|
|
 |
| I Give It: |
  (script - 1st draft)
|
|
(film)
|
 Human Nature crew: Jean-Michel Bernard, Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry (rear); Patricia Arquette, Tracy McKnight, and Anthony Bregman (front) |
 Shooting script published by Newmarket |
Reviews: Human Nature - IFC
Human Nature - About.com
Human Nature film review - Daily Bruin Online
Human Nature film review - Matinee Magazine
Human Nature movie review - Crank Critic
Human Nature film review - Film Freak Central
Human Nature movie review - Hollywood.com
Human Nature movie review - New York Times
Uncivilized 'Human Nature' fails to prove its thesis - PittsburghLIVE.com
Human Nature film review - Salon.com
Human Nature movie review - Arizona Republic
'Human Nature' pogoes across the screen with anarchic creativity - Star Tribune
Human Nature movie review - Chicago Sun Times
Trying Too Hard Is One Facet of 'Human Nature' - LA Times.com
Human Nature movie review - Access Atlanta
Human Nature movie review - Dallas Morning News.
Hairy day for ‘Human Nature’ spoof - MSNBC
Quirky comedy takes weird look at 'Human Nature' - Houston Chronicle
'Human Nature' is a snappy, quirky tale - Christian Science Monitor
Hail to the Chimp - Metroactive
Movie review, 'Human Nature' - Metromix
 French Human Nature poster |
I Say: I wish I'd been able to sit in on the pitch meeting for this. "So what's your new script about, Charlie?" "Well..."
Okay, they can't all be winners. The screenplay is as weird as it sounds, yet weirdness doesn't automatically translate into greatness, and compared to other Kaufman scripts, this one is sub-standard.
I finally saw the movie in August 2003 on DVD, braced for the worst, and you know what? I didn't think it sucked. Michel Gondry did a better job than I expected. With the hits he took from various reviewers, I figured it must've been really over-directed. But I thought it was okay. The film as a whole probably hit a lower target than its creators were aiming for, but putting that aside and judging the film on its own merits, I thought it was okay. Not great, not particularly insightful, nothing earth-shattering - and definitely Charlie's weakest script - but certainly not horrible. Tim Robbins looked uncomfortable in his role. Arquette was good and rather brave (that is, "brave" in the cinematic sense, as opposed to "brave" in the sense of firefighters and war vets). Bottom line is I'm a little less worried about Gondry and Eternal Sunshine than I have been. Everyone's expectations were ultra-high after Malkovich (except for my own, for reasons I've gone into ad infinitum). If Nature had been scripted by someone else but otherwise remained 100% identical to the finished product, I wonder if it would've been reamed as much as it was. Nevertheless, it is true to say it's the weakest of Kaufman's work to date.
Put it this way: if this had been the first Charlie script I read, rather than Malkovich, it wouldn't have compelled me to build a website all about him. It's an okay story, it passes the time, and it's not bad, but that's about it.
Latest: 3/9/04 - A reminder for the Aussies: you might want to tune into Rage on the ABC tomorrow night, because they're having a marathon of Spike Jonze / Michel Gondry / Chris Cunningham music vids. Mr. Fist has rather enthusiastically provided the playlist. You're gonna need a blank video or some uppers.
20/8/04 - News for Aussies! Mr. Fist of the BCK forum advises us to tune into Rage (ABC) on Saturday night, 4 September, because they're gonna hit us with an avalanche of Jonze, Gondry and Chris Cunningham music videos, in anticipation of the Directors' DVD release out here. Set your VCRs. If you're half as excited as I am, I'm twice as excited as you.
20/7/04 - What is it about body hair? Indeed, indeed. Human Nature gets a mention, yo. Thanks to Read for the link.
6/6/04 - Oh oh oh. I keep forgetting to mention that the Director Series Region 4 DVDs (Australia etc.) were finally released a month or so ago - you know, the work of Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and Chris Cunningham.
29/10/03 - The Work of Director Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry DVDs are released today. You can grab them via the BCK store.
