While “Robots” is not one of my favorite films, it certainly guided me to some that are, like “Coraline” (2009) and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004). That film helped me realize it was OK to love stereotypical masculine toys and playsets, and helped me cement my taste in film as I grew older. The first film I remember seeing in theaters was the 2005 animation film, “Robots.” At the tender age of six, I grew more invested in different forms of art, such as film and television. Nothing could tear me apart from my creativity. Books, glitter paper, cereal boxes - even erasers. And Buckley is impeccably cast as the young woman adrift in a bad dream someone else is having.When I was a child, I would take anything I could get my hands on. Plemons stolidly occupies the role of Jake – it is the kind of role that the late Philip Seymour Hoffman (star of Kaufman’s masterpiece, Synecdoche, New York) might also have played. Not that Jake has ever achieved anything of the sort, then or now. But perhaps it is more that for many (or maybe even everyone) high school felt shatteringly real in a way that nothing else would, and success there really does feel as good as winning the Nobel prize. It is a place where Jake seems to have picked up an uncool fondness for musicals and Broadway show tunes, and Kaufman imagines a kind of fantasy dance sequence for Jake and his new girlfriend in the corridors of the school. The couple’s road trip also features a long and rather bad-tempered discussion of the film A Woman Under the Influence by John Cassavetes, although the directors that have surely influenced I’m Thinking of Ending Things, such as Buñuel and Lynch, go unmentioned.Īnd what does it all mean? Kaufman is content to swirl away from actual revelations, but his evocation of high-school life occupies the position where in any other kind of fiction an explanation might go. Are we supposed to look down on Zemeckis, therefore? Not necessarily. He has a digression-daydream featuring a made-up romcom directed by Robert Zemeckis. You can spend up to an hour wondering uneasily when this film is going to start, while also realising that you have been on the edge of your seat.Īs ever, Kaufman shores up his world with pop-culture fragments. This film happens to be coming out right on top of Kaufman’s other new work – an epically bizarre autofictional novel called Antkind – and there are points in common, namely, Kaufman’s extraordinary, compulsive way of creating an alternative world of loneliness and sadness, accumulating tension and anxiety and suppressed panic minute by minute. Who is this woman? Who is Jake? Who is the janitor? It’s an arresting drama, although I was sorry that straight-up comedy (which Kaufman can really do) played little part. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is adapted by Kaufman from the novel by Canadian author Iain Reid and it’s really scary in a way that conventional scary movies really aren’t scary: insidiously disquieting and yet also somehow poignant and sad, a secondary mood that finally, inexplicably emerges from an unending rhapsody of directionless weirdness. Mary Cybulski/NETFLIX © 2020 Photograph: Mary Cybulski/NETFLIX Jesse Plemons as Jake, Jessie Buckley as Young Woman, Toni Collette as Mother, David Thewlis as Father in Im Thinking Of Ending Things.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |