15 Movies That Thought They Were Smart But Totally Weren't

Synecdoche New York is probably the most pretentious film ever made.

It concerns a playwright (the brilliant, dearly missed Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who launches a bizarre theatre project in which he replicates the outside city of New York inside a warehouse.

Synecdoche New York piles on motif after motif, subplot after subplot and metaphor after metaphor on top of each other for two hours, resulting in a mind-melting, incomprehensible mess of a movie in which it is impossible to figure out what the hell is going on.

What makes it all even worse is that this throws one overdone, ridiculous and convoluted metaphor after another (such as doppelgangers, plays within plays etc.) at viewers and expects them to take lots of philosophical insight from it, despite the fact that all of these things just feel confusing and meaningless.

It's like showing someone a child's drawing of a house and expecting them to view it as a philosophical meditation on the meaning of existence. There's no denying that this movie is well-made and acted, but any positives are overshadowed by the beyond infuriating script.

Overall, Synecdoche New York is an overlong, smug, miserable, arrogant, confusing, excruciatingly boring, endlessly insufferable, and unbelievably pretentious meditation on... something? As such, this is the perfect epitome of a film which thought it was smart but completely wasn't.