Some items from my Netflix cue

The Visitor
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
The Motorcycle Diaries
Lars and the Real Girl
Billy Elliot

I swear I'll be a better blogger...Rachel Getting Married/Burn After Reading/W/Synecdoche New York

Okay, so I'm on a caffeine purge which is affecting my ability to beanscreen. Two weeks clean albeit a dc & rum once or twice.

Nonetheless, Hollywood keeps churning them out. Here's some of what I've seen in detox:

Rachel Getting Married---problem: do not see this film if you A) are forced to sit too close to the screen, B) have a tendency towards motion sickness, C) find loading a dishwasher uninteresting, D) already saw Girl, Interrupted and are over privileged upper middle class waif disorder flicks, E) had a large bag of popcorn and are sitting next to a woman from Long Island eating a smelly mustard hot dog, F) All of the above.

If you selected F, you are me. And in which case, this film is not for you. Though I respect Jonathan Demme's work and thought the wedding within the film was lovely (sucker for saris and New England homes), it was the exact time of fall flick fodder that I usually avoid. Overhyped because nothing else is coming out to compare it too. Except Saw V.

Burn After Reading--This got slammed by critics, who were expecting an all star cast and all star production team to deliver an all star black comedy strike. Not the case, but not completely a gutterball either. I loved Brad Pitt's character and the premise was pretty laugh out loud, sort of a poor man's Dr. Strangelove. Frances McDormand has the most expressive face. Lots of fun with that character's romantic pitfalls. But George Clooney's comic timing is underutilized and the film doesn't quite find its footing.

W--While I think it is important to see this film as an American voting in the upcoming election (if you are an American not voting in the upcoming election, we can no longer be friends and thus you must discontinue reading my blog right NOW!), it is hard to watch. Because this is not a work of fiction folks, but rather eight years of the shared experience of our nation, spin control from a moron. Oliver Stone does not send up W unfairly, instead he is given a partisan even hand. Best casting I've seen in a long while, if they offered Oscars for that. Too long, like the Bush presidency.

Synecdoche, New York--Charlie Kaufman's latest mindfuck, this time about a melancholy theatre professor who wins a MacArthur genius grant after a regional production of Death of A Salesman. He uses the grant to stage a twenty-year installation piece inside a midtown warehouse where reality and theatricality are blurred causing his personal relationships (with Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, and Michelle Williams) to teeter and collapse. Sure there are moments of absurdist brilliance, but the whole thing is too ponderous and artsy to be truly captivating. Note: the indie movie audience of the upper west side couldn't even stand for it, half the theatre cleared out 1 hour into it (New Yorkers put up with little, including tedious self-indulgent filmmaking). If this whole piece was meta, a comment on life about a comment on life, I think I don't lead the life Kaufman subscribes to. Thank god, otherwise, I would walk out.