{"id":3417,"date":"2009-04-20T12:39:20","date_gmt":"2009-04-20T16:39:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3417"},"modified":"2009-04-20T12:39:20","modified_gmt":"2009-04-20T16:39:20","slug":"glad-to-be-weirdly-close","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3417","title":{"rendered":"“Glad to be weirdly close.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I watched a couple of movies this weekend. <\/p>\n

On Saturday, I watched Synecdoche, New York<\/i><\/a>, 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<\/i> 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<\/i>, 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.<\/p>\n

On Sunday, I watched State of Play<\/i><\/a>, 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<\/a>*, but well acted and a lot of fun. It does fetishize print journalism and make fun of news bloggers maybe just little<\/i> too much — and Scott Tobias<\/a> 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.<\/font><\/p>\n

* So I hear, anyway.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-3417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3417"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}