Being John Malkovich (Criterion), a devastatingly funny portrait of unhappiness, desperation, desire, and the vicious things we do for love, catapulted Spike Jonze from music video wunderkind to visionary director and Charlie Kaufman from sitcom scribe to brilliant screenwriter. In 1999 it was fresh and daring and inventive, and more than ten years later, in the age of reality TV and celebrity obsession gone viral, it is as timely and topical as ever, and just as inventive, surprising, devastating, and compassionate.

John Cusack stars as a shaggy, self-important only marionette artist who takes a  break from the angst-ridden wish fulfillment fantasies of his puppet theater to get a paying job and becomes obsessed with an acerbic woman (Catherine Keener) in the office next door. The fact that he’s married (to an improbably dowdy Cameron Diaz in a dowdy frizz) doesn’t phase his flailing attempts at seduction.

The mundane and the miraculous exist side by side in “Being John Malkovich.” The half-scale size of the 7 ½ floor is groaner of a pun (“low overhead,” get it?) turned deadpan surreal sight gag, and when Cusack stumbles into the weirdly organic portal that sends him into the mind of John Malkovich (played with exceedingly good humor by John Malkovich), the metaphysical implication pale beside the business opportunities.

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This is the week of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (Summit), which is such an event that it gets its own release date: Saturday, December 4, with discs going on sale at 12:01am at select retailers. Expect Friday midnight release parties. I’m pretty cool to the cult of Twilight but this entry is an improvement over the insufferable second film. I reviewed it for MSN here. My colleagues at MSN reviewed Going the Distance (Warner) and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Disney) so I didn’t have to, and I review Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool on my blog here.

Just another day in the life of a super spy

Knight and Day (Fox) – Tom Cruise plays to his strengths in this colorful spy fantasy, bouncing through as an unfailingly polite boy scout of a covert agent with a smooth-talking charm and ninja spy skills, and Cameron Diaz is the beautiful civilian who gets tangled up in his latest mission. Cruise’s Miller is a rogue CIA operative on a mission of honor, but his quest to rid the agency of the rot of corruption comes with a pretty high body count and the viewer just has to accept that every guy following orders to take him down is infected by the same rot to roll with the moral imperative that makes his actions all right.

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