A Mirror Floating in Water

And now for something completely different:

Oh how I love the fruits of vacation! What a beautiful time it is! After months endlessly working and emmersing myself in seemingly unrewarding tasks, I at last taste sweet sweet freedom for five days (though I don't want to think about how many days are left from today ). Oh what beauty there is in sleeping in, staying up all night reading Kafka, talking for almost five hours with friends on msn and skype, watching multiple movies in a row. Ahhhh, heaven.

At last I get to get some writing done, I've been working on some short stories, as well as some premature prose that may becoming something in the near future, as well as screenplay which may also become something in the near future.

In the mean time I have some opinions to share


The Reader - There seems to have been a trend going on in the Hollywood mainstream, a trend that I like; big-budget films with big stars in big historical WWII epics that in fact (suprise, suprise) seem to capture the spirit as well as terror of the time. They are done unlike your conventional historical epic; there are no battle sequences, only the consequences of battle, there are no nationalistic themes, the passing of time is treated with extreme delicacy and romance is treated as either tragic or scandelous, and their screenplays (which are always adaptations of slightly recent novels) are almost always very sophisticatoin (even if they have "Oscar yuppie" written all over it). Atonment is the best of this newly emerging genre, but The Reader is probably the most purist example.

Told in flashback, the first half of this film concerns the sexual experiences a teenager has with a thirty-something woman in post-War Germany. The arc of the film concerns the young man's discovery five or so years later that this woman was a guard for the Gestapo as she is put on trial in Berlin. A decision made by the young man sets the latter half in motion, taking place in slightly modern-day Germany.

This film is truly provacative for it deals with the immmensely difficult theme of the personal world pitted against the bigger world of society. Kate Winslet plays Hanna Schnitz, the woman whom the young man played by David Kross has an affair with. She represents the convergence of this dichotemy between the personal and the social, as the young man is the passive observer, as are we, in figuring out the implications of this dichotemy. A secret Hanna carries is the unification of these two worlds, and when the man grows up in the latter half, played morosley by Ralph Fiennes, it reveals the meandering effect of the years that go by, and the tragedy of the passage of time.

The latter half of the film concerns the unhealable wounds of time. It is stunning how well these two stars can act, Fiennes in an immensely cold and fixated stare is greatly subtle and at the same time all together heartbreaking. Hanna is ironically all together like a child in her innocence and as she ages seems all the more confused. Koss plays the younger version of the man in a somewhat underappretiated role, for it seems that star-studden Hollywood was unable to realize that he was the star and eyes of the film, and as a result wasn't even nominated for an Oscar.

This film takes two people's sexual encuonters in bed and the Holocoust and asks "what do these two things mean together?" Well, the result is a contradiction. A condractiction of social history and personal history. Living with it is the best thing we can do to survive ourselves. 8/10


Synecdoche, New York - Oh how dreadful I felt after having finished this film for the third time and realizing that for such a great film I had written such a medicore review. But how does one go around reviewing a film such as this?

Charile Kauffman, that great philosopher of the cinema, had pretty much established himself as an autuer before ever making a film. The term Kauffmanesque has even been coined, and yet he only wrote screenplays. Well those screenplays have such an immense presence, that they sometimes play the main role in his films (such as Adaptation).

And now at last comes his directorial debut, as well as his masterpiece. Kauffman says "to hell with sublty" and goes all out with an immensely complex and difficult film about a playwright dealing with his own mortality.

The playwright Caden Cotard is every one of us at our essence. Begining in his late-forties, the film progresses forty or so years as he goes thruogh all of the four Jungian stages of the induvidual process. A plot begins to appear when he is rewarded the McAuthor genius grant and as a result is inspired to produce a play "of real value" before he dies. The result is an epic grand-scale reproduction of New York as he attempts to investigate every single aspect of human behavoir and thought. This includes him hiring thousands of actors, each one playing a part representing some kind of situation of human expereince, as well as him becoming victim to the infinite regression of meta-reference as he makes a reproduction of New York in a warehouse, within a warehouse, within a warehouse, within a warehouse, ad infinum.

But even more so, this film is about human relationships. Caden interacts (both sexually and non-sexually) with multiple women in his life and each time discovers more about himself and his life.

Told in meticulous dream-logic, this film is an extreme blurring of reality and the mind. I have no idea if this film is a dream, reality, all in Caden's mind, whether if it spans forty years or just a minute, but I do know that it unlike any other film ever made accuratley describes the joy and tragedy of the human experience.

Time surrealistically flies by over Caden. When he morosley says that his wife has been gone for a week, his mistress replies that it's been a year. Quantum leaps in time occurs as we realize that it has been seventeen years, while it only seems like a little over ten minutes. This is not self-indulgent exersices in style as some shallow critics have noted, but rather a representation of the time that one loses as we age. How many people do you know who say that it feels like they were only twenty yesterday. Death eases onto Caden with merciless pacing as his body falls apart faster than his mind can comprehend (that's an exagerration btw).

I know that I have still failed at describing the accomplishment of this film, but you must experience it for yourself to understand it, and should probably see it twice. When film critic Roger Ebert named this the best film of the decade I decided to reconsider my opinion of this film (which was already extremely high) and upon watching it for the second time, it broke onto number three spot on my top ten films of the decade.

This is a great film, an incredibly sad and yet quircky and funny film about, well, everything. 10/10