Another drawback to the long and cold winter, besides all the obvious complaints: a total lack of DVD releases. In recent weeks our Netflix queue has been a desolate wasteland of old classics and new crap. When we get emails telling us What Just Happened? has shipped, and we’re actually kind of excited, the situation Read More
Synecdoche, New York
Running Time 124 minutes
Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman
Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Samantha Morton, Dianne Wiest
The word of the week is contrast. Decorating the top of the cake: a new Clint Eastwood. At the bottom of the cesspool: a Read More
We have a fundamental problem with the new trailer for Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York: it makes the movie look about as much fun as a funeral. Good golly this is depressing stuff!
Phillip Seymour Hoffman stars as a 40-year-old theater director who, with his life collapsing around him, decides to stage Read More
How do you outdo Hollywood’s master of mind-bending meta plots? If you’re Wired and you’re profiling Synecdoche, New York writer-director Charlie Kaufman, you create a blog that reveals the process of how the story was conceived, pitched, written, and edited. The profile and the blog are written by Jason Tanz. (This Read More
Comedy Central has greenlit a new show, Michael and Michael Have Issues, starring pals and vets of The State and Stella, Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black, reports the Hollywood Reporter. It will be a kind of sketch show within a show, focusing on the two Michaels, their problems with the world, Read More
Charlie Kaufman, the famously private writer of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, promises that he’s not a recluse. But he was being a little spooky in this interview with The Hollywood Reporter about his directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, which will have a big premiere at the Cannes Read More
Kneeling at the trough of psycho-gibberish that has come to symbolize contemporary movies, a piece of crap called I § Huckabees sinks to new depths of incoherent pretentiousness. But I will refrain from labeling it “The worst movie I’ve ever seen!” because, like the proverbial boy who cried wolf, I’ve blurted out that cry of Read More
Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , from a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, didn’t work for me, despite (or perhaps because of) all the rave reviews it’s received. Since Kate Winslet, who plays hippie-chick Clementine Kruczynski, has always held a special place in my heart-ever since she romped around in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Read More
George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind , from a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, based on the book by Chuck Barris, plays out as an amusing parody of A Beautiful Mind (2001). But whereas the delusional creatures of Russell Crowe’s schizophrenic John Nash are little short of terrifying in the vivid, lifelike performances of Ed Read More
As bad movies go, a dismal catastrophe called Solaris can’t go away fast enough to suit me. This fiasco of infuriating pretentiousness and numbing incoherence is the first science-fiction film by the overrated Steven Soderbergh. Let’s hope it’s his last. Solaris , an elliptical tale of ghosts floating around in outer space, was already snored Read More
