I watched a couple of movies this weekend.
On Saturday, I watched Synecdoche, New York, which writer-director Charlie Kaufman describes on the DVD as like “going through a dream reality — even though it’s not a dream.” I feel like I need to see it again. I’m just not yet sure that I want to. I liked it a lot — it’s clever and funny and breathtaking and strange — but what it’s not is immediately accessible. It’s a challenge, a movie that makes you really work to understand it — which probably sealed its fate at the box office. In a roundtable discussion by bloggers included on the DVD extras, the film gets compared briefly to David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive, and I think the comparison is incredibly apt. Yet Kaufman’s is a much warmer and more humane surrealism than Lynch’s, less interested in peeling back a facade to reveal the seedy, nightmarish reality beneath than in lifting back the layers of our shared nightmare to reveal the humanity within.
On Sunday, I watched State of Play, which I don’t think I’ll need to see a second time, but which I also quite enjoyed. It’s a smart, funny, and tense political thriller — maybe not the best of its kind, or even as good as the original BBC miniseries*, but well acted and a lot of fun. It does fetishize print journalism and make fun of news bloggers maybe just little too much — and Scott Tobias isn’t wrong abut the “the politics of [t]his political thriller get[tting] muddled in all the rug-pulling” — but none of that really bothered me. It’s a lot of fun for what it is, and it’s kept moving by some tense scenes, smart dialogue, and engaging performances.
* So I hear, anyway.
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