Charlie Kaufman, the intellectually scrupulous screenwriter/director behind enjoyably enigmatic films like, Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York , has a new movie centered around the thriving virus that plagues modern life, a subset of critical people fueled by anger, boredom and lack of attention—otherwise known as internet trolls.
Kaufman's new film, Frank Or Francis, will center around a self-aggrandizing film director (Steve Carrell) and a "blogger" (Jack Black) who gets his kicks by firing-off caustic criticism in the comment sections of movie websites.
Kaufamn says the movie delves into "online film criticism", and will focus on the negative emotions that thrive in the internet age. But, in typically Kaufman-fashion, the internet is not the movie's true subject and is only a stand-in for a larger concept:
"The world that I’m writing about is not necessarily the world that I’m writing about. It’s just a place to set it. There’s a lot in there about the internet and anger: cultural, societal and individual anger. And isolation in this particular age we live in. And competition: it’s about the idea of people in this world wanting to be seen".
Here at Complex, we're convinced there is a special circle in Dante's Inferno devoted to people who spend their days scouring the internet for grammatical errors and namelessly instigating, so we give the K-man props for using his pen to take a stab at this of-the-moment epidemic.
[Via AV Club andIndiewire]
