io9.com are running a series of Scifi 101 articles - basically, listing the essential books, TV shows, films etc. that you ought to check out if you're into the science fiction genre. Their list of 25 films includes the usual suspects (2001, Planet of the Apes, Alien, Blade Runner...), but not The Usual Suspects. It does include Eternal Sunshine:

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004, dir. Michel Gondry). This film works on so many levels. It's a metaphor for the ways in which you try to erase someone from your memories and your life, after a breakup, in order to reinvent yourself as a single person. And yet, the film manages to suggest, that process is a form of suicide — you have to destroy a piece of your life in order to excise your former lover from it. And since that process is also the reverse of falling in love, maybe it leads you to realize why you fell for the other person in the first place. But Eternal Sunshine is also an incredibly clever science fiction movie that introduces a bizarre new technology in a way that's both surreal and believable. (Source)

Y'all should check out another film on the list, Primer. I'm crazy about Primer. It's like Memento meets Pi meets Donnie Darko. You could view it online for free a few weeks back, but I think it's been taken offline.

For no particularly good reason other than potential world domination, BCK now has a Twitter account (roll of drums...): http://twitter.com/beingcharliek Any time a News item is posted here on the main site, its headline will appear simultaneously on our Twitter, with a link to the article itself. HOW CLEVER LIKE WOW.

I have never used Twitter in my life. This could be a huge stinking mess. But by all means, feel free to follow us and tell all your friends and spread the word and increase our army and all that jazz. There's a chance I'll find other uses for the Twitter account later on, other than merely reposting the headlines - oh, and if BCK is ever having technical glitches or something along those lines, you can always check Twitter and our Facebook page.

Ryan Boudinot is the author of the novel Misconception and the short story collection The Littlest Hitler, which was named Book of the Year (2006) by Publisher's Weekly. The pitch for his next novel, Blueprints Of The Afterlife, sounds like it has a bit of the Synecdoches about it:

[The novel is] set in a full-size replica of Manhattan under construction in Puget Sound that alternates between a richly imagined future in which the apocalypse is a distant, hazy memory, and a present in which a man recounts his search for a secret organization bent on harnessing the brightest minds to control human destiny and life on earth.

io9.com interviewed Boudinot and mentioned the Synecdoche, New York similarities. Says Boudinot:

I was well into the novel when I learned about Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. I sort of threw up my hands and thought, great, now everyone's going to think I copied Kaufman. I've watched that film four times and love it more every time. I love everything he does. And he's doing something different with his replication of New York City in Synecdoche than I'm doing with mine. (Source)

When Synecdoche came out, some people on the internets (who mostly hadn't seen the film) prematurely called it a rip-off of everything from a Bjork music video to Fellini. These people are crazy. Different artists get similar ideas all the time - but the idea isn't the important thing; the important thing is how you execute it. (I'm not slamming io9, by the way. Their question was totally valid.)

Not sure when Blueprints is due for release - he's only recently sold the book to Grove/Atlantic.

Conveniently, most of BCK's bills are due within a couple months of each other. Inconveniently, most of BCK's bills are due within a couple months of each other. And we're nearing those couple months. So if you've ever thought about tossing a few coins into our tip jar, now might be the time to do it.

Our costs this year come to around $250US - this includes stuff like hosting, domain name registration, the various commercial plugins that keep the site looking spiffy (the commenting component, the downloads component, etc.). There are a handful of other neato features I'd like to add to BCK before the end of the year, too -- extended Facebook integration, for one. (So in the future, you'll be able to log into BCK using your FB account details - no need to register a separate account on BCK.) If you feel like being charitable, you can hit the Paypal link any time. (Top right corner of the site.) I'll add a donation thermometer soon, so we'll know where we're at. Or you can hit this:

In other news: BCK has its own Twitter account! Pointless yet exciting! I haven't thoroughly tested it yet, so it's not quite ready for an unveiling. But the idea is, each time a news post is made on BCK, a link to it will appear on our Twitter account. And BCK can, like, TALK TO ASHTON KUTCHER. I'll let you know when it's all set; shouldn't be too long now. (Incidentally, re: the Twitter account: any suggestions for whose Twitters BCK ought to follow? Roger Ebert, I guess, Jim Carrey...)

