E tu vivrai nel terrore-L'aldila(The Beyond)
by Lucio Fulci(1981)
Incoherent, grizzly, and gore filled. It's very slow at points, and then when it eventually does get going, it's kind of hard to look at.
Makes "Dario Argento"(who was Tupac, to Fulci's Biggy), look like a master of suspense, by comparison. Both ...(read more) this film and Suspiria(Spoiler), feature a scene where a blind woman is attacked by her seeing eye dog. The difference is that where Argento might spend five minutes building music and sound and playing with your nerves a bit before the surprise, Fulci's scene comes after a group of corpses surround the blind woman whose, dog then attacks the undead, til the dog now full of zombie flesh, attacks the girl...who was supposed to be and admits that she is a ghost, begging the question how she could be eaten in the first place?
For Argento it's all about tension and irony, for Fulci it's gore and absurdity. Argento has tighter shots, Fulci wilder stories.
Another ridiculous moment is the acid bath...from across the room....
...or how the movie inexplicably transforms from a haunted house ghost mystery to a zombie survival film, for the last 20 minutes.
The opening sequence on the river and the final scene, are both particularly well shot.
Artuad inspired "Spaghetti Horror", goes for the gore, and though not as successful as it's ambitions, does have a more metaphysical and symbolic ending, than most films about gateways into Hell.
It's worth seeing.
Synecdoche, New York, is a play on words, as the story takes place is Schenectady, NY. Synecdoche, according to dictionary.com means "a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part, the special for the general or th
I loved it. They hated it. 
We argued the whole way home. It got heated.
It is true that Kaufman could use an editor, he is a first time director after all, and is not perfect. 
There were allot of moments I was repulsed and wanted the movie to end, but then I found myself being sucked back in the next scene. 
Few movies can play this kind of continual tug of 
Instead your left Caden Cotard, a theater director, whose life is slowly deteriorating, until he gets a genius grant and begins the great, true, meaningful work of his life
From there Kaufman explores just how impossible it is to ever fully master a narrative.
"Simulacrum" would be such a good title because almost nothing in this film is the genuine article, the title Synecdoche implies as much. 
Everyone becomes a character, idealized projection, or distortion in the world of Caden.
He reads a diary of his daughter, throughout the film, who hasn't lived with him in years.
What he reads is his projection of what she would be writing, which naturally would be about him. 
This extreme narcissism and melancholic attachments(everyone reminds me of her), becomes apparent in the film pretty quickly, the cartoons on the TV in the background, all having a Caden figure, and the re-runs on stage of the moments he's just lived.
I don't know if there's been a better metaphor for fantasy, in cinema, I've ever come across. 
The house is only possible so long as Caden doesn't live inside it.
Though a quick peruse of IMDB will show how almost every viewer has a different theory for that burning house, even so it's the best cinematic Rorschach since the glowing suitcase in Pulp Fiction (before it was spoiled with that soul business). 
With the exception of his shrink and the New Caden, all reject him at some point (not without good cause). 
This movie may have more in common with Fellini's "City Of Women" than "8 1/2".
A tremendous amount of ground is covered very quickly. 
To say this is a movie just about a man trying to make a play, is like saying Inland Empire" like it's movie poster said was just about "a woman in trouble", or "8 1/2" is just about the movie making industry.
But like I said, I didn't see this alone, and this movie won't be for everyone, but that's a good thing. 
Movies should not be for everyone. 
Where I thought it was a bit long, but excellently paced, challenging, funny, and ultimately moving. 
So to each his own, but if you like movies as more than just entertainment (whatever that could be), this is probably the first movie this year that really needs to be seen for yourself.
Directed by Clark Gregg(2008)
The only Chuck P. book I own. It's a very funny book, about lust and salvation, and here it is on screen in...pretty good form. That is to say I was a little dissapointed, with the ending in particular, which strikes a very different tone (not terrible, just different)....but that's niether here nor there. 
Choke is the story of Victor, med-school dropout who takes care of his 70's radical mom now suffering from dementia and dying after years of drug use and mental instability. In order to pay for her upkeep, Victor pulls double duty at his two jobs, one as an employee at a Colonial American theme park, and two, choking on food in restuaraunts, so that those who save his life, will feel obligated to help him out with cash from time to time. Who would save someone's life, only to let them die, once you know their sad penniless (over exaggerated) story? Victor targets the wealthy and affluent, "You don't wanna get saved by some waiter", he says in one of many direct adresses to the audience. The broken 4th wall, reminiscent of Fight Club, is taken directly from the book, and one of the films stronger techniques. 
In the hospital he meets, a young doctor, who assists him in translating his mother's diary, which leads to shoking questions about Victor's origins, and his father or lack there of. Victor goes to sex addict meetings usually just to have sex in the bathroom with fellow addicts. While his best freind Denny, a chronic masturbator, begins taking his first shaky steps to recover, which involves romancing a Stripper and collecting rocks for each day his sobriety, "idle hands are the devils playground". The sex addiction and the need to save his mom, are the twin turbins that propel this film, and by the end they are both so clearly entertwined it escapes being exploitative.
I enjoyed this version of Choke, which was kinda of like Choke-Light, but still very funny, if only slightly missing the aim of the novel; the heady and vulgar mix of the sacred and the profane. That is to say, important sub-plots, and main-plot points get muted; we know why Victor chokes, there are more reasons than I stated above, but we don't get to see the people who fund his faints here, as we do in the book, and so that aspect of the story, seems a little disconnected. As do Denny and the rocks, another vital story element for me, got put on the backburner here. Denny replaces one fetish with another, and most of the rooms of his house are filled with rocks(not in the movie). My favorite flashback is left out too, where Victor muses that as a child his only sense of stablity growing up, was knowing no matter where he was he could view the same internet porn site, of a man and a monkey, and how thier mutually humiliarted smile, was all that kept him going sometimes.... (Below is a photograph from the original end of the movie & book, that was cut before release. Here we would see all of the people Victor has scammed meeting up at Denny's Rock Formation. Either to stone him to death, or help build...we will never know)
Okay, but everyone always says the book is better than the movie, I know, I know, I just had to get that out. 
What's left of Choke though is commanded by Sam Rockwell, who is only improving as an actor, and Angelica Houston who needs no intro. While it's not as conceptually taught as I would have liked, its still really, really funny, and at a few moments, a bit moving (Ive got a personal soft spot for movies with visits to the demented in hospitals; The Savages is especially hard to watch), at least for me. It's an allegorical sex comedy, but it's also a very accessible one, considering the wierdness of the material. 
It's a more personal story than "Fight Club", and almost an opposite idealogoy, "building anything", versus "tearing down everthing", but told in the same sardonic writerly tone, weve come to expect from Palahniuk. In the end, I just wanted more, but it was fun, and the story was brought to life, mostly just as I had imagined it when reading.
Also it's got the funniest and perhaps the only funny, "rape" scene, ever filmed (it is and it's not what it sounds like). 
