The two names attached to the film that required a viewing are, of course, Spike Jonze (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) and Dave Eggers (Away We Go, You Shall Know Our Velocity).  It turns out that I put this blind faith in the right hands.  Jonze had turned the beloved children’s book by Maurice Sendak and made it into an ethereal, visceral cinematic experience.

Max (Max Records) is an imaginative, rambunctious boy who’s world is shifting at it’s very foundation when his parents get divorced and his mom (Catherine Keener) starts dating someone again (Mark Ruffalo).  Fighting to find his place he acts out and extremely sensitive, like most little boys would be.  One night, after a squabble with his mom, Max runs away, finds a small boat, which he boards and rides until he gets to the place where the wild things are.

Once he gets there, he meets a motley group of friends: Carol (James Gandolfini), Alexander (Paul Dano), Judith (Catherine O’Hara), Ira (Forest Whitaker), KW (Lauren Ambrose), and a few others.  Like Max, the group finds themselves in a state of change.  The group dynamics are shifting, and no one is really happy about it.  Before the eat Max, he convinces them that he’s a king and can solve all their problems.  Desperate for a leader to fix them, they all play along.

The feel of the film is so perfectly and beautifully lachrymose, it’s impossible not to get sucked into Max’s imagination.  The script (which Eggers had a monumental task of taking the short children’s story to a feature-length film) wasn’t pretentious or obtrusive, it was charmingly hilarious and, when it needed to be, poignant and touching.  Records is a fantastic actor.  I can’t imagine any other child actor working today that could have outdone him in this performance.  While all the wild things were great, Lauren Ambrose really managed to steal the show with her voice acting.

Cinematographer Lance Acord (Marie Antoinette, Lost in Translation) shows off his tremendous talent of framing shots and locations to create a truly unique and affecting world that perfectly contrasts all the emotions Max and his friends could possibly be struggling with.  What everyone is saying is true: it’s darker than the book, and may not be perfect for small children, but this is a masterpiece of film.

4 out of 4 stars

The tale of An American Crime is based on a true story, and it’s really one of the most disturbing crimes in American history.  If you don’t know about Gertrude Baniszewski and what she did to Sylvia Likens, read it here on wikipedia.  It will blow your mind.  Because I was aware of the backstory, I desperately wanted to see this at the 2007 festival.  Showing conflicts made this impossible, but it’s finally out on DVD.  Catherine Keener headlines as Baniszewski, Ellen Page plays Silvia, James Franco play Baniszewski uber-loser of a boyfriend, and there are a few other respected actors (like Bradley Whitford) that sprinkle cameos here and there.

Basically, Baniszewski accepts two teenage girls as borders in her home that she shares with her six biological children.  She’s ill (it’s not made clear with malady), there’s no man supporting the family, and she may have a small prescription drug problem (mind you this all takes place in Indiana in the sixties).  Sylvia and her sister are left with Baniszewski for twenty dollars a week, while her parents tour with a carnival (I’m not kidding).  Seeking an outlet for the bitterness cause by the steaming pile that life has served her, Baniszewski starts abusing Sylvia: beating her with belts, rounding up neighborhood children to sear words in her body with a hot needle like ‘I’m a prostitute and proud of it.’  The horrors piled on Sylvia are unending, and unbearable.

The story itself, is as dark and brooding as real life allows.  It’s like Hostel, but this actually happened.  The problem is, O’Haver butchered it like Bush butchered our economy.  Central acts that should have been the most powerful, lacked any sort of intensity.  First class performances by Page and Keener (who have both yet to let me down in a film) couldn’t save this middle-of-the-road waste of time.  The script chose to gloss over the bitter truth of the story in lieu of unreliable, first-person narrated fantasies, unending shots of Keener crying on a couch, and a whole lot of other boring elements that makes this film not even worth a rental.  The end was so cushioned against the terror and dread of the real story, that you actually don’t really care what happens to Sylvia.  It’s an American crime to watch this film.

