There are nearly thirteen million people in the world . . .

Synecdoche, New York

Crit

Two things:

My all-time favorite Chas. Addams cartoon shows a man in a barber chain, sitting between facing mirrors. His image appears in an infinite regression, each smaller than the last but otherwise identical to it, and thus identical to all the others. Except for one, in the middle distance, where the face of a werewolf stares back, only to revert to form in the next iteration. It's kinda like that.

In Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., God plays dice with the baseball universe, is drawn into it more than he'd intended, then withdraws, whereupon the universe continues without him. It's kinda like that.

It's also kinda like Charlie Kaufman's own Adaptation, only with less masturbation and more ambition. Lots more ambition, like the Pentateuch to Adaptation's story of Cain and Abel.

This is, I think, a great antiexistential document. The trouble with life is not that it's meaningless; the trouble with life is that it has far, far, far too much meaning--some of us are condemned to see the world in the color of a turd. Not prepared yet to call it a great film, but I am prepared to say that it'll probably keep me awake tonight and other nights, and that's something.

Said Jennie Tonic, who of course got to see it weeks ago when it opened in New York, not that I'm bitter or anything:

I think the fact that you can't quite evaluate it when you come out is the whole point of it. I think it's brilliant. But it doesn't give you what you expect out of a movie. It's both surreal and realistic in a way I want to call "unrealistic," not in the sense of nonrealistic, but . . . well, just see it. Several times. I think you just have to see it several times, because it's your life, and that's how you have to live your life. It's hard to judge it as a movie.

Trailers

• Waltz with Bashir--Not sure I knew this is animated; has potential, but I'm sticking to my 3.