Hi Dr. K (I nearly put Mr. K but I know that you didn't spend 6 years in Evil Medical School to be called 'Mr').



Just a quick note to remind you that The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, a film that you described as 'tertiary syphilis', is being screened on BBC1 on Christmas Eve and I wouldn't want you to miss an opportunity to rant at the idiot box.



Secondly, have you seen Mary and Max? It's an Australian clay-mation I was lucky enough to see at the Cambridge Film Festival. It's INCREDIBLE and is my pick for best of the year. I think it's available on region 1 dvd so if you want something decent to watch over the holidays, make it that.





Ho ho ho.

Dear Mark.



With regards to Synecdoche, New York, I too think it’s a wonderful film, and is my favourite film of the year. I can also say that I love all of it, I don’t think the last 15 minutes are irrelevant, and I think it’s got an amazing cast. I think it’s interesting, extremely bleak, but oddly comforting as well, with a terrific script from one of the best screenwriters going.



However, that’s not to say I don’t understand why people don’t like it. And not in that hideous way that a lot of fans have defended it, by saying things like “go see transformers 2 instead”. I hate that this is the kind of film that’s associated with that kind of pompous, flaccid idiocy. Just because someone doesn’t like the film doesn’t mean they’re stupid.



I’m just aware that it’s not for everyone, I showed it to one person in particular who found it disturbing. There’s an enormous amount going on, and I think that’s intentional, in fact I love that about it, but I can completely understand your reaction to it and the similar reactions of others.



I think it’s an incredible film, but one I wouldn’t necessarily recommend to everyone.



On the subject of [Rec], utterly terrifying, watched it in a room full of alpha males, one of them let out an audible yelp at one point, and no-one mocked him for it because we were all terrified. Very, very nervous about the upcoming sequel though.

First of, Merry Xmas. Secondly, what about your replies to the Fave Xmas Films and Animated Films blog? Well for the latter, you did get back to a user on the subject of your thought on A Matter of Loaf and Death, but I wanted to know your reply to the picks by users on their best and worse animated films.



Maybe you could get back to us on those topics after Xmas? Oh and who's driving the car, if you don't mind me asking? :D

whoever was driving, they ran a red light at around 50 seconds into the video...



highly illegal, unless Dr was in a motorcade....are you that important yet??

Speaking of the "new wave" realistic horrors, picture this. A good idea is, a film critic complaining about those films is trapped in a haunted house. He must use his expert film knowledge to fight of demons then ending with a battle with the critics idea of the worst director ever.

I believe it would be a great gory coedy horror in the R.e.c. style that our good friend "The Doc" would be a good main lead in.

And, in your opinion Dr Kermode, what do you view as the greatest filming style out there?

r.i.p. dan o'bannon

And just the other day I was praising O'Bannon's work in making the smug populace of male moviegoers fear the prospect of interstellar rape.

Had I been in possession of a hat, it would be tipped in respect at this point.

for extra credit,

with regards to inappropriate descrpitions on film marketing material (with acute M.McFly reference)

I recently bought a vhs copy of teen wolf and on the back it said, in a quote from LA Weekly,



"Michael J Fox is much better here than he is in back to the future",



I forgot that in the 80's it was ok to popularise your movie by denegrating the other films of its main star. They should start doing that again, would have worked a treat for The Men Who Stare At Goats,

"Hilarious. Clooney sh*ts all over his performance in Batman and Robin"

Just watched tonight's Newsnight Review going of the year's cultural highlights. Forgot about Mark shedding tears over the stage version of The Sound of Music; they even played it slow motion! hahahaa. I don't know if I heard correctly but Kirsty Walk's highlight of the decade was Lynch's Mulholland Drive. Great choice.

I really need to proof-read my posts. lol. Over not of. Wark not Walk. D'oh.

ghostwatch is as much one word as massmedia or temporarypopculture, all of which are synonyms in that one case.