15/10/03 - Director File has info on the upcoming Work of Michel Gondry DVD, including the disc's official music vid track list. It comes out on the same day as the Spike Jonze DVD. You can pre-order both via the BCK store.
23/8/03 - Fiiiiinally saw Human Nature last night, braced for the worst, and you know what? I didn't think it sucked. Michel Gondry did a better job than I expected. With the hits he took from various reviewers, I figured it must've been really over-directed. But I thought it was okay. The film as a whole probably hit a lower target than its creators were aiming for, and its not as dense as Charlie's other work. Putting that aside and judging the film on its own merits, I thought it was okay. Not great, not particularly insightful, nothing earth-shattering - and definitely Charlie's weakest script - but certainly not horrible. Tim Robbins looked uncomfortable in his role. Arquette was good and rather brave (that is, "brave" in the cinematic sense, as opposed to "brave" in the sense of firefighters and war vets). Bottom line is I'm a little less worried about Gondry and Eternal Sunshine than I have been. Everyone's expectations were ultra-high after Malkovich (except for my own, for reasons I've gone into ad infinitum). If Nature had been scripted by someone else but otherwise remained 100% identical to the finished product, I wonder if it would've been reamed as much as it was.
18/8/03 - Another BCK Hero of the Day: Tavis, who's painstakingly transcribed the interview with Charlie Kaufman that appears in the Human Nature script book released by Newmarket. Hot diggety! Every so often I get an email from someone looking for that interview online. If you aren't already in the know, it's not a legit interview at all, but...
...a note-for-note parody of an interview that Paul Thomas Anderson had given for the back of the Magnolia screenplay book, published by the same company. It makes Anderson look like a self-absorbed imbecile. Without the end part where Kaufman goes into why it makes perfect sense to end the film with frogs falling from the sky, I can't imagine more than a few people would 'get it' at all.
(That description came from another fine fellow named Jason, back around June 14 last year.)
It's pretty damned funny. Huge thanks to Tavis for transcribing it. /me crosses off another item from the Wanted page.
The Newmarket book is available from the BCK shop. A percentage of each sale goes to BCK, the better to purchase more screenplays etc.
9/7/03 - Human Nature is out now on DVD in Australia, for rent only. It'll be available for sale on November 12. More info.
1/7/03 - Old, short preview of Human Nature scanned by WiLL.
16/5/03 - Monkey Business, a really interesting piece on Michel Gondry. He talks about Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine (please Michel, don't mess it up), as well as Spike Jonze.
7/5/03 - The first draft of the screenplay is now freely downloadable as a PDF. Clicky. Thanks to Anonymous for PDFing it. You'll need something like Acrobat Reader to view the file.
5/3/03 - A series of DVDs will be released around August, showcasing the early work of Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham - music videos and all that jazz. (Scroll down to the March 1 update.)
1/3/03 - For bargain-hunting Charlie fans, WiLL re-emerges with news that the Human Nature DVD is going for $9.99 if you can find a Blockbuster with it in stock. At least, that was the price when he bought it just the other day.
22/12/02 - Whoa, what the hell?! Apparently Human Nature opens December 26 in Sydney, Australia. Just found this out tonight, go figure. Shows you how much publicity it's been getting out here. On Jan 16 it will hit Melbourne and Brisbane. I'm guessing it won't be screening in too many theatres, and the length of its run will be extremely limited. So check your local guides for info, and be quick about it.
18/12/02 - According to this article in The West, an Aussie newspaper, the film will finally see release in Australia around April 2003.
13/11/02 - Added an old article, (KAUFMAN sweats), in which Charlie talks about not only the film, but also his past and future. And kJ has sent in a neato Human Nature wallpaper.
5/11/02 - Added a couple of images to the gallery.
24/10/02 GiantSloar brings word that Human Nature is currently slated for release on DVD in the States on Dec. 10. Here is Amazon's listing for the film. (For some reason, direct links to entries on Amazon sometimes get re-directed to their home page, so you may need to go find the film's listing yourself.)
16/8/02 - I finally read the script's first draft. It was okay but not brilliant. Read the "I Say" bit just above for a little tiny bit more info.
