Being John Malkovich (M)
Director: Spike Jonze
Bug rating: 4/5

Mind your step

John Malkovich's career may very well lie in ruins as you read this review.
By his own hand, mind, one of American's leading screen and stage actors has been typecast for ever.
Gifted as he so clearly is, the man who barely raised a sweat playing a blind man on old Sally Field's farm, a French dandy doodling on Uma Thurman's perfect arse, a pathological president killer, a really bald guy – whatever – is doomed forever following his appearance in Being John Malkovich.
For years to come, strangers are going to go up to him in swank restaurants and say: "Aren't you John Malkovich, the guy who played John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich?"
And John Malkovich will seal his fate in that soft, almost gay voice of his by saying: "Yes, I am. Would you like one of our autographs?"
Really, what was John Malkovich thinking, playing John Malkovich?
Picture this inner city cafe scene:
Person one (sipping an over-priced cafe lately): "What did you think of John Malkovich's depiction of John Malkovich?"
Friend (sipping thoughtfully): I though it was very Malkovichesque!" (Both sip in unison, nodding wisely).
So, what do we learn about John Malkovich when John Malkovich plays him in Being John Malkovich?
Well, there's a dream sequence towards the end of Being John Malkovich when a couple of good looking women played by Cameron Diaz and the seriously sexy Catherine Keener are romping through his subconscious and this tells us a fair bit about the actor.
Personally, I think I could cope with Cameron Diaz and Catherine Keener giving me a simultaneous head job, but all we see of Malkovich is vignettes of a troubled life: peeing himself in a school bus as a bullied child, unhappy schoolroom memories, that of a lonely child, a young man sniffing ladies underwear. Okay, maybe he's not all that weird.
Which is more than can be said for Being John Malkovich.
They don't come much weirder than a story of an unfilled and frustrated puppeteer, Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) who takes a filing clerk's job and makes a chance discovery of a hidden portal into the famous actor's brain.
Being John Malkovich – the experience, not the movie – lasts about 15 minutes, and then you're spat back out onto an overgrown embankment beside a New Jersey turnpike. Don't ask, okay.
Craig gets the understandable hots for his mysterious co-worker at Lester Corp, Maxine (Keener) but sadly he's got more chance of getting into Malkovich's head than her pants.
Which he desperately wants to do, because he's human, after all, and his homelife is not that crash hot.
His wife works at a vet's clinic and their crowded apartment is always full of mended animals that are obliviously making intimacy a little difficult.
The wife tries to save the marriage by saying: "You know, a lot of people reckon that when I take off this dark brown wig and frumpy clothing, I look a lot like Cameron Diaz." Craig looks at her and says: "Yeah, right," and keeps fantasising about Maxine.
Personally, Craig needs a new glasses prescription; trying to hide Diaz's beauty under a wig and some frumpy clothes is akin to trying to cover the Pacific Ocean with a tarpaulin.
Poor Craig. Cool Maxine gets the carnal hots for his misses. She seduces Malkovich, which proves an almighty turn-on only because Mrs Schwaltz is in John's head at the time. Mrs Schwartz gets such jollies out of it, too, that she tells Craig she needs a sexual realignment.
Craig gets even with both women by getting into John's head and getting it off with Maxine who thinks she's getting it off with the missus. Gosh, I hope Malkovich's is having at least a little bit of fun throughout this.
The wacky screenplay by Charlie Kaufman is a perfect vehicle to say something about the status of celebrity, about our desire to be someone else; about fulfilling our carnal ambitions, perhaps even a tilt at immortality. These are interesting mind games about who we are sexually, and who we really want to be with, and the conundrums facing people when they spend time inside the only sex organ that matters in the opposite gender.
Being John Malkovich is seriously weird, but does that automatically mean wonderful.
The answer with Being John Malkovich is: almost!
Don't get us wrong here. Being John Malkovich, when it's in full flight, displays more zing and zest that half of the 1999 crop of cinema crap could boast collectively.
The concept of a shrunken workplace between floors is a rib-tickler in itself. Add to that the delights of the travels into John Malkovich's mind by our mismatched odd couple; the visually brilliant depiction of what happens when Malkovich takes the trip into his own mind; Malkovich's new career as a puppeteer when Craig works out how to stay in the actor's head for a long time to virtually put his life on a string and act out his own frustrated ambitions.
Perhaps it was brain overload, but Being John Malkovich reaches a point where you can almost get inside Kaufman's head and hear him thinking: "How the fuck do I end this?"
Consequently, there's a messy and rather illogical sequence towards the end – and that's saying something, all things considered – where Craig's boss plans to take over John Malkovich's brain with a dozen or so other old foggies.
It takes a bug off a film that is streets ahead of most of the crap that was touted as passable entertainment over the past 12 months.

Bowfinger (M)
Bug rating: 2 out of 5

Bowfinger is a movie in two parts – the unfunny part and the not quite as unfunny part.
The unfunny part comes first, which might ruin the movie for many people, even Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin fans.
Come to think of it, the not quite as unfunny part isn't all that not quite as unfunny really, considering most of the laughs come when Murphy is playing a simple-simon version of himself.
This reviewer has also been a big fan of Steve Martin's film career and remains so. But he'd better do something really good really quickly to cover up this blunder, seeing he wrote it as well.
Bowfinger is based on a sound enough concept – a wanna be/never-was movie director can get the funding for the chance of a lifetime project but only if Hollywood's hottest star (Murphy) is in it.
The hot-shot star says no so Martin shoots the film without Murphy knowing he's in it.
Murphy's got mental problems of his own without being the unwitting participant in a shocker of a movie entitled Chubby Rain, the story of alien takeover.
The very fact that Martin thinks the script is a one in a million, sure-fire success shows that on the surface at least, Bowfinger should have been a suitable enough vehicle to have some laughs at tinseltown's expense.
But Bowfinger is as slow as a wet week for the first half, and only gets a move-on - via some slapstick and nutty visuals - as the motley film crew shoot the movie around an increasingly paranoid Murphy.
Murphy's role as the unhinged black star who thinks the whole word is racist - and his dimwitted brother - is the best he's had for some time.
But Martin's role is so subdued you cry out for the emergence of the wild and crazy guy.