I am dying of hotness. But not the sexy kind. Although that's a possibility as well.

It's summer here.

Anyway. 

Slant's Nick Schager lists Synecdoche, New York as his #1 film for 2008, in their Year in Film round-up:

Charlie Kaufman dives down, down, down the self-loathing, self-doubting, self-destructive rabbit hole in his mad genius Synecdoche, New York, a vortex of meta-psychoanalysis at once formally daring and emotionally wrenching. With Philip Seymour Hoffman as his neurotic dramatist proxy, Kaufman rips his glum, anxious, phobic self wide open, searching for a "brutal truth" which might provide comfort were it not so maniacally elusive, and coming up with a triumphant portrait of the artist in perpetual crisis and creativity. (Source)

Meanwhile, Chris Sunami of Kitopedia says Synecdoche fulfils squandered opportunity left over from Adaptation:

When Ellen --or crypto-Ellen-- takes over from Caden, the contrast with Sammy is immediate and vivid. Where Sammy arrogates the right to be Caden on the basis of his study and obsession, Millicent establishes her ability to take on his role through her intuitive insight into Caden's hidden nature. Then, as she slips into the part, she moves through a scene in progress, whispering brief suggestions in each actor's ear. When they play the scene again, however, its effect has been utterly transformed. Instead of the sterile repetition of a scene we have already experienced in Caden's reality, the new scene has been transmuted into poetry, as the actors depart from their lines to bring to life something that is less accurate but somehow more truthful.

This scene, I think, is the long-delayed fulfillment of a squandered opportunity left over from "Adaptation". The point of "Adaptation", in my mind, is that art is not life, and that allegiance to the facts is no defense against the charge of creating lackluster art. The joke at the heart of that movie is that Kaufman rises to the impossible challenge of turning a quiet, meditative, internal story into a Hollywood movie through the self-conscious and ironic addition of all the standard Hollywood elements --fictionalization, car chases, drugs, illicit affairs and multiple personalities. Yet I feel the direction failed the script in as much as it did not commit wholly enough to providing the real Hollywood experience, complete with dramatic lighting, a swelling soundtrack, soft focus, and other blatant cues to mark the passage between fiction and reality.

The Millicent-directed scene in Synecdoche, on the other hand, provides it all, and while those trappings might have seemed cheesy or artificial out of context, they work perfectly where the scene is placed. It is genuinely moving to see that at long last, the dross of Caden's life can finally be elevated into something higher. (Source)

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