3/8/02 - Two newly-discovered articles and a review. First article's called Patricia Arquette Bares All, and includes absolutely no images of Patricia baring all. Swear to God, you wouldn't believe how many hits this page you're on now gets from perverty types looking for nude images of Hillary Duff or Patricia. THEY'RE NOT HERE, SO GO AWAY!! SPREAD THE WORD TO YOUR FRIENDS! SERIOUSLY!! Ahem. Second article is At the Human Nature Press Junket, an amazingly pointless piece of "journalism" by a stunningly under-prepared Marcy Dermansky, who with a gossip columnist and a college student "interviews" (I use the term loosely) Charlie, Gondry, Arquette, Robbins and Rosie Perez. I suppose it's worth reading for fun, and for the fact that Charlie reveals he doesn't go to the movies any more because he no longer has a passion for watching them. The review is by Dermansky's colleague at About.com, Jurgen Fauth. He gave the film one star (out of five).
30/7/02 - Got my copy of the Human Nature script (1st draft - i.e not the shooting script released in book form by Newmarket) from Script Shack today, in the mail. It was all packaged securely and what-not. No cardboard covers, though - just a paper photocopy of the cardboard cover, if you can but dig it. It has "Patricia Arquette" handwritten across the front, so I guess it's a copy of her copy.
11/7/02 - Early this week I ordered my copy of the Human Nature screenplay (first draft - ie. not the shooting script released by Newmarket). Should have it in three or four weeks, I guess.
6/7/02 - Uploaded yet another interview with Charlie. It's from the round-table discussion Charlie had with journalists in LA while promoting the film (they all went off and wrote articles about it, and most of those are on this site), so there's nothing incredibly new.
29/6/02 - Found another article from around the time Human Nature came out. As well as the film, Charlie touches upon his desire to direct, and how he almost lost his mind writing Adaptation.
27/6/02 - Been meaning to mention this for aaages. The Human Nature soundtrack is now out. It includes a few tunes sung by Patricia Arquette, and a few written by Charlie, among other tracks. Evan emailed me about it months ago and said he was surprised to find it's one of his favourite CDs this year. Here's Amazon's entry for the disc.
20/6/02 - Found another interview with Charlie, from an April edition of Nureel. Clunky grammar and questionable typing in parts, and no big revelations, but still worth a peek.
14/6/02 - Okay, the mystery of the supposed interview with Charlie in the Newmarket Human Nature shooting script has been solved by Jason.
I was leafing through the book at a shop in NYC and turned to the interview - the first thing I noticed was that the picture accompanying it was most certainly not Charlie Kaufman. I think. And then I read it - I've read a handful of interviews with him before and right away could tell that this was not him. Every other line is "f*** this" or "that motherf***er" and he's talking very bluntly about his inspirations in a way that seemed really, really odd. And then it goes into his relationship with Mercedes Ruehl...and at the point where he was talking about how he'd been listening to a lot of Bonnie Raitt when he wrote it and that Bonnie Raitt was a big inspiration to him and it made perfect sense to have all of the characters start singing a Bonnie Raitt song, it dawned on me that I was holding in my hands a note-for-note parody of an interview that Paul Thomas Anderson had given for the back of the Magnolia screenplay book, published by the same company. It's absolutely hysterical and brilliant, not to mention the fact that it makes Anderson look like a self-absorbed imbecile. Without the end part where Kaufman goes into why it makes perfect sense to end the film with frogs falling from the sky, I can't imagine more than a few people would "get it" at all. Pretty brilliant stuff.
Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. You big kidder, you.
8/6/02 - Here's a brief interview with Charlie Kaufman about Human Nature. It's by Sam Adams at the Philadelphia City Paper. As mentioned elsewhere on this page, the Human Nature shooting script was released in book form by Newmarket. Supposedly the book includes an intro by Charlie. But in this interview there's a quote that goes:
The “interview” with Kaufman in the back of Human Nature’s published screenplay is, it turns out, actually a barely modified interview with Paul Thomas Anderson (complete with photo), with the name of Anderson’s then-paramour Fiona Apple replaced with that of Kaufman’s presumably never-paramour Mercedes Ruehl.
