Synecdoche, New York

Caden Cotard is a relatively successful theatre director, married to a
successful artist, with a young daughter. His health's not all that it might
be, and his marriage is a bit dead in the water. His life begins to spiral way
out of control, as he attempts to create a massively complex autobiographical
theatre piece, with a cast of thousands, recreating his entire life and
everyone that connects with him in a warehouse set.

Now, this is a film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, writer of Being
John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, so it should be no
surprise that things take a rapid turn for the incredibly bizarre, dreamlike
and hallucinatory very quickly. Uncompromisingly so, in fact; not much that
happens in the second half makes a lick of sense, even though, ultimately, it's
quite justified. It's a deliberately confusing and occasionally disturbing bit
of cinema, but I would say completely worthwhile. Like some sort of odd cross
between Michel Gondry and David Lynch.

Obviously, when a film is largely dream sequence, it's all to easy for it to
disappear up its own arse. Synecdoche avoids this by being frequently highly
amusing, as things take absurd and whimsical turns all over the place, as
dreams are wont to do. So it's surreally amusing, surreally disturbing,
surreally melancholy... basically, all flavours of surreal in one big
surreality selection box. Very nice.

Still don't know how to pronounce it. Apparently it's not done that well at the
box office, and I wonder if, in part, that's because people have gone "I'll
have a ticket for sneck... sink.. sind... Wolverine please."