Jeremiah Zagar’s In a Dream premiered at SXSW in 2008, two months before Synecdoche, NY was unveiled at Cannes, but seen in the run up to its release in New York on Friday, Zagar’s family documentary pops out as a true-life analogue to Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut. Dream’s counterpart to Caden Cotard is Isaiah Zagar, the filmmaker’s father and a mosaic mural artist who, in the film’s earliest frames, confesses to an attraction to the “gigantic.” As In a Dream unfolds (in three parts, detailing Jeremiah’s parents’ courtship and formation of a family life around the patriarch’s art practice, the eventual threats to their way of life and ultimately its tentative rebirth), more Synecdoche similarities emerge. Like the protagonist of Kaufman’s masterwork, Isaiah Zagar deals with the internal by projecting it on the external, making an art work that conquers a city, that blurs the line between public space and domestic, and that never ends. His work becomes an addiction that unwittingly distances him from the people he loves. Both films even feature protagonists who handle their own feces. Oddly enough, it’s the indie documentary, not the studio-released drama with an ensemble full of stars, that points to the possibility of a happy ending.
…Read more
The Writers Guild of America have released their nominations for the best original, adapted and documentary screenplays of the year. The good: recognition for Boogie Man, Burn After Reading and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The bad: some of the least original, most cliche-ridden scripts of the year got noms, including Milk, Benjamin Button and Slumdog Millionaire. The will-be-judged-by-history-as-criminal: Synecdoche, NY and My Winnipeg were overlooked. Blerg, WGA. Blerg. Variety has the full list of nominees.
About.com’s Jurgen Fauth has put together a list of the ten films he was most disappointed by in 2008. Among them: box office champion The Dark Knight (”turgid”), preordained indie “surprise” awards darling Slumdog Millionaire (”completely falls apart by the light of day”) and the year’s token “but it’s good for grown ups too!” animated hit, Wall-E (”predictably schematic kid’s fare”). Three cheers for contrarianism!
It should be noted that many of Jurgen’s disappointments are amongst my favorite films of the year. If I made a top ten of 2008 today, spots for Burn After Reading and Synecdoche, NY would be assured, and I’m a fan of Ballast and Vicky Cristina Barcelona as well. “Many of the movies that disappointed me most in 2008 were grossly over-hyped, flagrantly overpraised — and zealously defended by people with wide-ranging vocabularies,” he writes. I’m one of those zealots!
Since the Chicago Reader’s Pat Graham extended the meme on his own blog, I thought I might as well. My own picks for the biggest disappointments of 2008 are after the jump. Chime in with yours in the comments, or write your own blog post and paste a link there.
…Read more
So, we’re taking the rest of the week off. Enjoy your, uh, eating and shopping? That’s what people do, right? (I’m half-English, so I’m only half willing to admit that Thanksgiving even exists.) But first, for your holiday browsing pleasure, here are a bunch of stories from this week that I meant to comment on but ran out of time. Let me know if there’s anything in particular that you’d like me to revisit in depth next week.
- “Auteurism had Andrew Sarris. Abstract expressionism had Clement Greenberg. Punk rock had Lester Bangs. Where is the equivalent voice for today’s documentary scene?” So ponders Thom Powers, before offering a number of tips for those of us who might aim to fill the position.
- “Is there room in that diverse [film festival] community for people of faith? For people of more conservative political beliefs? Or are film festivals only for the support and promotion of those who agree with a specific, left-of-center political philosophy? And therefore, must major film festivals — and their primary staff — have a de facto bias toward that philosphy?” AJ Schnack examines the implications of the Prop 8/Rich Raddon situation.
- Eric Kohn visited the Futures of Entertainment conference, sponsored by the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT. “As the conversations progressed, so too did a flurry of typing from numerous laptops throughout the audience: Microblogging and online chatter created a series of miniature conversations that converged into a unified whole.”
- In the second of potentially three posts on Synechdoche, NY, Filmbrain runs Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut through the ringer of the Jungian concept of individuation. “The individuation process is about the uniting of opposites — good and evil, masculine and feminine, matter and spirit, body and psyche. There’s no question that Caden undertakes the journey, but he fails to become an individual, both literally and psychologically. Caden treats his life (both the conscious and unconscious elements) like a stage play, yet his attempt at directing from an omniscient position robs him of (in alchemical terms) the prima materia required for one to be a person.”
The Circuit points to the news that a Los Angeles art gallery has mounted a show of the paintings of Adele Lack, the estranged wife of Caden Cotard, whose portrait graces the catalog for the show. Which is interesting, because both Lack and Cotard are fictional characters, played by Catherine Keener and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, NY, which not coincidentally opens in New York and LA on Friday.
Even more interesting, a number of art and culture blogs have written up the opening of the show without noting even the connection to the film, never mind the fact that the paintings themselves are movie props and the artist to which they’re credited doesn’t actually exist. One site even includes an image of Keener from the film, without indicating that they’re aware that it’s a publicity still not of an artist, but of a sort-of famous actress playing an artist.
It certainly seems like clever surreptitious marketing for the film — especially for this film, which resists relegraphing its intent or meaning –– but maybe it’s *too* clever? If the show itself is as free of Synecdoche signage as many of the blog posts about it, at what point are patrons of the show (which ends on Sunday) going to make the connection?