You might know of PostSecret - "an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard." Let me tell you, reading that site can become highly addictive. It's also occasionally NSFW, so beware. ANYWAY. Bryan spotted an Eternal Sunshine postcard on the site, and sent it along:

At the moment SCRIPT has a short essay on Synecdoche, New York. Gary J. Shipley is taking a look at the film/script from a philosophical angle - references to E. M. Cioran, Martin Heidegger, Dasein and Paul Celan. If those names activate your mental light bulbs, this one's for you. Here's an excerpt:

There can be no resolution to Caden's play because there can be no resolution to Caden's life or, by extension, any life. In the film, resolution -- not even a fleeting approximation of itself -- is nothing more than nullification, nothing more than death. Whereas the filmscript curtails Caden's revelation with the accelerated blackening of a screen, the film makes the same curtailment with a gradual fade to white, Caden's death-cue being issued at the precise moment that he ceases to be visible. In both cases, though, Caden appears inseparable from the medium: he ends when they end. (Source)

Following up from the previous post: in her quest to cover the 500(ish) flicks in The Best DVDs You’ve Never Seen, Just Missed or Almost Forgotten, blogger Ofelia Legaspi has a write-up on Charlie's Adaptation:

Charlie Kaufman‘s film adaptation is a strata of adaptations. Laroche curiously adapts to the fleeting life of his passions with ease and with such discipline. New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean, who devours Laroche’s story as fodder for an article and, subsequently, a book, is in the cusp of change herself. There is something about Orlean waiting to happen. Meryl Streep saturates her character with such poetic desires that adaptation indeed seems like a very good thing. (Source)

Canadian blogger/journo Ofelia Legaspi is working her way through The Best DVDs You’ve Never Seen, Just Missed or Almost Forgotten, a book compiled by New York Times film critics. There are 500(ish) films in the book. That's a lot of sitting on your butt. Today Ofelia's tackling Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and contrasting it with Inception.

Kaufman’s characters fight, not in million-dollar action sequences, but inside intimate homes. The only place more intimate and alive than the reality of Clementine and Joel’s lives is when they go back deep in Joel’s repressed memories, through some low-tech brain damage procedure that takes place in a small clinic and in the depressive patient’s own dingy home.

Nolan’s, on the other hand, is a construct that detaches itself from poignant and well-developed emotions the way its inception scenes have the Earth detach from its core. These scenes invoke awe but they seem to serve no purpose other than to showcase the capabilities of a “dream architect” whose mind maze creation is actually more decorative than plot-driven. (Source)

I just repeats what I reads.

Borys Kit at Heat Vision reports that Charlie recently spent a couple of weeks polishing the script for...

... Kung Fu Panda 2.

Believe me, I know how that sounds. No sources are cited, and I can't find it mentioned anywhere else, but Borys is from Hollywood Reporter,which lends credibility. But still.

[Charlie] is coming off of less than two weeks worth of work on DreamWorks Animation’s “Kung Fu Panda: The Kaboom of Doom,” the sequel to the fun 2008 movie that had the voice talent of Jack Black, Angelina Jolie and Dustin Hoffman.

His work on “Kaboom” falls under the polish category, and animated movies tend to be worked on by multiple writers, so it’s not fair to say this will be a Kaufman cartoon. But it will be interesting to see, when the movie is released in 2011, how much of the Kaufman stamp it will bear. (Source)

Ordinarily this would sound like complete BS to me. But the Hollywood Reporter thing... Talk about news out of left-field. Is this awesome or awful or just plain surprising?

Anyway. A while ago, Charlie did say he enjoyed the first Panda.

Thanks to Nathaniel and Alby!

Update: I don't have much faith in the IMDB's forums as a news source, but last month a member posted this message, which sounds kinda legit to me. I guess. (Emphasis added):

Today Charlie Kaufman was in Bologna, Italy, to receive the prize "Lancia - Celebration of Lives". He said he's working on a new script, "Tentative", about which he didn't revealed much. Does anyone know something?
And, about Kung Fu Panda 2: he said he worked on this script only about 2 weeks, stating that was like "writing a single episode for a tv series".

Sorry about my bad english. (Source)

I doubt Charlie's writing anything called "Tentative," though. Seems too simple for a CK title. Maybe something's been lost in translation. Like, "I'm tentatively working on a new script." Maybe.

Salon have a slideshow feature at the mo', titled "Beyond 'Inception': Best on-screen dreams" - and in news that will shock not many, there's a Kaufman film on the list. BUT WHICH ONE? And where in the list does it fall? THE SUSPENSE THE SUSPENSE.

Non-Kauf films in the list include pretty much the ones you'd expect: 8 1/2, Brazil, Jacob's Ladder, to name a few. Even Sopranos gets a look in.

Thanks to Carl for the heads up!

