Also in Tuesday morning's round-up of news briefs, Charlie Kaufman has turned to crowd funding (seemingly quite successfully) for a stop motion animation project. Richard Gere's Arbitrage is set to open a Middle Eastern film festival. And Park Chan-wook is set to direct a Corsican mafia story.
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The ever-expanding Crowdsource Era has a new milestone: Charlie Kaufman needs $200,000 to help make a 40-minute stop-motion animated film called Anomalisa, and he's inviting exiled Community creator Dan Harmon — and you — along to help.
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Bad news, Charlie Kaufman fans: While some cast members had been hopeful in recent months that Frank or Francis would move ahead, Elizabeth Banks (doing the press rounds for People Like Us) spilled news to the contrary.
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The Film: Being John Malkovich (1999), available today on Blu-ray and DVD via The Criterion Collection
Why It’s an Inessential Essential: It’s strange to think that a film with John Malkovich’s name in its title isn’t really considered to be “a John Malkovich movie.” Instead, Being John Malkovich is understandably normally associated with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze, both of whom really broke out thanks to BJM’s success. While Jonze reveals on The Criterion Collection’s new audio commentary track that he and Kaufman were dead-set on getting Malkovich for the film, Being John Malkovich could really be about any celebrity. At the same time, that’s one of the many things that’s funny about Being John Malkovich: It’s a metaphysical black comedy about what people projecting things onto celebrities that don’t necessarily have anything to do with those celebrities.
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