No./17 Battle of the meta-memoirs

From Jim Carrey and Charlie Kaufman, two new self-referential books that poke fun at Hollywood (and each other)

MEMOIRS AND MISINFORMATION JIM CARREY (AND DANA VACHON) ANTKIND CHARLIE KAUFMAN MOST SELF-LOATHING REFERENCE

“Tell me I’m safe again,” said Carrey. “And loved.” “You are safe. And loved.”

In his novel, Carrey gives himself such a crippling need for validation that even his house has to be programmed to tell him how much everyone loves him.

“I screen movies with zero entertainment value. I show Synecdoche, New York... it is an irredeemable, torturous, tortuous yawn.”

B. Rosenberger Rosenberg (the fictional film critic character in the book, who hates Charlie Kaufman) hurls a rotten tomato at his creator.

MOST SURPRISING CELEBRITY CAMEO

“Taylor Swift felt her big toe catch in the earth… It was trapped, she saw, looking down, in the eye socket of a human skull.” Nashville’s finest stumbles into a mass grave dating back to Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

“It was the first sewer-centric film study since Mark Kermode’s 1993 essay on the C.H.U.D. series, which I believe was entitled ‘I, Mark Kermode, Am An Asshole’.” Britain’s most famous film critic gets dragged.

HARSHEST BURN

“Katie Holmes attended with her then husband, a colossal action star whose real name, for legal reasons, cannot be given here. Hence, we shall call him Laser Jack Lightning.”

Carrey pokes fun at a raft of Hollywood celebs, but the most withering running joke is saved for someone whose name he dare not even type.

“Starbucks is the smart coffee for dumb people. It’s the Christopher Nolan of coffee. Dunkin’ Donuts is lowbrow, authentic. It is the simple, real pleasure of a Judd Apatow movie.”

Rosenberg loathes Nolan almost as much as he despises Kaufman. Give him This Is 40 any day.

LOWEST OPINION OF EACH OTHER

“Hair oily and unkempt, cheeks gaunt, the eyes of a biting creature. Only his voice defined him as more than a straggling junkie, as Charlie Kaufman...”

The fictional Kaufman has a major role in Carrey’s novel, casting our hero to play Chairman Mao — somehow still not as unsettling as The Cable Guy. “I stop by Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree at this year’s Performa festival and attach my ‘wish’ to it... There is currently only one other wish tied to the tree: Bicycle — Jim Carrey.”

Carrey is mentioned only once in Antkind:

making this sweetly innocent wish.

ANTKIND AND MEMOIRS AND MISINFORMATION ARE BOTH ON SALE NOW