Well, here's a film I've been curious about strictly on a title basis... Oh... and it's got John Cusack, which immediately gets my attention. And then there is... CAMERON DIAZ (breathe in breathe out) But we haven't been hearing too much on this film before now, and it's time to change that flow of info.... So Flynn here is gonna put on the first wave of changing that, and if you've seen it, I'd like to hear from you too. Smaller films like this need all the word they can get. You don't really think there'll be a major studio push for this one do ya? We'll see...

Hey Harry. Long time listener, first time caller….I noticed that you didn’t have Being John Malkovich on the list of projects you’re working on. I saw this film a couple of weeks ago and imagine it is something you’d definitely be interested in, so I thought I’d share my valuable insight with you. I saw it at a screening room in Beverly Hills with what looked like an even mix of recruits and studio mucky mucks. It was definitely a rough cut and we were given all the standard warnings about sound and color, etc.

It’s really a strange one. Definitely out there. Actually, “out there” doesn’t even come close to describing it. It so strange that it makes Repo Man look like an episode of the Love Boat. It’s a fairly complicated story, so pardon me if my summary seems a bit long: It’s about a puppeteer, played by John Cusack, who can’t get his puppeteering career going, so he has to take a day job as a file clerk on the seventh and a half floor of a building. After he’s been there a little while, he discovers a portal behind a file drawer. Out of curiosity, he crawls into the portal and it whisks him into the brain of John Malkovich (played by – you guessed it – John Malkovich). For fifteen minutes he gets to view the world through Malkovich’s eyes, and then he’s dumped into a ditch by the side of the freeway. He tells his co-worker, on whom he has a secret crush (she’s played by Kathryn Keener – Cage’s wife in 8mm). She figures that they can turn this thing into a money making venture so they take out an ad in the newspaper and start charging fat people and losers a couple hundred bucks for the chance to be John Malkovich for 15 minutes.

Complications ensue when Cusack’s wife (played by Cameron Diaz) also begins to fall in love with the Kathryn Keener character. She and Keener begin arranging rendezvous’ where Keener will hook up with John Malkovich just as Diaz goes into the portal. When Cusack finds out about it, he flips out and locks Diaz in a monkey cage (Diaz keeps a whole menagerie of animals at their apartment) and goes into Malkovich, pretending to be Diaz. (I.e. Keener is having an affair with John Malkovich, thinking that Malkovich is being inhabited by Cameron Diaz, when in fact it’s really John Cusack in there – I told you it was weird.) Anyway, Diaz’s monkey helps her escape and she tells Keener the truth. However, I guess Keener was so amazed by the sex that she doesn’t seem to mind. Simultaneously, Cusack figures out how to stay in Malkovich (he is a puppeteer after all) and how to control him – i.e. he actually becomes Malkovich. He uses Malkovich’s fame to become a famous puppeteer (although the rest of the world sees it as Malkovich taking a massive career change into puppetry), and he (as Malkovich) and Keener get married.

Meanwhile, Diaz hooks up with the guy who owned the filing company where the portal was located (who’s played by a very famous and recognizable character actor, who’s name I don’t happen to know). It turns out this guy is actually another portal, like Malkovich, and he has a bunch of people inside him. But his body is getting old and he and a bunch of his friends were waiting for the Malkovich portal to mature so they could enter it. Keener gets bored with Cusack and goes back to Diaz, and the old portal guy forces Cusack out of Malkovich by threatening to kill Keener. In the end, the old portal guy and his friends inhabit Malkovich, Keener and Diaz hook up, and Cusack tries to go back into Malkovich, but because the portal is already full, he becomes trapped in the next portal – Keener and Diaz’s daughter.

Did I mention this is a strange one? I really can’t imagine how the hell this movie ever got made. Beyond that, I really can’t imagine how they got John Malkovich to agree to be in it. All credit to him for having a sense of humor, as they’re constantly giving him crap – there’s one scene where he’s playing himself being inhabited by Cusack, and he has to say something like “shut up you overrated, balding moron” to himself.

It’s a pretty incredible movie, and definitely one that I will be seeing again if and when it ever comes out (and probably more than once), although it certainly has some flaws. Malkovich is amazing, playing a stuck up, self-absorbed caricature of himself, and then playing himself inhabited by Cusack. Cusack is also pretty great, going from his typical, loveable every man to an obsessive psycho. Keener is the only one I really had a problem with, but mostly because I didn’t really get her character a lot of the times. She’s kind of a cold, manipulative bitch at the beginning, but then later on it seems like we’re supposed to feel sorry for her (when she’s married to Malko-Cusack and is pining for Diaz), and I didn’t understand when the transition happened. In fact, I was half expecting her to get some kind of come-uppence at the end, but it never came. Diaz was fine, although she has the least to do of the leads. Interestingly, they really went out of their way to uglify her by putting her in a long, gross wig and giving her really bad skin – it could be that they were trying to counter any kind of “why go out for hamburger when you have prime rib at home” criticisms, as Cusack is supposed to be more interested in Keener than her (and in my opinion, it’s a huge stretch to imagine someone wanting Katherine Keener over Cameron Diaz).

What’s most funny about this film (written, by the way, by Charlie Kaufman, with whom I’m not familiar), are the strange little incidentals that are thrown in. For example, the office that Cusack works at is located on the seventh and a half floor of the building. To get there, they have to stop the elevator between the 7th and 8th floor and pry the doors open. And in all the scenes that take place there (quite a few) all the actors have to walk around stooped over, because it’s only a half floor. Another example: when Diaz is trapped in the monkey cage, she’s helped out by her monkey. But the monkey doesn’t just untie her, he first has a flashback to his childhood when his parents were captured and he couldn’t do anything about it. We see him re-live this childhood trauma and decide to face his fears, which results in him untying Diaz. And the funniest scene in the whole movie is when Malkovich finds out about the portal and goes in himself – I won’t tell you what happens, because it is just too strange for words, but I almost peed myself, I was laughing so hard.

Although there were no credits on the film, the IMDB reports that it was directed by Spike Jonze (which I think is correct, from what I’ve read in the trades). He’s a pretty cool music video director, but there’s really no flashy, music video type stuff in this film. In a lot of ways, it kind of looked like an indie film or a student film. It was really dark at times – so dark that it was hard to see exactly what was going on in some scenes -- although this was definitely an early screening, and that may be fixed before the final release. It’s definitely not shot like a studio comedy, in that the scenes weren’t put together to set up and pay off gags, or to emphasize the comedic situations. That’s a good thing, in my opinion – the material is so bizarre and so inherently funny that I think it would have ruined it in a lot of ways if they had tried to shove the jokes down your throat, like in an Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey movie. Still, though, it’s certainly going to make it that much harder to sell to a mainstream audience. In fact, given how bizarre this is to begin with and how non-traditionally it’s put together, I would venture to say that it might be almost impossible to sell it to a mainstream audience. It will be far better for them to just put this out there for the college crowd and let people who are into this kind of thing discover it. If they do that, I’m sure this is a film, like Repo Man, that we will all be talking about for decades to come. I tried to ask who was releasing it and when, but nobody would answer me and I don’t know if that was because they just weren’t telling, or because they didn’t know.

Flynn

"Because man... somewhere in all these... MEMORIES is the evidence!"