Full disclosure: I haven't actually read this article, but it seems like a lengthy analysis of Synecdoche, New York. (As opposed to a review, or an interview, or a retelling of the story using only origami puppets.) Here's how it opens:

As one of the few Hollywood screenwriters of the last decade to achieve the status of auteur, Charlie Kaufman has built his artistic reputation on bizarre and baroque narratives. And yet the last line of dialogue from his Synecdoche, New York is one of aggressive, devastating, succinct finality, a solitary word and plosive that at once enacts a protagonist’s inevitable demise, announces it, and fulfills a brutal, film-long program of unsolicited ego-surrender. “Die,” says Dianne Wiest’s enigmatic Millicent Weems, the actress who switches roles with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s slowly disintegrating theater maestro Caden Cotard, the recipient and performer of this most definitive of stage directions. That Kaufman chooses such a harsh word to conclude his directorial debut is less significant than the manner in which he has chosen to communicate it. Because for someone who has also built his screenwriting reputation on literary, concept-heavy wit, Kaufman demonstrates with the execution of this single word—and all that leads up to it—a mastery of dialogue as sound, and sound as delivered through the cinema-specific device of voiceover narration. (Source)

If that grabs you by the grey cells, there's plenty more at the link, yo.

It's a rule now: any film that includes brain-bendy weirdness (especially if the mind is actually part of the plot) has to be compared to Charlie K's work. (On a related note, every sci-fi film has to be declared a rip-off of Philip K Dick at some point, usually on an internet message board.)

Says Empire, reviewing Christopher Nolan's Inception:

[It's] Like The Matrix mated with Synecdoche, New York — or a Charlie Kaufman 007. To paraphrase Casino Royale’s Vesper Lynd, it’s a meaningful pursuit in a summer of disposable entertainments. With physics-defying, thunderous action, heart-wringing emotion and an astonishing performance from DiCaprio, Nolan delivers another true original: welcome to an undiscovered country. (Source)

I want to see this. The Batman films were good but not entirely my thing; Memento's an all-time favourite, though, so I'm there for anything Nolan wants to do. Not sure about the Synecdoche comparison - I haven't heard much about Inception that made me think of SNY.

That excerpt is Empire's entire mini-review, but a longer review from them is here. They give it 5 stars. More importantly: Charlie Kaufman as 007! Times like this, I wish I could create decent fan art.

I don't know what the hell I'm saying. But it's the title of an article at Obvious Mag, and it's about the Kauf, so it's bound to be aces! Here's an excerpt for our Portuguese readers:

Charlie Kaufman é roteirista e, como muitos descrevem, uma mente brilhante e conturbada. Assinou filmes polêmicos para o padrão hollywoodiano de cinema e impressiona com suas alucinações cinematográficas. Fato é que analisá-lo é uma tarefa dolorosa, pois corremos um grande risco em diminuí-lo, assim como diminuir sua obra, que pode conter inúmeras interpretações.

Um aspecto geral, muito importante e marcante, com o qual Kaufman conseguiu um espaço respeitável nas produções americanas, é o talento de nos deixar intrigados com um filme, que em primeira mão nos pareceria impossível de interpretar mas, com olhos analíticos podemos perceber uma certa dose de filosofia, autobiografia e antropofagia. Assim, por questões paralelas, vou deixar aqui um olhar, talvez um tanto raso, de dois filmes importantíssimos: Quero Ser John Malkovich e Synecdoche, NY. (Source)

RIGHT ON!

Update: Renan has translated the article for us unilingual English-speaking types! Cool!

Charlie Kaufman: Confessions of an Original Mind is the title of a new CK biography, written by Doreen Alexander Child and published by ABC-CLIO. I'll bet you Charlie's ecstatic about it. Here's some back-cover spielage:

This revealing study looks at the influences and creative impulses that shape one of today’s most progressive, thoughtful filmmakers.

[...]

This exhaustive study of Kaufman's life and work is organized chronologically to cover his early influences as well as his most-recent ventures. Highlights include explorations of Kaufman's collaboration with Being John Malkovich director Spike Jonze—who stood him up for their first meeting—and the writer's conflict with George Clooney (about whom Kaufman says, "I can tell you that George Clooney is my least favorite person"). There are analyses of Human Nature, Adaptation, and the hauntingly beautiful Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which led to an Academy Award. The book also studies Kaufman's sound plays for Theatre of the New Ear and his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York.

And a little about the publisher:

ABC-CLIO is an award-winning publisher of reference works, academic and general interest books, digital resources, and professional development publications and programs for librarians and educators.

With a 50+ year legacy of excellence and innovation, the company’s well-respected publishing imprints include ABC-CLIO/Greenwood, providing students, teachers, and scholars in history, humanities and language arts disciplines an award-winning lineup of databases, print reference and resource books, and eBooks.

More info at the link above!