Dear makeshift,

Please give us your honest opinion. : )

Love, Bradley

I always do, Bradley. I always do.

Dear makeshift,

Yes. Please. Your honest opinion. Hopefully when you get back we can go together to throw eggs at Manohla Dargis' window.

Love, yoshue

Please give us your honest opinion only if that opinion is "I liked it"

That's better. :O

Dear makeshift,

Please reconsider Wall-E and all of it's amazing-ness.

Love, Munky

Dear munky,

There is a time and place to wage the battle for the cute little robot's soul. It is not here.

Love, yoshue

I finally got around to grading Synedoche, New York. In good faith, I couldn't give it an F because it is such an ambitious work and clearly the work of a genius and I'm a fan of Charlie Kaufman.

On the other hand, its impenetrable and the type of film that goes out of its way to be impenetrable. I don't like weird for the sake of being weird.

D

Man, I'm dying to know what makeshift thinks. The future of the snobs may hang in the balance.

totally!

except the snob hanging thing, I dont know what that means!

I'm afraid he's going to hate it and I'm gonna feel obligated to provide justification for my love. That will be very hard to do before the DVD comes out. : (

I don't understand what was so boring about it.

Hmm...and good luck egging Manohla's palace in the sky, however futile your efforts might be.

It wasn't boring at all. It certainly wasn't "impenetrable"! I penetrated this bish not only while watching it, but for days later.

No word overnight from makeshifted. I am going to go with 'good sign' there. I hope :O

I realize its subjective and I can easily see why some would go to incredible lengths to love the film. I get that.

And I'm not the smartest kid in the room, though I did see Synecdoche with the smartest person I know. She's a few months from her Ph.D and see also thought the film was pretenious and obsessed with being obtuse. I'm pretty sure we're not singular in that regard.

It's a fun film to debate because its one of those perfect love it or hate it examples of artwork.

Is that legal where you live?

Delaware, Utah, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands. Oh and a 4 block radius in Fremont, California.

I honestly don't know if it's even fair to try and make qualitative claims on this movie, at least after one viewing. I dunno, I think one of the friends I saw it with made a good point afterward when he said it seems like Kaufman almost wants you to actively dislike the movie, if that makes any sense.

I agree with yoshue about one thing at least - it felt very, very, very long. It is definitely one of the most dense and laborious movie experiences I've ever been through. Kaufman wallows endlessly in all of his thematic fixations, and the viewer is forced to trudge through them with him, even when the stuff is unappealing or just plain awful. It is readily apparent that Kaufman is working without a filter of any kind throughout this movie, because some truly awful shit slips through and stains some of the brilliant stuff.

This movie has absolutely no flow. It's essentially a series of vignettes, and I think that makes it especially difficult to "get into". "Boring" is almost always an issue with the viewer, but I think when a movie doesn't even bother trying to establish a rhythm of any kind and it seems to intentionally keep you at arms length, it starts to become more of an objective truth about the piece.

I think there is definitely some fascinating and great things happening in the movie, but I mostly think it's a completely shapeless film comprised entirely of unfiltered obsession. Take from that what you will. I definitely want to see it again.

Yeah I'd mostly agree with that.

Watching Adaptation last week, I found it funny that Kaufman the character has trouble structuring his scripts and has to turn to Donald and his mother to help him out. That apparant truth couldn't be more true here.

makeshift, well done. That was entirely fair and balanced. Look at you, Greta van Susteren.



You know, I hear what you're saying. I do. There's plenty of works of art I needed two or more looks at to really digest. But sometimes, just sometimes, something that seems muddled and irritating and unfocused really is just that. No need to call a spade a heart. We don't need to walk on eggshells because he's an artiste. Sometimes filmmakers, talented ones, bellyflop. Or, as in this case, take a steaming poop in the pool.



This must have been a project he'd been nursing for quite some time. You can always tell when a filmmaker has clinged to a project for too long, whether it's Martin Scorsese and Gangs of New York, or, say, Baz Lurhmann and Australia. In trying to be about everything, in picking up idea after idea over the years, the film winds up being about nothing at all. And while it's hard to fault ambition, dear god, this whole enterprise just made me want to die.



Kaufman the director really fails. Forget the dreadful lifelessness of this thing for a moment; visually, has there been anything as grim all year? Guys, this is a movie about a dude building a lifesize replica of New York City! What invention! What possibility! And does Kaufman the director ever allow his camera to really capture the potential of that image for us? No. He never cues us into the scope and wonder of the idea. Unforgivable. Only in the last scene, with Hoffman literally walking through the abandoned remains of his life's work, does it resonate at all.

He won't let the movie come to lfie visually. The very execution of this movie reeks of the self-loathing we always get from Kaufman and his protagonists. How tiresome. It's why, more than anything else, the film is such an interminable experience; my eyes could not stand one more minute of this ugly, indifferent photography.



