Hopefully Anonymous recommended it a while back, so I watched it. I’m impressed that Charlie Kaufman was able to make this movie and stick so much ridiculous stuff in it without anyone telling him otherwise, and I have to admit laughing at stuff like the forever-burning house, but I can’t say I recommend it. My experience may actually have been better if I had seen it in theater without a pause button available, since I always used it when things were getting too much and I was hesitant about continuing, and without that ability it would have passed right by and finished sooner.
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June 6, 2011 at 9:33 pm
I found that movie difficult to follow, but was left with an “important” impression and thought it was pretty stylish.
June 7, 2011 at 2:14 pm
I really liked it. For one thing, I laughed a lot. For another, the shifting identities and earphone scripting seem relevant to a edging neuro-philosophical currents, particularly concerning free will and the impermanence of the self. Kaufman seems wise to this stuff.
I also think it’s interesting to compare with Palindromes and maybe A History of Violence.
June 7, 2011 at 9:41 pm
I agree that it was well made.
Throughout the movie I often thought back to Something Awful’s parody.
Haven’t seen Palindromes and had to look it up to see what you were referring to. I’m not sure if I’d even heard of it before, or am confusing it with that Bob Dylan movie. Surprised with the History of Violence reference, that was a relatively normal movie. Didn’t even seem to have the same obsession with mortality which presumably piqued H.A’s interest.
June 11, 2011 at 4:01 am
I almost forgot why I liked it -its been so long since I thought about the movie. I don’t think its my “obsession with mortality” (I don’t think the the protagonist or anyone tries to escape death in the movie)-I think its my obsession with microsociology and simulation as part of an optimization strategy.
I recall some bit being silly, for example the scary lesbians ruining the protagonists’ daughter. It was the author playing with levels of simulation that I liked.
June 12, 2011 at 6:36 pm
Simulation certainly, but I didn’t notice what was particularly microsociological about it.
There’s a reference copy of Cuddihy’s “The Ordeal of Civility” at a nearby library that I was leafing through today, just for the chapters referencing Levi-Strauss and the Irish that would be more novel. I think it may be up your alley. Plenty of references to Goffman and highfalutin five-dollar words about collective status negotiation you like to use. Oddly the thesis seems to be almost the opposite of Slezkine’s.
June 16, 2011 at 9:26 am
Maybe we’re operating with different definitions of microsociology?
Plays and movies almost always operate within a Dunbar’s Number of salient actors. It occurs to me that that’s the appropriate microsocial scale. Synedoche seemed to me to be solidly microsocial simulation.
The Something Awful parody was clever, but I think ultimately less clever than the movie itself -which makes it a failure in my book (in contrast, for example, with Colbert or Team America). Synedoche actually self-satirized internally with more art, in my recollection.