Avoid this movie, it's not worth the intellectual investment

Rating: Null/10 (17 July 2002)

Listening to a drunk's account of his mishaps out on the town the previous night is a lot more fun than actually watching him do it.
"Being John Malkovich" should have been a 10-20 minute short, a skit on SNL or something along those lines. It has an interesting premise but not much else. There's a lot of cool individual stuff not seen in other movies but it doesn't add up to anything, really, least of all a decent movie.
To learn that Spike Jonze was, and presumably still is, a music video director didn't surprise me at all. He knows how to work a camera, set up shots and make stylish, good-looking stuff but in a feature film one needs a lot more than that. I love the Beastie Boys, Beck and Daft Punk videos as much as the next guy but there Jonze has the advantage of being able to simply throw a lot of cool, unusual things on screen without having to tie it up into anything remotely coherent. He tried the same approach here, with the result being pretty weak in my opinion.
To hear this movie be lauded with compliments such as 'daring', 'thought provoking' and 'visionary' is very laughter inducing, I must admit. What thoughts other than 'get me outta this theatre' did this mess provoke? I'd really like to know.
To summarize, "Being John Malkovich" is original, unusual and visually good but, more importantly, it is also messy, annoying and not deep enough in story and characters to support a 2 hour movie around this one single idea.