It might seem laughable now, but I've never been as scarred of anything, as I was when I first saw Ghostwatch! I was a fairly jaded nine year old when that program was first (and I think last) screened, but I honestly thought that we were all going to hell in a hand cart!



No other film (not even films as great as "Blue Velvet" or "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer") have ever had that effect on me!

Just seen Avatar (in 3D). Blown away by the effects. My 1st 3D film too. No in your face '3D flies out of the screen' stuff (other than insects), but it adds real depth of field to the jungle scenes.

The 3D glasses fitted over my spec's too, and no red/blue lenses either.



The other special effects (creatures, natives, scenery etc) are also pretty excellent. It's a drama/action, but a love story too; Dances with Wolves in outer space. Cameron's shifted his posture since Aliens. As a story it's no better, no worse than T2 or Titanic; much better than True Lies.



I have to say this has had the same impact on me as when Jurassic Park or Terminator 2 came out; it really does take special effects to a new level; you forget this planet or the native people doesn't actually exist; it's pretty convincing.



Should every film be made this way? God no.

In 2 yrs time we'll probably get everything in 3D (I'm sure TV adverts will copy what special effects they can from this within a few months), just because they can.



But with this film I felt I was watching something special, regardless of the merits of the story; and it's an OK story, especially if you've read and liked early si-fi like Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars series.



Would 3D etc add anything to, say, Gran Torino? No. But for an occasional big budget spectacular such as this it worked for me.

very sad to hear of the passing of dan o'bannon. He always seemed to have the most heart of all those various writers/executives that nurtured the original alien into existence before fox/giler/weaver ultimately ran the series passionlessly into the earth.



you can read a great interview with him here-



https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/7576/the_den_of_geek_interview_dan_obannon.html

Dear Mark,



I'm sorry to clutter up your blog with an irrelevance such as this but I'm trying everything I can think of:



My name is Michael Glass and I'm a third (and final) year Film With Television student at the University of Warwick in the UK, and I'm currently writing a dissertation focusing on stereoscopic film, which I feel is massively undervalued in contemporary film criticism, and in particular the current resurgence of 3D. The questions I am asking are: what are the reasons for the modern resurgence of 3D, and how is it unique in comparison to previous revivals; and what can/does 3D technology provide to film in aesthetic, thematic and dramatic terms, and to what extent is it utilised usefully?



As there's little literature on the subject - certainly the modern popularity - I'm conducting interviews with filmmakers, historians and so on to get a feeling of how different people think about 3D. Other interviews I've conducted have been with Ray Zone, a 3D historian; Phil McNally, stereoscopic supervisor on Monsters vs Aliens; and Rob Letterman, one of the co-directors of Monsters vs Aliens.



I am looking in particular to get in touch with you given your strong opinions on the topic - it's fair to say that my other interviewees haven't been too critical of the technology. I would like to conduct an interview with you to function as primary evidence to include in my work. The interview will focus primarily on questions of aesthetics in 3D rather than the economic and technological aspects, although your thoughts on these aspects would not be unwelcome!



I would be happy to travel in order to conduct a face-to-face interview. If this proves difficult, my dissertation supervisor, Dr Jon Burrows, assures me that a phone or email-based interview would also be perfectly acceptable.



The deadline for my dissertation is in February 2010, so there is some time, but of course, the sooner I can make progress the better.



Should you wish to see any examples of work I have previously done (although they are not on the topic of 3D), I will be more than happy to supply you with them.



I hope you read this comment - I've tried Hidden Flack and your Five Live producer so far and had no luck!



Kind regards,



Michael Glass



[email protected]

[email protected]

I have to be honest (can't be bothered writing a defence for the film, as the film dosen't deserve more of my time) Synecdoche, New York was rubbish.



FACT

On Synecdoche, you are plain wrong Dr.K, it is alternately confusing, outrageous, irritating and pretentious...it is also absolutely brilliant.



Find me a monologue in any other film last year that matches the one below for emotional power.



The last 15 minutes aren't unnecessary, they are the WHOLE POINT OF THE FILM.



"What was once before you...an exciting, mysterious future. Is now behind you. Lived. Understood. Disappointing. You realise you are not special. You have struggled into existence and are now stooping silently out of it. This is everyone's experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. As the people who adore you, stop adoring you. As they die, as they move on, as you shed them as you've shed your beauty. Your youth. As the world forgets you. As you recognise your transience. As you begin to lose your characteristics one by one. As you learn there is no-one watching you and there never was. You think only about driving. Not coming from anyplace. Not arriving at anyplace. Just driving. Counting off time. Now you are here, it's 7.43. Now you are here, it's 7.44 Now you are...Gone."

- Charlie Kaufman

Just to let you know Mark, that Johnny Deep isn't so bad after all.



via Joblo.com



"It's been about a decade since fate slapped the shit out of Terry Gilliam's THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE (as seen in the documentary LOST IN LA MANCHA). The project has slowly been struggling back to life, but it seems like it's about to get a hefty zap from the defibrillator. Clear!



After a giant question mark hovering over the whole thing, it sounds like Gilliam managed to lure his original star Johnny Depp back (which should certainly help with financing), judging from this exchange at the end of a lengthy Paste interview:



Paste: Between such tentative projects as GOOD OMENS, THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE and the Gorillaz feature, what do you have on the horizon that you can talk about?

Gilliam: There’s a couple others as well, but QUIXOTE is what we’re working on at the moment. Hopefully that’ll get up and running next year.



Paste: Is it still going to have Johnny Depp in it?

Gilliam: Yeah, and I rewrote the script. Robert Duvall has agreed to play Quixote. I’m really excited. So it’s all that business of funding now.



The story is loosely based on the classic Cervantes tale of a quirky old Spaniard, and follows an obnoxious advertising exec who gets hurled back through time where he meets Don Quixote, and ends up becoming his sidekick Sancho Panza for various adventures."



You see good things come to those who wait.



https://www.joblo.com/index.php?id=30088



Happy xmas and a happy new year to everyone on here btw.

The reason people are so apt to defend "Synecdoche, New York" is because it relates to how people are and how life is. You lose time without realising it. You make bad decisions. You miss opportunities. How you choose to respond to the great conspiracies of life, including those brought about through your own actions, is the premise of Caden Cotard's story, and our own. He hits his head off the medicine cabinet - in what seems a random instance of this film - and he's angry, and confused, and bleeding. Maybe if he hadn't started his morning in a wild flurry, he could've avoided hitting his head. Maybe he couldn't have. We will always regret the things we cannot change, and will relive our emotional experience of them as vividly as those we cherish in our memory.



The film may not be "entertainment" - it's infuriating and unconventional in the way "entertainment" isn't supposed to be. Does good art not offer the same things? Here is Roger Ebert's edifying reveal of its many parts, which is more than I can put into words for now:



We find something we want to do, if we are lucky, or something we need to do, if we are like most people. We use it as a way to obtain food, shelter, clothing, mates, comfort, a first folio of Shakespeare, model airplanes, American Girl dolls, a handful of rice, sex, solitude, a trip to Venice, Nikes, drinking water, plastic surgery, child care, dogs, medicine, education, cars, spiritual solace -- whatever we think we need. To do this, we enact the role we call "me," trying to brand ourselves as a person who can and should obtain these things.



In the process, we place the people in our lives into compartments and define how they should behave to our advantage. Because we cannot force them to follow our desires, we deal with projections of them created in our minds. But they will be contrary and have wills of their own. Eventually new projections of us are dealing with new projections of them. Sometimes versions of ourselves disagree. We succumb to temptation -- but, oh, father, what else was I gonna do? I feel like hell. I repent. I'll do it again.



