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Synecdoche, New York” is the best film of the decade. It intends no less than to evoke the strategies we use to live our lives. After beginning my first viewing in confusion, I began to glimpse its purpose and by the end was eager to see it again, then once again, and I am not finished. Charlie Kaufman understands how I live my life, and I suppose his own, and I suspect most of us. Faced with the bewildering demands of time, space, emotion, morality, lust, greed, hope, dreams, dreads and faiths, we build compartments in our minds. It is a way of seeming sane.
The best films of the decade - Roger Ebert’s Journal - A great list of great films.
I still have not seen Synecdoche, New York, unfortunately. For me, it’s Kaufman’s honesty, his frankness in his work that makes it so powerful and meaningful and admirable. In a time when we are inundated with artifice and illusion, here’s a guy who writes movies about real people and creatively presents those people and their problems to us with alarming immediacy and insight.
