You are trapped in a dark cave, chained up and forced to look forward onto a wall in front of you, and you have been in this position since your birth. On this wall. Synopsis: "The early life and career of Vito Corleone in 1920s New York is portrayed while his son, Michael, expands and tightens his grip on the family crime syndicate.".

Synecdoche, New York Movie Review (2. I think you have to see Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" twice. I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film and that I had not mastered it. The second time because I needed to. The third time because I will want to.

It will open to confused audiences and live indefinitely. A lot of people these days don't even go to a movie once.

There are alternatives. It doesn't have to be the movies, but we must somehow dream. If we don't "go to the movies" in any form, our minds wither and sicken.

Advertisement. This is a film with the richness of great fiction. Like Suttree, the Cormac Mc.

Carthy novel I'm always mentioning, it's not that you have to return to understand it. It's that you have to return to realize how fine it really is. The surface may daunt you. The depths enfold you. The whole reveals itself, and then you may return to it like a talisman. Wow, is that ever not a "money review." Why will people hurry along to what they expect to be trash, when they're afraid of a film they think may be good?

The subject of "Synecdoche, New York" is nothing less than human life and how it works. Using a neurotic theater director from upstate New York, it encompasses every life and how it copes and fails.

All the latest news, reviews, pictures and video on culture, the arts and entertainment. Theater director Caden Cotard is mounting a new play. His life catering to suburban blue-hairs at the local regional theater in Schenectady, N.Y., is looking bleak.

Think about it a little and, my god, it's about you. Whoever you are. Here is how life is supposed to work. We come out of ourselves and unfold into the world. We try to realize our desires. We fold back into ourselves, and then we die.

Synecdoche, New York" follows a life that ages from about 4. Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a theater director, with all of the hangups and self- pity, all the grandiosity and sniffles, all the arrogance and fear, typical of his job.

In other words, he could be me. He could be you. The job, the name, the race, the gender, the environment, all change. The human remains pretty much the same. Here is how it happens. We find something we want to do, if we are lucky, or something we need to do, if we are like most people. We use it as a way to obtain food, shelter, clothing, mates, comfort, a first folio of Shakespeare, model airplanes, American Girl dolls, a handful of rice, sex, solitude, a trip to Venice, Nikes, drinking water, plastic surgery, child care, dogs, medicine, education, cars, spiritual solace - - whatever we think we need.

To do this, we enact the role we call "me," trying to brand ourselves as a person who can and should obtain these things. Advertisement. In the process, we place the people in our lives into compartments and define how they should behave to our advantage. Because we cannot force them to follow our desires, we deal with projections of them created in our minds. But they will be contrary and have wills of their own.

Eventually new projections of us are dealing with new projections of them. Sometimes versions of ourselves disagree. We succumb to temptation - - but, oh, father, what else was I gonna do? I feel like hell. I repent. I'll do it again. Watch Shocker Online Hulu on this page.

Hold that trajectory in mind and let it interact with age, discouragement, greater wisdom and more uncertainty. You will understand what "Synecdoche, New York" is trying to say about the life of Caden Cotard and the lives in his lives.

Charlie Kaufman is one of the few truly important writers to make screenplays his medium. David Mamet is another. That is not the same as a great writer (Faulkner, Pinter, Cocteau) who writes screenplays. Kaufman is writing in the upper reaches with Bergman. Now for the first time he directs. It is obvious that he has only one subject, the mind, and only one plot, how the mind negotiates with reality, fantasy, hallucination, desire and dreams.

Being John Malkovich." "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." "Adaptation." "Human Nature." "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind." What else are they about? He is working in plain view. In one film, people go inside the head of John Malkovich. In another, a writer has a twin who does what he cannot do.

In another, a game show host is, or thinks he is, an international spy. In "Human Nature," a man whose childhood was shaped by domineering parents trains white mice to sit down at a tiny table and always employ the right silverware. Is behavior learned or enforced? Advertisement"Synecdoche, New York" is not a film about the theater, although it looks like one. A theater director is an ideal character for representing the role Kaufman thinks we all play. The magnificent sets, which stack independent rooms on top of one another, are the compartments we assign to our life's enterprises. The actors are the people in roles we cast from our point of view.

Some of them play doubles assigned to do what there's not world enough and time for. They have a way of acting independently, in violation of instructions. They try to control their own projections.

Meanwhile, the source of all this activity grows older and tired, sick and despairing. Is this real or a dream? The world is but a stage, and we are mere actors upon it.

It's all a play. The play is real. This has not been a conventional review. There is no need to name the characters, name the actors, assign adjectives to their acting. Look at who is in this cast. You know what I think of them. This film must not have seemed strange to them. It's what they do all day, especially waiting around for the director to make up his mind.

What does the title mean? It means it's the title.

Visioneers Starring Zach Galifianakis (Man Vs. Office Culture Continues) – /Film. Thirty minutes into Visioneers—a high concept indie dramedy that is, well, brand new to the public—I was consumed by the thought that I, most likely, will never see the movie for sale in a really choice record store. Don’t worry, this movie review will not serve as a wistful rant on the music industry courtesy of a wannabe Nick Hornby or Chuck Klosterman.) The realization got me down for a half- a- second. Nevertheless, calling Visioneers a “prized would- be staple of the ‘choice record store movie genre’” is a tidy complement that sums up how I feel about it.

In the mid/late ‘9. DVDs in many independent record stores. Browsing the small selection was a welcome, habitual cool- down after hours spent listening to and considering albums. Generally, the selection amounted to: concert films like Ziggy Stardust, The Show, and Bill Hicks Live. Drug movies like Easy Rider and Neco z Alenky.

