which collapse onto and into each other in scene after scene. Sounds great, right? Except, well, it is. Portraying a man vexed by doctors, lovers, work and ultimately himself (aging decades in the process), Hoffman digs into an adventure of suffering as ludicrous as it is bittersweet. In one crucial scene when the hunt for his estranged daughter takes him to Berlin, what little interaction they have both validates and fetishizes his paranoia — just one of dozens of metaphysical stunts that make Hoffman's performance thrilling and really kind of inspiring. He not only gets but owns all this mindbending melancholy, and for the maybe first time ever, we felt like we had a guide in our tumble down the Kaufman rabbit hole. 2. Six extraordinary roles for women. Starting with Samantha Morton as Caden's theater receptionist-turned-lover-turned-right-hand Hazel (and then Emily Watson as the woman who depicts her in his play), Synecdoche features enough dynamic parts for actresses to fill its own Oscar category. Michelle Williams and Dianne Wiest contribute brilliant turns as Caden's second wife and fourth doppelganger, respectively, but Hope Davis walks away with her scenes as arguably the world's worst couples therapist: 3. Charlie Kaufman gets to be Charlie Kaufman. Like director and former collaborator Michel Gondry, whose screenwriting debut Science of Sleep found a grandly ambitious balance of theory and technique that slipped through the twee seams of their Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman and his vision seem more potent and personal on their own. (Don't get us started about his overrated work with Spike Jonze.) It's another nifty trick under the circumstances; as Manohla Dargis alludes to in her fantastic NYT review, an opus about failure is itself a staggering creative success that took decidedly less than a lifetime to make. And for better or worse, it can happen to you. Maybe not the part about bedding Michelle Williams, but that never ends well anyway. 4. Hazel lives in a house on fire. Why? Kaufman professes not to know, but it makes already great scenes (and a classic, climactic bit of dark humor) altogether memorable. 5. Adele Lack's paintings. The square-inch canvases on display through the weekend at the Montalban Gallery are too absurdly small to require the paint-spattered basement workshop where Keener's character composes them, but we think their clues to Caden's past, present and future symbolize the rewards viewers earn for accepting an artist's challenge. Sound familiar? Like so much of the rest of Synecdoche, New York, it really is your life. We'd sincerely hate to see you miss it.
Writer Jason Tanz continues with the overshare on his behind-the-scenes blog for a Wired profile of screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman, best known for Jim Carrey vehicle Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Today Tanz has uploaded a rough draft of his story. Forgive the typos and factual errors, he asks, in return for the peek at his process. We couldn't resist the urge to crowdsource his editor's response:
"What if we showed how we produced this story?" iconoclastic Wired creative director Scott Dadich asked the team producing an article about self-referential screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (in photo) and his new self-referential film about a self-referential Broadway play, Synecdoche, New York. "What would happen if we broke the rules, we put the whole thing online as we produced it?" "What if we posted the edit — hell, the rough draft." "What if we posted the pitch letter?" "What if we posted the emails about the pitch letter?" Keep going guys .... What if we posted the email you sent Valleywag? Transparency just keeps getting easier.
· Sony Pictures Classics is close to picking up Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman's sprawling directorial debut spanning 40 years in the life of a guy who tries to mount the greatest play of all time. It began as a real-time project, but has since been whittled down to a far more digestible two hours, four minutes. [THR]
· Nia Vardalos's long-awaited follow-up to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, My Life in Ruins, will be distributed by Fox Searchlight. In it, she plays a travel guide who gets her groove back while touring through Greezzzzzzzzzz. [THR]
· The Wiffler: The Ted Whitfield Story, is an "indie baseball mockumentary" set in the world of competitive wiffleball during the 1994 MLB strike. [Variety]
· Christian "Fierce™" Siriano will design all the looks for the young title character of Eloise in Paris, trying his best not to make the famed Plaza Hotel resident not look like some hot French tranny hooker mess. [Variety]
· From the people who brought you American Pie 2: Michael Vartan and David Cross will play "bitter tire store rivals" in Demoted. [THR]
Only a few days remain before Cannes ends and we can roll our bleary eyes from the backs of our heads. In the meantime, the rubbernecker in us can't help but take an interest in Spike Lee's latest sortie against the Hollywood establishment — this time as personified by Cannes darling Clint Eastwood, whom Lee railed against while promoting his upcoming Afro-centric World War II drama Miracle at St. Anna:
With the minor exception of missing out on Jim Toback's documentary on Mike Tyson (which will screen here this fall anyway — we can wait), the only regret we have so far about sitting out the Cannes Film Festival is our absence at the mini-riot that preceded the press screening of director James Gray's drama Two Lovers, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow. That's when we're at our best, as were Lou Lumenick and the "major U.S. film critic" (*cough* Manohla Dargis *cough*) who apparently exclaimed, "I'm not going to wait an hour for f—-ing James Gray" before an ensuing screening delay, shoving match and seating free-for-all.
The Cannes Film Festival announced this morning it will get four hours of Che Guevara after all — not to mention additional Oscar bait from Clint Eastwood, Angelina Jolie and Charlie Kaufman in this year's competition program. As recently as last Friday, the Steven Soderbergh/Benicio Del Toro all-or-nothing two-fer of Guerrilla and The Argentine was looking doubtful for the Cannes deadline, but the festival announced this morning that it is indeed in. Out of competition, meanwhile, world premieres Indiana Jones 4 and Kung-Fu Panda will do battle for the honorary Jerry Seinfeld Award For Shameless Publicity Hijacking.
The LA Weekly's Nikki Finke reports that Sony is making Da Vinci Code adapter Akiva Goldsman, a man whose career highlights include depicting schizophrenics as people who spend their days scribbling on dirty windows while playing with imaginary friends and assisting in the destruction of the Batman franchise, the best-paid writer in town by forking over $4 million for him to churn out a script for Da Vinci sequel Angels & Demons:
Today the LAT introduced Scriptland, a weekly love note to the Hollywood writing underclass so persecuted by the industry that they can be shot on sight if caught wandering a movie set without proper Directors Guild supervision. The new feature wastes no time messing around with well-paid, uncredited-rewrite hacks, and instead strips out the brass fasteners from universally admired screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's latest opus, Synecdoche, New York, and gets to work thrusting itself into the script's quivering brad-holes with papercuts-be-damned vigor:
