Our top choices for TIFF 2010:
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Twitch - Synecdoche, New York is going to be a hard sell in Schenectady, New York; and not just because it starts right off with a titular pun more inclined to make a crowd of linguists chuckle than your average crowd at the multiplex. In my book, that’s a good thing. For his first directorial effort, Charlie Kaufman proves there’s still a trick or two left to the magical art of moviemaking; especially when imagination is the confused rabbit pulled out of the tophat. This is the movie that should have been preceded by the animated short Presto.
A dark mindtickler, Synecdoche, New York is a bardo state left waiting for that final trim in a barbershop of mirrors. Perhaps not so ironically—instead of a trim—things get shaggier and shaggier, which ultimately reflects Kaufman’s mentally-drenched tale as something flawed but heartfelt, cathartic and hopelessly human.
Originally configured as a horror story, Kaufman borrows a cue from Jacob’s Ladder but envisions it with the relative perspectives of M.C. Escher. The ladders in Synecdoche, New York aren’t Biblically simple; they go up, down, sideways, backwards, forwards, and even bend a little caught in the gravitational compression of Kaufman’s black hole of an imagination. Wrestling with a single angel seems simple by comparison. Never before has directorial control seemed so inaccessible, if not downright impossible… [Full Story]
