One blog. Two opinions. One zillion films.

David and Tammy are on their respective long, langourous, hang-loose Spring Breaks.   Re-entering, re-bounding, re-winding when we feel like it.   Happy Break, all!

Not sure if you’re in the mood for this gem, Tammy. Maybe later? More later.

Synecdoche, New York is probably a masterpiece.* It’s the sort of film we politely call “challenging.” Then again, I watched the first 20 minutes and started it over so K could join in. I was flabbergasted at how much more information was apparent on the second lap. Maybe it’s like my gold standard film, Brazil. I’ve seen it at least 20 times. It still pays fresh dividends.

No sense in trying to go into details. SNY is both too exhilarating and too exhausting for mere . . . language. Instead I’ll try to outline what I think Charlie Kaufmann is trying to do here. (Kaufmann has written the sharpest and most original screenplays of the past decade: Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation. Synecdoche, New York is his first big directing job and if turns out there are problems with the movie . . . well, there’s your problem.)

1. Kaufman takes a few of well-worn 20th-century dramatic tropes — life speeding by, middle-aged man fearing death, “life is a stage,” loving and longing — and thrashes them mercilessly. Hilariously, bizarrely, tragically, touchingly.

2. Kaufman is the world’s leading meta-trickster. For Adaptation, the movie version of Susan Orleans’ non-fiction book on exotic orchids, Kaufman added a fictional character, a blocked screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman. He struggles; Orleans’ reportage keeps morphing into some fancy sex-and-action script. While Charlie becomes a wreck, his identical-twin brother Donald, a dim-witted boor, becomes a sensation at hack screenplays. It sounds crazy. The movie works, gloriously. It still teaches us something about exotic orchids, part of which is adapting, which of course the characters do too.

In SNY, Phillip Seymour Hoffman is a play director who answers his own mortality by recreating his own life as a theater piece. By the end of the movie his play, in rehearsal for over 40 years, has not managed to open. The stage he has build has literally grown larger than New York itself, and by definition most of new York has to be in the play anyway. Crazy. It works.

3. The movie woozes gently, sometimes trippily, the way ephmeral dream states wooze. Outlandish jokes, like the woman whose house burns for 40 years, actually make sense by the end. Movies today typically jump around in time. In SYN, time passes more like we’re surfing and bobbing on three different time ripples at once. The story, highly detailed, only needs geologic time to make sense anyway.

4. All of this may sound precious. It’s anything but. K and I both drifted off toward the end — Kaufman may have dragged out the last 30 minutes, we’ll know better after another viewing or three — but then we’ll spend a week reading a novel that coughs up a similar experience. I’m looking forward to having a few people over who have already seen it. Then we’ll figure out just how good Synecdoche, New York is.

5. No matter what you think of the movie, nearly every moment shimmers with dedicated performances from a very game cast. Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis, Catherine Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh. Tammy, I really regret getting so involved in the Oscars this year. The movie is tricky to evaluate but there’s no denying that all of these roles are stark-bonkers-excellent, and overlooked.

* Until further review I’ll call it “masterpiece (with an asterisk).”

My therapeutic vent re: movie trailers felt pretty good (see this comment) but, you know, negative people suck. Here’s my idea of a good trailer. Check these features:

1. Snappy selection of tunes. 

2. Two of the finest (and perhaps the smartest) young actors today, Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

3. Not a single promise that we can look forward to an assortment of eviscerations and slo-mo gunshot exit wounds.

4. Those two magic words: Sun! Dance!

5. A chance to utilize my mad YouTube-embedding skillz.