What does this mean? There's no intro by Charlie - just an interview? And the interview is actually with Paul Thomas Anderson, but with the names changed? WTF? I don't own the book so I can't shed any light.
7/6/02 - Update 2: Brief article here, with a couple of comments from Charlie. It's followed by a longer article about Patricia Arquette. The Human Nature shooting script from Newmarket is now available for sale from Amazon and other book stores. I read something odd about that, but I'll talk about it tomorrow. Update 1: Dug up two interviews, both from About.com. First one's with Patricia Arquette, second one's with Rhys Ifans. Also added a couple of pics to the gallery, but no pictures you haven't already seen in one article or another.
23/5/02 - Two drafts of the script (May '95 and August '99) are now available from Script Shack. $15US each, plus postage. Remember the filmed version of Malkovich was nothing like that script's first draft - if you ask me the first draft was a LOT better. So even if you found Nature ho-hum, it might be worth your while to check out the '95 script if you're a major Kaufman fan. I haven't read it yet (or seen the film) so I can't tell you how it compares to the movie.
15/5/02 - Interview with Arquette and Gondry here. It's from April 9. The interviewer is David O. Russell, writer-director of Spanking the Monkey, Flirting With Disaster and Three Kings. Again, nothing spectacular but worth a peruse anyways.
2/5/02 - Short interview with Charlie can be found here. Nothing spectacular but interesting nonetheless.
23/4/02 - Mary Dang from UCLA's Daily Bruin gives Human Nature the big four paws! Many thanks to Tristan for the heads up.
20/4/02 - Couple more pics. Here's a foreign Human Nature poster. Could be German, I don't know. And here's a photo of Michel Gondry getting ready to perform karate on a misbehaving cast member.
18/4/02 - Colin Covert from the Star Tribune interviews Charlie and steals my site's title. But that's okay, cos it's a pretty good interview. Madblast have an exclusive, The Making of 'Human Nature'. You'd think it'd be a really long, in-depth piece about the struggle to get the film written and made, but no. It's a fairly short piece with a few comments from Charlie and Michel. Still worth checking out, though.
16/4/02 - Filmmaker Magazine interviews Michel Gondry. And just one review today. Thank God. I'm about done with those. Matinee Mag's Joe McGovern doesn't hold back. I reckon we have enough reviews now, hey? Help me out and see if you can find more interviews with the cast and crew. Particularly that mysterious Charlie dude. Email me if you come across anything useful.
15/4/02 - Couple of new pics in the Human Nature gallery.
Charlie and Patricia Arquette both talk to Nerve.
"I'm satisfied with [the movie]. But I'm not that attached to the result," Charlie tells the Press Democrat.
The Cranky critic wasn't too fussed over Human Nature.
Walter Chaw from Film Freak Central pretty much hated it.
Kit Bowen from Hollywood.com gives it two stars.
A.O. Scott from the New York Times thought it should have been better.
Ed Blank from PittsburghLIVE.com gives it two stars.
Salon's Andrew O'Hehir found the film too ambivalent.
Bizarre without being clever says the Arizona Republic's Bill Muller.
14/4/02 - Interviews: Wild Things: Michel Gondry's Human Nature - Holly Willis' feature article on Human Nature and the folks behind it.
The Inner Depths of Human Nature - USC's Brett Buckalew talks to Kaufman, Gondry and Arquette.
From an Untamed Mind Springs an Ape Man - the New York Times talks to and about Michel Gondry about Human Nature.
Reviews: Proving that a unanimous verdict on this film is just not gonna happen, Colin Covert from the Star Tribune gives it an almighty 4 stars out of 4.
Access Atlana's Eleanor Gillespie gives Human Nature a C+.
Trying Too Hard Is One Facet of 'Human Nature', so says John Anderson.
The Sun Times' Roger Ebert gives the movie 3 stars.
"An aggressive mix of smart and stupid" - Chris Vognar from the Dallas Morning News.
