Rex Reed's evisceration of this was hilarious and single-handedly justified his last 30 years of bitchy nothingness.

one of the greatest movies I've ever seen.

yay snack. i was wondering where the NY people were. is it in LA, too? because i think there are even more over there.

Is anyone else ever going to see this ever? I want to discuss.

they had a preview screening with Kaufman here in Berkeley several weeks ago with a Q & A forum after the screening, but unfortunately I couldn't attend. Though one of my closest friends did and she loved the film - her favorite film is Eternal Sunshine. She said that it is much less mainstream than that one, but amazing.


I will see it eventually I suppose. Looks great though

This one's wwwaaaaaaaayyyyy out there.......

First time director, Charlie Kaufman, manages to wrangle this beast for the first half of it's running time. After that, SNY comes brilliantly/frustratingly flying off the rails.

There are a thousand little beautifully astute observations of reality buried throughout this celluloid psychosis. From the microscopic paintings getting ready to ship, to the brutally honest snippets of dialog between Caden and his cast. The set design naturally echoes. The acting is superb from a veritable galaxy of stars.

I look forward to a great deal more of the writing genius of Charlie Kaufman in the fututre - - I just hope he goes back to hiring a real director next time so his words can be brought back into focus...

18 out of 5.

(...could've been infinitely higher...)

considering I seem to remember very little, maybe this was not one of the best movies I've ever seen. or my memory is going to shit.

I don't know where I got the idea that this was going to be more of a David Lynch movie than a Kaufman one... it definitely has Kaufman written all over it though and through... it's much closer in feel and tone to Being John Malkovich than Inland Empire. In fact after seeing this, it wouldn't surprise me to learn Kaufman had a lot more to do with the making of all his movies so far than its been let on, there's a lot of recognizablity between them and this. It was definitely a lot more charming and entertaining and had more heart than I had expected. It's an enjoyable watch for sure... I think just taking it on that movie for movie's sake level and appreciating it for the fantastic acting and such, it worked quite a lot. But yeah...



I would agree. I mean it's clear Kaufman is just spilling with ambitions and mediations about life/people/reality/etc., but he does spread himself so all over the place that it's hard to take anything out of it at all, or at least not until further probing. . It's as if he threw all this stuff and ideas on paper, then couldn't find anyone to make it fit together as a whole. But maybe that was the effect of cutting a 4 hour movie down to 2... I get the sense Kaufman struggled much more with the editing in this film than working behind the camera or with the actors. The mix of regular narrative, total wtf? absurdity like the fire, flat out telling us messages orally, the play scenes, the flashbacks, the character switches, the deaths, and everything else here, definitely needed some work. I'll definitely be interested in seeing the long version.

So yeah, it deserves credit for its ambition and getting a lot of things right, but I can't say its the incredible uber masterpiece I was expecting. It's definitely above average though.

4/5

I really didn't find it THAT difficult to follow.

Well, that's what I meant. A lot of what I got out of it, at least, can be summed up by his daughter's realization that she has blood. That whole scene was brilliant.

I think the word "tighter" definitely fits what this film needed... it's a bale of hay after you pull off the straps and it just become a pile.

Great analogy, Shack-alacka-ding-dong!

Who else gets to Synecdochize friday? Because I'll be Synechdoching the fk outta this movie Friday.

Compare:

• Rex Reed
• Manohla Dargis

Their opinions on the movie aside, it's amazing how two people can be paid to review the same film and produce such drastically different output. One of those reviews is incredible, and the other is five paragraphs of over-written, rambling, childishness. I dont think he says a single thing of note about the movie.

(I dont really ever read any reviews, but I hear this Rex fella's name a lot, and its almost never in a positive light, so I guess it shouldnt be too surprising that the review is so bad. But man.)

Manohla Dargis is the most brilliant person working in film criticism. Rex Reed is the opposite.

The first few sentences should tell you where Rex's Reed head is at:



Yuck.

Rex Reed's review is brilliant. He's always been useless, but, regardless of the quality of Synecdoche, that was hilarious.

I got to thinking how suitable this film might be for a university course - - you know, something typical like... Film Studies 403: Art and Artifice in Synedoche, New York. The kind of course where you have a super smart analytical professor who gives a cool lecture each week on various elements and themes in the movie, and then you go to your tutorial group with your spaced-out ex-hippie TA where you go through the film scene by scene having far out discussions.

I'm all for films that are complex enough for this type of dissection, and I have every confidence in Charlie Kaufmann's writing genius that it it will hold up under the microscope - - but that doesn't alleviate the sadness I felt that the second half of the film still seemed to come off the narrative rails and plummeted in pure film viewing enjoyment.

Still, I will take SNY for the blessing it is, and watch it again and again as the years flow by...

Specifics?

I'll try to put some down after work today.

Charlie Kaufman must never be allowed to direct one of his scripts again. I'm not saying Spike Jonze could have made this garbage fly, but maybe it would have felt like a cohesive piece. You know how certain movies make you feel great and remind you why you waste all your time watching them in the first place? Well, this bloated piece of shit made me hate movies. A truly stunning bit of awful, a film so apocalyptically bad I wonder if it hasn't forever ruined my ability to love them.

I swear to god it felt 8 hours long. My god...eight hours of all these talented actors indulging in the same bullshit deadpan. Eight hours of Jon Brion's lets-find-the-single-most-irritating-piece-of-background-music-imaginable torture. Eight hours of Charlie Kaufman checking items off the "Charlie Kaufman's 100-Step Guide To Hipster Quirk." This is an ugly film, in every sense of the word.

Kaufman, the fucker, does not have the filmography to be wasting our time with all this self-parody.

I'm going to be harboring a lot of ill-will toward all involved for quite some time. Well, not Dianne Wiest. I can't stay mad at Dianne Wiest.

I'm seeing this tonight. yosh's review got me all fired up.

Dear makeshift,

Please like it. : (

Love, kypade