Word: malkovich
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...This may be a poor metaphor - a touch on the heavy-handed side - but I think it evokes the sheer strangeness of watching Being John Malkovich, perhaps the oddest romp of a movie I have ever seen. It is a comedy about getting inside other people's heads, and it has the kick of a head trip, which is a clich even though the film is not. This film will polarize people. There will be many people who will hate this film as much as they have ever hated anything, who will break off relationships with dates who dare...
...greatest toy the movie has to play with is the participation of real-life actor John Malkovich, playing himself with perversity and panache. The film brings him into the plot with characteristic audacity; Cusack discovers a secret door at work that leads directly into the inside of Malkovich's brain. He becomes famous Malkovich for fifteen minutes (get it?), and is then spit out onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. It is to the film's credit that this bizarre, supernatural turn of events doesn't jar the logical tone of the movie at all. Getting inside Malkovich...
...Still, it must be said, John Horatio Malkovich quickly becomes the heart of the film. We see the world through his eyes, and feel a little bit of the charge the characters get from experiencing real life in Malkovich's brain. The camera-eye gimmick goes on just long enough that we don't think that we'll really get to see John Malkovich himself, until all of a sudden he enters as another insane player in this mad roundelay. He all but overwhelms the movie with the question mark of his celebrity and the eerie charisma...
...Simply put, Malkovich is no agreeable Tom Cruise heartthrob. John Malkovich is, fundamentally, creepy. (This isn't just my opinion; I have taken a poll of eight people, and seven agree. The eighth has a crush on him.) John Malkovich doesn't have any of the usual qualities of Hollywood stardom - the symmetrical, chiseled looks, the measured voice, the stolid evenness. Malkovich is bizarre by comparison, with beady eyes at inappropriate moments and a sneer of a voice which sounds more like somebody choking than talking. You can imagine this movie being born out of a stoned conversation about...
...This surrealistic feat, finally, is what the film comes to explore. Malkovich's is the performance of a brave oddball genius; he plays himself as an effete, monstrous perv, the perfect centerpiece for a film about the insanity of pretension. First-time director Spike Jonze, a longtime music video artiste, has filmed it with collaborator Lance Acord to underplay the fantastic elements of the storyline and accentuate the dirty realness of the images; the plot is deeply surreal, but the setting is today's world, crazy as it actually...