the end is built into the beginning.

when someone close to you strongly insists watching a movie like "synecdoche, new york" because it reminds them of you, it's hard not to walk away thinking WTF. okay, well regardless if that was how you heard of it or not, you'd probs still turn off the tv/dvd player/blue ray/projector/boot leg chinatown disc thinking "wait, what the hell just happened?" it's just one of those kind of movies that comes from the psyche of charlie kaufman (hello? "eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" or "being john malkovich" ring a bell? [o hai john cusack u so fine]) that requires a few days to process and reflect upon.

obsessed with reality vs. living inside your head, death in all forms, and human disconnect, kaufman comes through once again with making little, but complete sense, in synecdoche (which, for the record, is NOT pronounced sink-a-douche as it was pointed out to yours truly in an organic grocery store in san francisco). my fave philip seymore hoffman, who for some reason i always find strangely attractive, plays small town theatre director caden cotard in upstate new york. after his wife leaves him to get a little *~* in berlin, he begins directing a massive theatre piece as a final attempt to do something important. the whole movie gets lost as the play moves within a play moves within a play inside an enormous theatre inside manhattan and all of the characters start acting out one another. confused yet? yeah, so am i.

while "synecdoche, new york" is horribly depressing, there's something raw and refreshing buried beneath all that epic sadness. at the end, a narrator tells us:

"What was once before you - an exciting, mysterious future - is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone's experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone is everyone."

maybe it's the collective human experience of trying to do something with what we have, despite how difficult all of this can be, is the uplifting message. we get up, go on, and even though we know it will be over for all of us in the end and our mark on the world will truly be nothing after the blip of our existence finishes, there remains a hope that we will be different and it is our choice how we play out our story.

shit, i need to take another hit off my bong and think about this some more.