1 out of 4 stars

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a small time theater director who has incredibly bad luck.  The name Cotard, by the way, is most likely a reference to a rare nueropsychiatric disorder in which a person believes that he is dead, or doesn’t exist.  This is constantly hinted at throughout the movie.  Caden has a wife, Adele (played by Catherine Keener who has not once disappointed me with a performance), and a young daughter.  It’s a horribly dysfunctional marriage, with hints of lesbian love affairs (with an odd character played by Jennifer Jason Leigh who got lost in her role–not in a good way).  Adele takes her daughter, and leaves Caden for her art show in Berlin, leaving him all alone.  He then is given a MacArthur Genius Grant and attempts to create a new play that’s powerful and true.  The entire time, he’s sick with one weird affliction after the next: seizures, pustules, tremors, bleeding gums, losing the ability to cry, salivate, swallow.

With his wife gone, Caden starts exploring relationships with other women.  This leads to an affair with his eventual assistant Hazel (played by Samantha Morton) who lives in a house that’s been on fire since before she bought it, a short marriage to his leading lady Claire (Michelle Williams) which produces another daughter, and another leading lady Tammy (played by Emily Watson) who plays Hazel in Caden’s new play.  It gets very confusing as the movie goes on, as Caden attempts to make a life-size replica of New York in an enormous warehouse.  Actors become actors playing actors, playing actors, playing actors.

There are some very touching, hilarious and poignant moments in Synedoche.  The acting is tremendous.  This is one of the most talented ensemble casts of any movie this year.  Kaufman’s direction is incredibly ambitious, and is much better than you’d expect for a freshman effort.  You’d think he’d been in the director’s chair for years.  His style is distinctive and beautiful.  It’s useless to list all of the players by name when it seems they were all equally as driven and satisfying in their roles (save Leigh, and I’m not sure who’s at fault there).

As far as entertainment goes, I definitely wasn’t bored during the lengthy two hours and three minutes. The one major issues that plagues the film is that Kaufman brings up and flutters around scores of interesting ideas, without landing on any one of them to fully develop them.  For a while, the film seems to be about death, and the beauty of it.  Then it’s about the sadness of death.  Then it’s about unrequited love.  Now is it about an unreliable narrator? Then it’s about…  The entire two hours, Kaufman pitches concept after concept at the audience, and before I had a chance to even begin to wrap my mind around it, the movie had moved on.  Perhaps this problem would be solved with a repeat viewing, but mostly it seems like there’s simply too much crammed in here.  Kaufman could have written several movies with so much material.

Extremely dark, and requiring intense amounts of concentration, Synecdoche, New York is not for your average movie-goer.  It has it’s flaws, but if you make the effort, Kaufman can take you into an overwhelming world of creative expression.

3 out of 4 stars

Rottentomatoes: 65% – Cream of the Crop: 67%

The story follows Hollywood power producer Ben (played by Robert De Niro) as he screws up most everything around him.  He’s recognized as one of the thirty most powerful producers in Hollywood, yet he can’t seem to get a grip on his own life.  He’s torn several ways, between multiple ex-wives, which he still seems to be in love with, his several children, his responsibilities to studio head Lou (the spectacular Catherine Keener), and the actors he works close with such as Sean Penn (playing himself) and Bruce Willis (also playing himself).  He spends most of the movie trying to fix uninteresting problems and despite devoting a good two hours to this, nothing is really resolved.

This whole satire of Hollywood thing is getting kind of old, especially in What Just Happened”s case, where despite poking fun at themselves, they still end up looking like the good guys, and save the day at the end of the film.  The script was written by Art Linson who also wrote the book the film is based on.  His script writing is restricted to this film and 1978′s American Hot Wax (although, again, he’s produced some pretty cool stuff such as The Black Dahlia, and Into the Wild).  The script ends up being nothing special, and the movie as a whole doesn’t bring anything to the table that hasn’t been seen before in the scores of Hollywood movies about itself.  It’s a clumsy, half-assed piece that does provide a few laughs, but leaves your mind faster than you’ll leave your theater seat.

