Netflix Recommends... Please Give (2010)

* * * 1/2
Director: Nicole Holofcener
Starring: Catherine Keener, Rebecca Hall, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt

Netflix's top recommendations for me are getting better, although they still feel a bit random. This time my choices included Alpha Dog, Battle: Los Angeles, Omar Killed Me, The Lookout, Hoffa, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, Jack Reacher and Please Give. Having recently enjoyed Nicole Holofcener's Enough Said, and having been meaning to check out Please Give for some time now, that ended up being my selection and it turned out to be a pretty good one. Alternately darkly funny and heartbreakingly sad, Holofcener's meditation on death and guilt is a sharp and incisive character study - even if those characters aren't always people you might want to study.

21st Century Essentials: Synecdoche, New York (2008)

All eras have works of art that are fundamental to our understanding of not only the craft itself, but the culture from which it was created. The 21st century is still nascent, but it isn't too early to start creating a canon that demonstrates the heights to which film as an artform has reached since the year 2000. These are the essential films:


Director: Charlie Kaufman
Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Dianne Wiest, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson
Country: USA

Worlds within worlds within worlds. A life is comprised not just of experiences, but of how the mind filters, understands, organizes and relates those experiences. Because of that, a life cannot be understood in simple terms; an event is not just an event, but something defined by multiple layers of meaning, some of which remain hidden. Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York is a film of almost unfathomable ambition, one rich with ideas about the relationship between the mind and reality, which starts as a story of the interior and then just keeps burrowing deeper and deeper until finally turning itself inside out. It’s a film which demands multiple viewings and which can, perhaps, never be fully unpacked – but it’s well worth a try.