Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A different reality, 9 May 2009
For two hours I was transported into someone else's vast reality, I don't know whose and I don't where it was but it wasn't mine! Every shot is beautifully compiled and every line masterfully delivered. It is a triumph of Production, Direction, Acting and Design. I had to watch it twice to better understand the relationships, interestingly the second viewing felt like the first time as there is so much content. No question this is a future cult film, see it now!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Experimental, but thoroughly engaging, 16 May 2009
A New York theatre director,, unhappy with his life and the choices he's made, receives a massive arts grant and spends it on a piece of theatre that eventually, over many decades, exactly mimics his own life: He rebuilds New York in a huge warehouse, employs hundreds of actors, eventually employing actors who are acting the part of the actor who is acting himself, and so on. What writer/director Kaufman(Adaptation, Being John Malkovitch) is saying here is difficult to encompass on a single viewing: Certainly it's about the idea of free will versus predestination (the protagonist recreating his wretched life perhaps despite himself) but what does the constantly-burning house represent? In the near future, who are the armed thugs dressed as clowns taking rioters to 'Funland'? In short, it's a dizzyingly ambitious film, filled with ideas, and manages the difficult trick of being both uncompromisingly experimental and thoroughly engaging on an emotional and dramatic level, aided by outstanding performances by the lead cast. Brilliant.
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1 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
CARL JUNG MEETS DALI COURTESY KAUFMAN, 26 May 2009
CARL JUNG MEETS salvador dali-
synecdoche is a greek term referring to a parameter ,so charlie kaufman borrows the rather intellectual sounding word as a title of his wildly delusional and manic depiction of an indulgent playwright who typically presents the ego -inflated pseudo intellectuals of manhattan ,played by mr .hoffman as a dying duck who keeps proclaiming in the 30 years of screen time set in new york that he is terminally ill .
the movie is a depiction of an extended mid life crisis of an inexorable male ,which here envelops the whole existence of caden corbut , the sexually promiscuous hystericaL PATHETIC and rather self absorbed miscreant who virtually exhibits every symptom of being bipolar manic depressive though he is disguised here as a pitiful and even sadder counterpart of a contemporary artist who spends more time in quest of art and ends up creating virtually nothing .
the lame script is the premise of a writer in search of a perfect play that he contrives out of his own egoistical existence and his envy of an erstwhile spouse who understandly elopes to berlin from new york with his first daughter olive .
this is a man in crisis who is obsessed with baron Munchausen syndrome from periodontitis to pseudo epilepsy but these give way to a self proclaimed genius who then becomes a bitter spoof of the Jungian psychology as to realising self and ego in the same instance by discovering your subconscious and the reality of existence .
in this instance that means promiscuity and isolation granted by anonymity as he receives a grant of billions of dollars so he can create the ultimate art house play in a huge contraption created inside ART DECO warehouses in new york .
the absurdist plot convolutes as karl jung meets salvador dali and psychology gets surreal in the midst of a vast void where one can see nothing but lofty ambition and desperate execution combined with creative bankruptcy .
the billions wasted are not as sad as the talented cast that is wasted here on a flight of surreal fantasy which is borrowed ,uninspired and misdirected and plainly pretentious as well as painfully monotonous to watch .
the idea of a play within a movie as borrowed from FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN is combined with kaufman's own BEING JOHN MALKOVICH to create a hugely dissatisfying and exasperating experience which has nothing new to offer except a novel narrative which juxtaposes various time capsules and time warps to create a rather sinister milieu but the fact it reeks of hilariously psychotic and plainly silly characters and imposes itself as a self proclaimed intellectual burden on it's viewers is unforgivable .
watch it you must to see how misguided can cinema get in it's grand allusions to self glory and egoistical worship of individuality ,KARL JUNG here is maliciously exploited to the heights of inanity where a selfish confused male with an ego the size of an elephant exploits everything around him to realise the ego or the glory he does not posess in the least and fails to provoke any emotion or intellect in the process .
the female form here is just ridiculously presented as an inferior race which is there to sexually and psychotically pleasure and alternatively torture the male psyche of CADEN CORBUT as caden has a wife and at least 3 mistresses who definitely do not love him but caden is not bothered about that trivia in the least ,as for the rest just imagine the name caden corbut played by an obsessive compulsive phillip hoffman seymour and you can guess the rest .
i liked about 20 minutes of this exorcism into the lost human virtues of quest for identity and some visual artistry which becomes preposterous as it is rendered in the manner of ADAPTATION and BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and this is nowhere near them as abstract art or as as a black comedy either .
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