We (I) went to see Synecdoche, New York again last night. The first time I saw it was five and a half months ago at the London Film Festival last October.

THIS JUST IN
It’s still amazing.

It remains at the top of our Best of 2009 list.

Here are five amazing things about it that I didn’t necessarily notice the first time round:

1. Everything.
2. At no point in the movie is the phrase ‘Synecdoche, New York’ actually mentioned.
3. Emily Watson.
4. It has the perfect runtime for a drama film – 120 minutes excluding credits. Incidentally, the perfect runtime for a comedy film is 95 minutes.
5. It has the best end credit design I’ve ever seen, with white text on a white background that slowly darkens to become grey and eventually black.

Screenings of animated films are crap. If they’re not full of kids, they’re full of bored sarcastic media people (nothing like myself) who sit there making funny comments about how ‘it’s not exactly Les Quatre Cents Coups‘.

Luckily, this was not the case at the screening for Coraline, where three things raised my excitement level beyond recommended allowances:

3d glasses, pepsi max and the film critic from blue peter is here.
6:27 PM Mar 16th from txt

I apologise for bringing Twitter into this, but it’s really the only way to adequately convey my experience.

It was in Dolby 3D which is without a doubt the greatest 3D format on earth. It looked off the hoooooook, but annoyingly I couldn’t nick the glasses cos they had a ’security tag’ in them. I tried to take a picture of the warning but it didn’t come out very well:

Ironically, it might be worth looking at that with your 3D glasses on.

The film is pretty solid too, and surprisingly scaryific, with a whole Buffalo Bill style buttons-sewn-into-eyes thing going on throughout. One musical number in particular ranks alongside the hands-down scariest moment ever seen in an animated film, by which I of course mean…

Fucking horrific.

P.S. If you’re wondering where you’ve seen that girl before:

I didn’t see The Damned United in the end and I’m fed up about it.

I bet you it’s proper three times good.

If you have seen it, get in touch and we’ll re-print your review as if we wrote it or something.

On the other hand, did you see Michael Sheen on Jonathan Ross’ show the other night? What an arrogant tanker.

I went to see Traitor with Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce the other night. I didn’t think much of it but they loved it (lollllllz).

Here’s is my concise graphical-metaphorical review:

Work that one out.

How cool is this?

Someone’s smashed off a bit of his jacket there. He’s that hardcore.

(stolen from IMPA)