Godzillas. Tromas. OG”- flicks like New Jack City and Fresh. Watch Inalienable HIGH Quality Definitons on this page. Usually a movie starring Natasha Lyonne that wasn’t American Pie.

Docs like Grey Gardens and The Corporation. And odd movies starring great comedians like The Magic Christian and The Razor’s Edge. Right, Visioneers would be bunched in with those two. Of course, “cult movies” is a broad umbrella term for these films, then and especially now, but their location under a roof housing infinite great music birthed the silent notion that the works belonged to a cinematic family. The odd symbiotic relationship is perhaps why the DVDs were rarely purchased; another reason is that, while the DVDs were new, the hands of countless gross nerds, junkies, and patchouli weirdos had flipped them over in states of blank studiousness and after many months of this they felt second- hand. Yet another reason is that most of the diehard culture addicts were shopping for music and…had already seen the majority of these films multiple times. Visioneers, starring newly minted comedy star, Zach Galifianakis in his Beard Era, is (fortunately?) being released a few years too late to join these illustrious and random racks.

But the film contains the familiar equation of two shots artsy tedium, one shot intelligence, and one shot white- people- in- existential- breakdown, that will parlay longevity and affable cred amongst a cross- over viewership that now reserves hushed adulation for Synecdoche, New York. Eeek. I’m one of those people.) In other words, if anything in this paragraph makes sense, go seek out Visioneers and fucking do not go watch Away We Go. A final call for violent death to aging- hipster romance movies marketed with quixotic, borderline pedophiliac doodling.)Directed and written by newcomers, the brothers Jared Drake and Brandon Drake, respectively, Visioneers is another hearty nomination alongside Mike Judge’s Office Space and the Ricky Gervais revolution, for “Man vs.

Office Culture” to become an addendum to the universally accepted “Five Examples of Conflict.” Set in a pseudo- future that for all intents and purposes (and budget restrictions) could be present day, Galifianakis stars as a well- paid office grunt, cunt, or “Level Three Tunt” whose name, George Washington Winsterhammerman, seems destined to send him off a cliff of 3. Winsterhammerman is gainfully employed at a shady monolith called The Jeffers Corporation, which we find out is the largest and most successful corporation in the history of mankind.

It earns this superlative by piping in the benefits of propagandized group- think over intercoms all day long. The company- identity- is- your own message is presented on posters, pajamas, the works. In- office ticker- tapes reading, “There are 1. Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. And in an omnipresent gag that screams indie comedy but compliments Galifianakis’s now signature boiler room frustration, the logo of the Jeffers Corporation is an architectural middle finger; the accepted greeting amongst its staff is literally the middle finger (the serious version, with no extended thumb). The movie’s office setting is so minimal—a handful of desks, gray walls—that it would feel more at peace on the stage, and much of the film would work—and in intimate cases, much better—as an off- Broadway play. But knowing that Galifianakis just starred in The Hangover, a film that will make at least $3.

Possibly even more memorable. Homegrown at a time when American indies attempt to sneak vines into the studio system pot before they’re made. In the film, office life has sucked all external notions of individualism away and left Jeffers Company employees stricken with nervous tics and muffled huffs. Indeed, we find out that employees are literally exploding from complicit duress. Moreover, people around the nation are exploding due to the same mass- influence of security over free thought.

The notion of overextended office- dread causing desk- parked men and women to explode is a funny concept. However, I do wish the threat of human explosions was conveyed better and utilized for some of its testier, freakier implications a la Scanners. As presented here, the threat is an unveiled metaphor for a premature heart attack and for the all- consuming, post- 2. As you might have guessed, Winsterhammerman teeters on the brink—he’s having vivid, feverish, colonial dreams related to his surname that are reminiscent of VBS’s Drunk History—and he hilariously frets through doctor examinations and homoerotic jock physicals.

Unlike a premature Larry David on the first seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Winsterhammerman is perpetually troubled and discontent with his home life, sex life, and marriage. His wife, played by Judy Greer (Elizabethtown), is a self- absorbed vacuum living out a repressed day- to- day New Age prescription, one filled with self- help books and yoga- ish meditation. Sex is predictably treated as, “Want to give it a try,” and it’s funny watching Galifianakis react to the mundane request by cuddling up to himself and staring at the wall doom- eyed. He’s like a bear cub that can’t decide if disappearing is desirable or fucking terrifying, man. You can tell that Galifianakis digs the material and the film’s message, and during the few times when I was bored, his interest kept me interested. Of course, part of me just wanted to see his character lose another golf club to the sky or shatter more decorative glass in his kitchen for sickened amusement.

In one scene, Galifianakis acts his heart out in a nocturnal stampede- as- nervous breakdown that will make John Belushi‘s skull grin. One hopes that, as an actor, subversive performer, and admirable male, he never loses touch with the crazy in the years forthcoming. I’m always interested to see new and young filmmakers debut with movies that work as deliberate going- for- it breaks against the plundered, dark world of corporate offices and cubicles. It’s a cinematic oath that veers upon new tradition. With Visioneers, the Drake Brothers are invested in seeing Winsterhammerman find what he needs in life, and it involves little trial and much tribulation.

Money is not really a factor, which will earn a few eye rolls given the current climate of overdraft fees. Mine rolled when I first saw the character’s scenic Washington State crib and boat. But in the end, the Drakes roll out the character’s life path before us like a clean- cut epiphany; and usually IRL—well, at least ideally—that’s the way major life changes go down. Unfortunately, a sappy ending moderately undermines the message of individualism as well as the reality we all experience outside the screen.

But witnessing Galifianakis kick the total shit out of our solar system in the film? As we lose touch with albums, movies, and life’s worth as tangible objects for the picking, it doesn’t get much more real than that./Film Rating: 7. For current and upcoming screenings and information on Visioneers, go here. The film can be followed on Twitter.