Extremely ambitious film that almost succeeds: it is long and confusing, but it could be no other way. Fans of Joyce and "Finnegan's Wake" should appreciate this, but it's much more accessible than that book. Hallucinogenic, but it makes sense and is an effective and often moving externalization/communication of the internal life of an everyman, with warts and all respectfully and sensitively rendered.

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The title word is a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part. In the course of trying to create a play of reality & honesty, the main actor’s own, real (or is it?) life is falling apart. This is Pirandello for filmgoers. What is the nature of reality? Can love exist, and how? Can one put meaning to chaos? This is a difficult film, but there is a thread of basic sweetness evident in it and its conclusions.

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About 123 minutes too long, boring, full of clichés, an Allen and Fellini wannabe vomit. I love weird, I can enjoy slow, but this has nothing. The only reason I saw the end (I fast-forwarded – with sound – about half of it) was so I could see the end and maybe, hopefully be surprised. No such luck. I felt like I ate something bad.

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‘Synecdoche, New York’ is a movie unlike any you’ve ever seen, one so bold, dazzling and original that this sentence scarcely does it justice. Can any? It’s a movie that starts in the past, ends in the future, spans a lifetime, clocks in at just over two hours but feels about half that length, a movie where time seems to simply slip away, capturing better than any other work of art I can think of the fleetingness of our lives. None of this should be surprising, coming from the mind of Charlie Kaufman, but somehow it still is. And yes, some of the themes here do overlap with his previous work, but I won’t hold that against it (and neither should you). Opening with a beleaguered Philip Seymour Hoffman dragging out of bed, he eats breakfast, reads the newspaper, turning straight to the obituaries, Harold Pinter died, goes to work staging a revival of ‘Death of a Salesman’ (with a 20-something cast!), begins a casual flirtation with one of his co-workers, goes home, contemplates his life and perceived ill-health, feels alienated from his wife and daughter, goes to bed, wakes up, reads the paper, again turning straight to the obits, and like that, without even realizing it, a year has gone by. All of this takes about a half hour of screen time, but passes in a blink of an eye. And so it goes. From there the film becomes increasingly abstract, broadening out to cover such big themes as life itself and our futile search for meaning in it, mostly through art. And did I mention it’s funny? Seriously funny. Who will play me after I’m dead? That question kept popping up in my head as I watched this film, and probably describes it as well as anything can. This is a work of sheer genius…you’ll probably hate it.

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'Synecdoche, New York' was strange almost soley for the sake of being strange. The characters were not endearing or engaging and the story itself was not very interesting. If the intent was to delve into the director’s obsession with his first original stage production, it failed; all that came through was his own self loathing and failure as a human.

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There are a number of unusual elements in this film that are entertaining, but, overall, it is sluggish and repetitive. Woody Allen does this material much better and manages to give it life and humor both of which are missing in this piece. Hoffman's work is well done, but watching a character whine through two hours is enough to make one sick of that character. One bright spot is the appearence of Tom Noonan: a fine actor among other gifts who is seen all too seldom and in the smallest of roles all too often.

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