We definitely part ways here, brutha.

Final thought: when fucking Tom Noonan is the funniest part of your movie, something is malfunctioning on a very fundamental level.

I definitely know what you're saying, and in a way it sort of pains me to fence-sit on movies like this. I just feel like there is way too much happening in this (for better or worse) to try and discern everything about it (a solid opinion included) on just one viewing.



Yeah, that is the definite vibe I got off this thing. You can tell this has been gestating in Kaufman for far too long. Virtually every hallmark of his oeuvre is not only on full display here, but amped up to 1000. Funny you should say it made you want to die, the same friend that said it seemed Kaufman wanted you to dislike the movie also said he was pretty sure the movie ruined his life. Oddly enough, he didn't hate it.



I agree with this almost uniformly. I was actually a bit startled by how ugly the movie was. I think a lot of this has to do with Philip Seymour Hoffman, who may be the most aesthetically unpleasant person on the face of the earth. The fact that he is in seemingly every frame - sweating profusely with veins popping out everywhere and boils and scabs and tumors and bloody piss on full display - is enough to turn anyone off, never mind the clunky camera work and hideous lighting. Kaufman seems to have an obsession with the unpleasant (viruses, infections, disease, shit, piss, nasty sex, nasty sex terminology, and other assorted pleasantries), so I guess it shouldn't be too much of a shock that his aesthetic is so ugly and lifeless, but for some reason it is.

You have a kinder heart than me, sir. I don't find myself giving many second chances, regardless of the ambition and good ideas lurking behind the curtain. Pauline Kael always said she only needed to see a movie once. She was wrong, as she often was, but there is something to be said for that first impression of something. Our appreciation may not be as deep, but there's a certain purity to it. The first viewing is unique. It doesn't happen again. And that initial impression is the most exciting; the reason I go to the movies. I'm not sure what I'm even talking about.



You speak of every aspect of his oeuvre being laid out on screen. Absolutely. And it all felt so terribly, terribly by-the-numbers for him. Ironic for this paragon of originality. I could visualize him checking quirks off a list. This loathesome trek through his obsessions and standard tricks is the single least renegade thing he could have done. Did anything surprise you here? Not me. Is it all officially shtick at this point? I'm inclined to say yes.

I should add that my companion also wanted to die. But hers, like mine, was not a death wish of respect for melancholy well-constructed, but one of resentment and sadness for time lost to ugliness. She drank afterwards. I did not.



Your perfect summary of the Kaufman aesthetic is bringing back bad memories. Bad, makeshift!

Jonze and Gondry were able to find the heart in these scripts, and they didn't let the films drift aimlessly. They were tightly, tightly controlled. Can you imagine Being John Malkovich or Adaptation in lesser hands? Actually, it would look a lot like this.

In fact, think about that. A first-time director trying this? What hubris. I hardly care that he fell flat on his face.

Oh, this is the internet. I should add IMHO to please the folks in the cheap seats.

Harsh!

Goddamn it.

It played here for one fucking week, and of course that has to be the week before Christmas, when I'm too busy shopping and working to make a trip to see it.

Fuck it, I'm downloading.

Great. I thought this movie's reign of terror was over once I mercifully got out of the theatre. Not so.

I think this is somehow responsible for Harold Pinter's death yesterday. Did Kaufman merely predict it? Or, is the badness of this movie so complete that it ruptured the very fabric of time and space and became reality?

it's more likely he died in tribute to the film's greatness

I think this is the best film from last year.

I'll need to watch it again.

There's hope yet!

I can't believe how negative the reaction on here has been. Of course, it would seem that some were set on hating this one from the first (though the reasoning behind that mystifies me), while others have decided that since they weren't able to fully grasp it, it must be nothing more than a pile of nonsense.

For me, this is the third Charlie Kaufman film I've seen that struck a really deep chord. Some say the film is drowning in his themes - I just felt like this came off as as even more personal work. He doesn't have a director trained in music videos to give the project quite as much visual zest as Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but I found the look to be completely fitting such a dark comedy about the futility of worrying and of art eating life.

Many have complained that the film feels like it collapses under it's own weight. I think that was exactly what Kaufman's intention was, and I kinda loved how he has the film's tone and structure fit the story on screen. He did a similar feat in Adaptation, with the involvement of Donald in the story affecting the movie's tone. Go ahead and complain that these are overly clever tricks, but a philistine such as myself found them to be rather brilliant.

This certainly isn't a movie for most. I showed this to an unsuspecting crowd at one of my weekly movie clubs, and most of the audience shot out of the room the moment it was over. But there were a select few who were thrilled to see something so unique, and we had a great time mulling over the film's themes and eccentricities. It sounds like that group was a synecdoche of the film's reception at large.