Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman received a great deal of acclaim for his "Being John Malkovich" script, but while that film contained many quirky and inventive ideas, the plot fell apart in the third act, making for an ultimately unsatisfying experience. The same can be said for his second produced script, "Human Nature," which is chock-full of good ideas but ultimately unravels. Kaufman is clever and a jokester, he's just not much of a scenarist.

On the up side, there's a lovely performance by Patricia Arquette, who's not afraid of any of the many bizarre turns her character goes through, and director Michel Gondry (who has made terrific videos for Bjork and others) does the best that he can with the script. (Although those CG mice are pretty lame once they are set free.)

Not an unalloyed success, but some elements here definitely work. Too bad they don't all come through.

This may be one of the most undereatimated movies on the imdb. Trumped only by it's more popular cousin Adaptation, this movie in the best that film language has to offer express all the joy, sorrow, misery, agony, torment, ennui, sillyness, and boozy lust of being a biologacal creature in a social super structure. I love this movie. I love how it translates the dry language psychological philosophy into an entertaining movie that is both emotional heavy and light heartedly funny. Rhys Ifans is absolutely wonderful in his portayal of the apotheosis of the destructive nature of language on human emotion. As with adaptation I just can't say enough about this movie. They seem so intelligent and full of joy that Charlie Kaufman is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers in hollywood along with Linklater and Tarantino.

10 out of 10 i'm drunk

As he managed to do in Being John Malkovich, brilliant writer Kaufman succeeds in creating a completely believable alternative reality, which he employs as a metaphor that pokes seemingly light (and therefore lethally subversive) fun at 'society' - what it means to be civilized, what it means to be free, how people judge each other based on ridiculously superficial differences of appearance, etc, etc. It works, because Kaufman IS so brilliant, and I left the theatre with the same feeling I had gotten from Being John Malkovich - inspired and gratified that someone like this not only exists in the world but actually gets to put his completely unique and uncompromising visions on the screen.