Saturday 18 October 2008

Being John Malkovich [1999]


Spike Jonze’s remarkable directorial debut, Being John Malkovich, would rank among the most irreverent, whimsical and weird movies of recent years, along with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and could easily be clubbed along with such classics as 8 ½ - movies which revel in deliberately distorting human perception to incredible levels, and achieve a surreal impact in the process. Parallels to such movies in literature would be nonsense verses of Louis Carroll and Sukumar Ray. John Cusack (I hardly remember having ever seen a bad movie starring him) is exceptional as a semi-crazy puppeteer, who along with a fellow employee (he’s thoroughly smitten with) of the seventh and half floor of the building he’s working at, chance upon a portal that leads to the mind of John Malkovich (played by Malkovich himself with astonishing quirkiness). In fact every actor has done commendable jobs here, including Cameron Diaz (in a weird hairdo) as Cusack’s wife confused with her sexuality. Charlie Kauffman’s brilliant, heavily satirical and absolutely bonkers of a script, with subtle injections of pathos, humanism and existentialism, is a near flawless work on absurdism.









Director: Spike Jonze
Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Fantasy/Existentialist Drama/Avant-Garde/Experimental
Language: English
Country: US

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