"Synecdoche, New York" is not a film about the theater, although it looks like one. A theater director is an ideal character for representing the role Kaufman thinks we all play. The magnificent sets, which stack independent rooms on top of one another, are the compartments we assign to our life's enterprises. The actors are the people in roles we cast from our point of view. Some of them play doubles assigned to do what there's not world enough and time for. They have a way of acting independently, in violation of instructions. They try to control their own projections. Meanwhile, the source of all this activity grows older and tired, sick and despairing. Is this real or a dream? The world is but a stage, and we are mere actors upon it. It's all a play. The play is real.

Well done Dr. K. All is covered now, have a very merry Christmas!

Dear Mark,



I thought I'd add my personal favourite to the list of quotes used misleadingly on movie posters.



"Titan A.E. is Star Wars" ran the tagline. The actual quote was taken from Owen Gleiberman's review in Entertainment Weekly, and was as follows:



"Titan A.E. is Star Wars pulped and mashed into flavorless kiddy corn".



Have an excellent Christmas, and keep up the good work.



Nick

Hi Dr. Mark,



Just your previous blogs about films over the christmas period. Just watched Blade Runner and although not a typical family christmas film it has reminded me just how good that film is.Its still the best dystopian sci fi film of all and I cant see how Ridley can produce another version or cut without making it more complicated.



Merry christmas



Liam

I love Synecdoche, New York. When I saw it at the Cornerhouse in Manchester. I was elated, pleased, excited and knew two things. That I couldn’t wait to see it again and again and also that I was looking forward to reading the inevitable film theory spin-offs.



(Some) reviewers have been desperate to label the film a ‘masterpiece’ but none of writing I’ve seen has noted the film’s debt to the great auteurs, giants like Tarkovsky, Bunuel, Resnais, Fellini and Tati, directors who treated their audience with intelligence and respect with work in which ideas took precedence over explaining the plot and offered a visual contract that asked us to use our own imagination and personal experience to explain the order of events and character motivations. Like Kaufman, they’ve also been accused of self-indulgence which isn’t necessarily incorrect; but everyone with a personal vision is self-indulgent and more often than not the really interesting, surprising work comes when that vision hasn’t been compromised.



Many of the films of those directors have moments in which the viewer finds their understanding being stretched, which probably require a pause to check some director’s notes. Synecdoche is replete with such incidents, though like those films too, the ideas and themes coalesce afterwards as they did for me on the train home. That if we’re not all careful we can all find ourselves in a state of recursion trying to recreate the times when we truly comfortable rather than creating something new, a constant state of discontentedness that leads us to miss the moments when we actually should be contented. I'm growing my hair longer again because I remember being happier when I had longer hair. That sort of thing. Or we become afraid of taking risks in case that contentedness is wrecked, leading to a kind of emotional paralysis.



Nothing appears at Google Scholar yet. There’s the fittingly titled, “Debating Inclusion in Synecdoche, New York: A Response to Gresham and MacMillan” which is about “the comparative development of socialization skills in children with disabilities placed in inclusive or non-inclusive educational programs” but these things take time, critical mass must build, the film is too new. In interviews, Kaufman has said that he only wants to create films which lead to at least one conversation afterwards and he must have succeeded; for years to come I suspect, people will be debating the meaning of the work, from its structure to themes to meaning and not just in film classes, but psychonalysis courses. And mathematics labs too.

Hello Mark,

Have you seen all of The Wire yet and if so..isn't it the greatest thing ever shown on television ever??

A capo is not just for Mafia control.

Kermode, Kermode, Kermode. Where did it all go wrong?

It seems that if it's mainstream it's a terrible film. If it so happens that it has an actor or actress in the film that so happens more than one person has heared of its tainted and should be sent to movie hell where the likes of Transformers will be found.

I would love to see your DVD collection, thats taking into account that any of the films you actully like make it to DVD.

Dear Mark,

Can you, or any reader, help a fading memeory to recall a recent film (last five years) about a man who arrived in New York with memory loss. British I think and possibly true, so maybe a documentary. Thanks.