1.5 out of 4 stars

Rottentomatoes: 51% – Cream of the Crop: 44%

Hamlet comes to us from, like so many other bitchin’ films, Sundance Film Festival and is directed by Andrew Fleming who has a pretty hit and miss, average, mediocre track record.  Fleming directed 2007′s Nancy Drew and 1996′s The Craft.  Which makes this oddball, uproariously hilarious comedy somewhat surprising.

Remember that Cronenberg film Crash (not the Sandra Bullock version that won the Academy Award for best picture, but the 1996 dark drama about people that get off from being in/watching car crashes)?  The tagline of that movie is: The most controversial film you’ll ever see.  I’d like give that honor to Hamlet 2.  The irreverence is so hilarious, your stomach will hurt from laughing, but you feel bad because you know He’s watching you and frowning, but you just can’t stop laughing because it’s so f-ing funny (‘He’ being Jesus, whom the film makes light of).

Steve Coogan leads a talented cast as Dana Marschz, the creepy, and dedicated drama teacher who makes a last ditch effort to put on a play so successful, it will stop the drama department from shutting down at the high school where he teaches in Tuscon, Arizona.  Fleming makes no secret of how he feels towards Tucson, and I have a feeling he may have offended some of it’s residents (you can only call it a shit-hole so many times before people start to get it).  Catherine Keener plays Brie, Dana’s alcoholic wife, and plays her terrifically well.  Other nuggets of joy include Elizabeth Shue playing herself, David Arquette as Dana and Brie’s fitness-fanatical roommate, and Amy Poehler as the ACLU representative who’s married to a Jew and proud of it.

While there are some lulls in the hilarity, it’s worth it to wade through the slow sections to get to the parts that will have burst in to laughter for hours after you’ve left the theater.  If Jesus jokes or sexual humor offend you however, this is definitely not the movie for you, as some of the acts and musical numbers (like ‘Rock Me Sexy Jesus’) might come across as crass…

3 out of 4 stars

Rottentomatoes: 61% – Cream of the Crop: 57%

Spike Jonze started out as a music video director.  Directing videos for Bjork, the Beastie Boys, and others, he developed quite the style, which is immediately evident with his direction in Being John Malkovich.  Some directors that make the Jump from music videos to film put all their effort into style, and let the content (plot lines, character development, etc.) slide (unfortunately, Tarsem falls into this catagory, even though The Fall is one of my favorite films this year).  Fortunately for Jonze, Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation) wrote one helluva script that leaves you completely satisfied and yet wanting more.

The script was fresh, entertaining and wickedly funny.  One of my favorite parts follows:

“Excuse me, are you John Malkovich?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Wow, you’re really, uh, great in that movie, where you play that retard.”

“Oh, thank you very much…”

“I have a cousin who’s a retard.”

“…oh, thank you.”

“Yeah, so, um, as you might imagine, it means a lot to me to see retards portrayed on the silver screen so… compassionately.”

“Well thank you very much, I appreciate that. Good night.”

Read here for more memorable quotes from the movie.  If I can’t convince you to see this movie, those quotes will.

All the players are remarkable.  Cameron Diaz isn’t even recognizable as Lotte, the frumpy wife animal-lover, that believes she’s transgendered, once experiencing lovemaking with a woman from Malkovich’s point of view.  There’s her husband Craig (John Cusack), who just wants to share his artistic vision with the world as a puppeteer  and resents his wife for wanting children.  There’s Craig’s co-worker Maxine (Catherine Keener, who is the true star of the show) who falls in love with Lotte, but only when she inhabits Malkovich.  I’ve always felt the Academy has snubbed Catherine Keener, but they finally recognized her fantastic performance in this movie with a nomination nod.  Craig discovers a small door in his office that serves as a portal to the conscious of John Malkovich.  Because he’s in love with her, Craig shares this with Maxine who decides to rent out the experience afterhours to those who want to be somebody else.  And finally there’s John Malkovich who is, as always, (except that musketeer movie) tremendous.

I can’t praise Malkovich enough.  It is endlessly entertaining, and I gaurantee you will lose yourself in it, if you only give it a chance.

4 out of 4 stars

Rottentomatoes: 92% – Cream of the Crop: 92%

Rated R for language and sexuality.