Charlie Kaufman
November 24, 2008
Some people just don’t fit the formula. But then the formula seems somewhat antithetical to what Charlie Kaufman does. As a screenwriter, he is best known for his two mind-bending collaborations with director Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation (2002), and another pair of colorfully inventive films with director Michel Gondry, Human Nature (2001) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). But the 50-year-old Kaufman seems to have saved his trippiest project for himself: His directorial debut, the recently released Synecdoche, New York, stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theater director whose autonomic functions are, one by one, beginning to shut down as he contends with both his cast and the women in his life, and as he struggles to build a life-size replica of Manhattan as part of his new play.
Mike Kelley
November 24, 2008
We all have things wiped from our memories. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes not. But Mike Kelley’s sculptures and installations are impossible to forget-he challenges what we see and how we see it. He plumbs the depths of childhood, repressed memory, psychoanalysis, and pop mythos-but that’s just the starting point for an individual speculative universe where things make startling, weird sense.