I almost watched Synecdoche, New York. After about half an hour, it became the droning background as I read IMDb reviews, starting with people who gave it the lowest possible rating. Normally 1-star reviews are terse expressions of disappointment, but in the case of Charlie Kaufman's fiasco, knowledgeable cinéastes showed up, in numbers and in high dudgeon. So while the movie dragged on, I was perversely delighted by the posse of ruthless, erudite, and funny critics who posted lines like "To call this movie pretentious is an insult to pretentiousness"-- a contention proved this line of dialog (chosen almost at random): "Caden Cotard is a man already dead, living in a half-world between stasis and antistasis."
Seriously.
Another writer took the time to get specific: "Think about the ways that a movie can be bad. It can be horribly depressing for no particular reason... It can be confusing, with a plot that is impossible to make sense of... Or it can be annoying, with lots of pseudo-clever gimmicks that don't work. Synecdoche manages to be all three kinds of bad at once."
Precisely. Not only grandiloquent, but gratuitously repulsive with the toilet scenes and skin pustules. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Michelle Williams don't disappoint, and now and then a line of dialog lands squarely, but at its core Synecdoche NY is a dreary aping of Fellini's "8 1/2," with characters that wandered in from a Woody Allen movie.
Because his grand debut as an auteur is such an abysmal failure, both an artistic disaster and a box office bomb ($4.5 million globally), I almost feel sorry for Kaufman. Almost. I'll let another reviewer explain why: "The message behind this waste of time of a motion picture was not to waste your precious life analysing your misfortunes. I wasted two hours of my life watching a highly analytical movie that was effectively telling me not to waste my time because analysis is fruitless."
Seriously.
Another writer took the time to get specific: "Think about the ways that a movie can be bad. It can be horribly depressing for no particular reason... It can be confusing, with a plot that is impossible to make sense of... Or it can be annoying, with lots of pseudo-clever gimmicks that don't work. Synecdoche manages to be all three kinds of bad at once."
Precisely. Not only grandiloquent, but gratuitously repulsive with the toilet scenes and skin pustules. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Michelle Williams don't disappoint, and now and then a line of dialog lands squarely, but at its core Synecdoche NY is a dreary aping of Fellini's "8 1/2," with characters that wandered in from a Woody Allen movie.
Because his grand debut as an auteur is such an abysmal failure, both an artistic disaster and a box office bomb ($4.5 million globally), I almost feel sorry for Kaufman. Almost. I'll let another reviewer explain why: "The message behind this waste of time of a motion picture was not to waste your precious life analysing your misfortunes. I wasted two hours of my life watching a highly analytical movie that was effectively telling me not to waste my time because analysis is fruitless."