You’d be hard pressed to find a more startling or complete debut in the past twenty years than Spike Jonze’s absurdly brilliant, Being John Malkovich. With a premise almost too perfect to be real and a razor-sharp script to match it is one of the last modern classics of the ‘90s. It’s an intricately structured and surreal masterpiece full of existential melancholy and offbeat whimsy.
It is the synthesis of two creative forces (Jonze and screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman) working in perfect harmony to create a work that was quite unlike anything else at the time. In lesser hands it would have been little more than a failed experiment with a bizarre synopsis but this is a dense, provocative, witty and…