Welcome, Charlie Kaufman

Charlie Kaufman has just been named a lifetime honorary member of the Practicing Surrealists Union of America, thanks to his film Synecdoche, New York. A lot of you might be thinking "Crap, shouldn't he have already been in there for, like, that movie about the puppet and the actor who played that jewel thief? Or that one where Francis Coppola's nephew tried to steal some orchids? Or, hey, what about that one where Ace Ventura and that naked girl from Titanic gave their brains to Mary Jane Watson?"

No. Because Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind may have all been odd, but on some very fundamental level, they all made sense. People did and said and felt things that exhibited some continuity within the narrative space of the films.

Not so with Synecdoche, New York. Among other things, Samantha Morton's character moves into a house that's constantly on fire because she's thirty-six and thought she'd be married and have a family by now. To say anything else about this film would be spoiling it for you.

So we say congratulations, Charlie, and offer you dues-free lifetime membership in the PSUA. For those of you who haven't seen the movie (which is all of you, probably), here's what Charlie Kaufman did in the space of two hours and four minutes:

1) make the highst-profile, most expensive, and unabashedly Surreal feature film since That Obscure Object of Desire, and
2) win all the bets he made that "After this, nobody will ever let me direct a film again."

We don't even need to ask if it was worth it. It was. We know it was. Charlie, thank you.

Vince out.