Ants In Your Plants Of 2020

I just finished screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's novel Antkind.  That's an accomplishment itself--it's over 700 pages. I don't have the time (with a blog template that fights against me) for a full-fledged review, so here are just a few observations.

The basic plot is about a pretentious, politically correct, sexually frustrated, not particularly successful film critic (loves Judd Apatow, hates Charlie Kaufman) who travels to St. Augustine on an assignment.  There he meets an ancient black man who shows him a stop-motion movie he's been working on all his life. Indeed, it takes three months to watch the film (no one else has ever seen it), and the filmmaker dies during this period.  The critic believes his fortune is made.  He'll truck this masterpiece back to New York and build a career around it.

Unfortunately, the film catches on fire on the way back, and much of the novel deals with the critic's attempts to recreate the film in his memory, especially with the help of hypnosis.

There are a lot of side-stories in the novel--the critic's obsessions with various women, the recounting of several plots within the three-month film (I especially liked the stuff regarding the fictional comedy team of Mudd and Molloy), mockery of Donald Trump, the end of the world and so on.  Really there are enough stories here, some quite imaginative, to make five or ten films (all with the themes we've seen before in Kaufman's cinematic oeuvre).

However, the story goes on an on without really going anywhere.  There's nothing cumulative about it.  And though we've got an unreliable (and obnoxious) narrator, it hardly matters, since the story is already surrealism verging on fantasy.

Still, a smart book with some nice gags.  What Kaufman needed most was an editor.