Tulsa, Okla.—Friends of David Krause say they’ve reached the end of their rope. A week after watching the movie “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”, directed by the acclaimed Charlie Kaufman, Krause has talked about little else.
“He’s always been OCD, but this is something else,” friend Lucy Torres said. “We IMed about it for at least an hour yesterday. This was after he talked forever while I was supposed to be writing a paper for our quantum physics class.”
The movie, like many of Kaufman’s previous work, distorts time and reality. It is the story of a young woman who meets Jake, agrees to drive through a snowstorm to meet Jake’s parents, the parents change age and station in life while the younger people remain the same, and there’s a janitor who really likes the musical “Oklahoma” and an animated pig infested with maggots.
“This is way worse than when he watched ‘Being John Malkovich’,” said friend Iain Reid of another mind-bending Kaufman film. “I watched this one with him, and it was torture. He’d seen it, like, a hundred times by then and he kept pausing and rewinding and saying ‘Oh, look how her sweater changed,’ and ‘That speech was taken from a novel that was on the bookshelf.’ It took 10 hours.”
Krause, who declined an interview for this story, responded to an email with: “There is just one question. One question to answer.”
“That’s a line from the movie,” Torres, the poet, said. “He just keeps repeating himself.”
In a pivotal scene late in the movie, Jake is revealed not to be an accolade-earning physicist but an overworked newspaper reporter who can’t find love.
“That’s not in the movie,” Louisa Torres said. “Wait, my name is Lucy…and I’m a grad student earning my masters in physics, not a poet.”
Would you like to go out for ice cream sometime? I know a place that’s open late.
“Are you asking me on a date? Is this not really a newspaper article?” Amy Torres said after telling the writer he was cute. “I didn’t say that! Hold on, are you thinking of ending this article? If you do will I exist? Wait! I got it. You’re really Charlie Kaufman? I can’t wait to tell David.”
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