Indulge Your Senses

If you are like me, I love when a movie is visually stimulating. Filled with metaphoric symbolisms and a solid story that titillates your brain cells is what I crave and seek. One of those movies for me was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, starring Jim Carrey (unusually) in a serious role and Kate Winslet as his manic pixie girlfriend. This is an unconventional love story depicted with a unique twist. Assuming you’ve obviously seen it and obviously assuming you loved it, then you should definitely check out Synecdoche New York.

When I first stumbled upon Eternal Sunshine, I was encapsulated with the writing and pacing of the story, which through research was written and executive produced by Charlie Kauffman. I then started to go down the rabbit hole of Kauffman films seeking more of his stylized abstract movies. His directorial and writing style in Synecdoche New York is distinctive and glaringly intricate and complex. Multiple re-watches are required to truly grasp what you can from this masterpiece.

Most movies I find tend to treat audiences as incapable of grasping anything complex, therefore spoon-feeding us the plot to digest only through one way. I absolutely hate that. I want to be so consumed by everything at once and overload my brain to the brink of explosion. If you need to be stimulated like this, Synecdoche New York will leave you utterly hungry for answers that may never come.

The acting performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman, which in my opinion is one of the greatest actors of all time, submerses you into his lonely, depressed character. Caden is a miserable hypochondriac theatre director living in New York, in a failing marriage, living an unfulfilling life. Yet, the possibility of the light at the end of the tunnel appears when he wins a genius grant to create an inspiring piece of work. Caden sets out to devote everything he has with this chance to contribute something of value for himself and the world. He has an ambitious idea to construct hundreds of fabricated lives that actors will play in an open apartment building where audiences freely view slices of life that spans for decades. This film targets us to question the very essence of life through Kauffman's indirect yet direct storytelling and directorial choices and challenging us intellectually.

My formula for a perfect movie is obviously one that shows rather than tells. A solid plot with beautiful cinematography and fleshed out characters is all I need to satisfy my needs. My advice to someone who is just getting into films would be to be open to anything and expand your pallet. An easy way to do this is what I like to call the ripple method. Take your favorite film for example, what did you like specifically? Maybe it's the cinematography or the screenplay. Google the director, the screenwriter or whomever worked on the film and from there, look through their other projects. It's very likely that you'll find other films that they've worked on that will spark your interest.

There are also helpful resources like Decider or my personal favorite, Letterboxd that will assist in broadening your horizons. Letterboxd is a social film community (available as a mobile app) that allows you to log all the films you've seen, review and rate which you can see below with my personal account.

You can also interact with other movie lovers, curate watchlists and have your very own film library at your disposal. A great feature that can serve as a great recommendation tool is that you have access to other movie lists from users. The lists can span from movies based on specific moods or themes which will have you scrolling with addiction. I hope you can fall in love with new films or just the art of filmmaking in general because everybody needs to escape reality once in a while.