"It’s impossible to have a love-hate relationship with “Human Nature.” You either go for its goofs or you don’t" - that comment from MSNBC's David Elliot pretty much sums up the feedback Human Nature's been generating. (Beware of the four hundred pop-up ads, though.)
Houston Chronicle's Eric Harrison gives it a C+.
"Kaufman doesn't approach the brilliance of "Being John Malkovich" here, but he confirms his promise as a writer with very imaginative notions". That's from the Christian Science Monitor's film critic David Sterritt.
Metroactive's Richard von Busack thought it was okay, but ultimately unsatisfying.
Chicago Tribune's Michael Wilmington gives it two stars.
12/4/02 - Whoa, heaps of stuff today. Still more reviews plus brand spanking new interviews with none other than our pal Charlie. Ex-cell-ent, to quote Monty Burns.
Interviews:
Charlie Kaufman au Naturel - Reel.com
An Interview With Charlie Kaufman - IGN FilmForce
Being Charlie Kaufman - San Francisco Examiner
Being Charlie Kaufman - Town Online
(These people! They steal my ideas! Anyway...)
Five Questions With Patricia Arquette - Associated Press
Not Quite Human: Michel Gondry Makes The Leap To Features With "Human Nature"
- indieWIRE
'Malkovich' writer's head has no simple portal - Seattle Times
Reviews:
Chris Faile from The Trades gives Human Nature a C+
IGN FilmForce gives it 3/5
Associated Press' Tim Molloy gives it 3/4
The Village Voice's J. Hoberman absolutely hated it
Yannick from Filmdeculte really really enjoyed it.
Daily Herald's Eric Snider found it daft and surreal but not quite as funny as Malkovich.
Vicki Glass from Tokyo Q not only thought the movie was ho-hum, she also gives a huge spoiler about the ending with no warning whatsoever.
11/4/02 - Two more reviews. First one's from the Asahi Shimbun News Service, and they liked the film; second one's from Newsweek and they liked it too.
9/4/02 - Added two more images to the Human Nature image gallery, plus a larger version of one pic.
8/4/02 - And still more reviews. Ron Wells from FilmThreat, John Popick at Planet Sick Boy and Ross Anthony's Hollywood Report Card.
7/4/02 - Four new reviews of the film today, plus an image of Rhys and Miranda (check the Human Nature gallery).
6/4/02 - The Official site has been jazzed up and now has a nifty navigation system and fully-functioning clickables - cast and crew details, info abou the film, all the standard Official Movie Site stuff. Unfortunately the trailer there, like the one at Apple, has to load up via your browser - you can't do a "Save Target As." (Or "Save Link As.") Bastards.
4/4/02 - Newmarket Press will be releasing the Human Nature shooting script in April or May. (It says April on their site, but May on Amazon. I'd put my money on May.) The book will include a preface by director Michel Gondry and an introduction by none other than Charlie Kaufman. Click here for more details, and on the Amazon link above. The book's cover is up above.
31/3/02 - Here's the new Human Nature poster, found at Empire Movies. (Not to be confused with the French poster.) And the full US trailer is now available for download here.
30/3/02 - Zap2It has reviewed the movie. Click to read.
28/3/02 - The official USA site is now up but not exactly running. It's just one page right now, and nothing to do. But keep an eye on it because I guess they'll be adding stuff shortly. Go to www.humannaturemovie.com/. My oh my, looks like this thing's finally going to be released. Will it remain true to Charlie's vision? Will it lose something in its tranformation to the big-screen? Will I ever get a publishing deal? Only time will tell, only time will tell.
18/2/02 - Screenwriter's Utopia confirms that Human Nature is still all systems go for April 2002. Click for the extended remix.
14/1/02 - I've been finding a bunch of reviews of the movie, mostly by folks who've seen it at film festivals. Check links above.
19/12/01 - I was a little worried about why they might keep pushing this movie back, but now reports are filtering in from people who've seen the movie, so I'm guessing it will finally be released on a wider scale within the next few months, especially since there's now an official site.
