8. Synecdoche, New York
Speaking of wanting to kill oneself, after
sitting through
Synecdoche, New York, putting my head in the gas oven seemed pretty awesome. This film is just all-out depressing. I've got a pretty high threshold for depressing stuff too, y'know.
Mulholland Drive? Kind of a bummer.
No Country for Old Men? Well, ya win some, ya lose some. But after watching Philip Seymour Hoffman, (whose only rival is Paul Giamatti in the Sad Sack Stakes), rot on both the inside and outside for a couple of hours, causing misery to everyone around him, my eyes had glazed over and my soul felt as heavy and dense as dirt. There's only one reasons why I keep this film in my collection... ... Because it's one of the only films on this list that I would deign to display front and centre in my DVD rack, and it gives me a chance to show off. 'Oh,
Synecdoche? Charlie Kafuman's masterpiece. ... Oh, of
course I understood the narrative, it's all about Jungian psychology. It also cleverly references both the phenomena of synecdoche, wherein something refers to a fragment of a whole, and Cotard Syndrome, where one is obsessed with decay. It's just
so meta.
So meta.'* *I had no freakin' idea what the narrative was about the first time that I watched it, and I gleaned this information from that bastion of knowledge, Wikipedia. I'm sorry to all the dinner party guests that I have ever bored with this information. I am full of fecal matter. I'm sorry. I can also be an insufferable adult.