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Synecdoche, New York
''Synecdoche, New York'' (pronounced ) is a 2008 American postmodern psychological drama film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman in his directorial debut. It stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as an ailing theater director who works on an increasingly elaborate stage production and whose extreme commitment to realism begins to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. The film's title is a play on Schenectady, New York, where much of the film is set, and the concept of synecdoche, wherein a part of something represents the whole or vice versa. The film premiered in competition at the 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival on May 23, 2008. Sony Pictures Classics acquired the United States distribution rights, paying no money but agreeing to give the film's backers a portion of the revenues. It had a limited theatrical release in the U.S. on October 24, 2008, and was a commercial failure on its initial release. The story and themes of ''Synecdoche, New York'' polarized criti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charlie Kaufman
Charles Stuart Kaufman (; born November 19, 1958) is an American filmmaker and novelist. He wrote the films ''Being John Malkovich'' (1999), ''Adaptation'' (2002), and ''Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'' (2004). He made his directorial debut with ''Synecdoche, New York'' (2008), which film critic Roger Ebert called "the best movie of the decade" in 2009.Ebert, Roger. (December 13, 2009The best films of the decade – Roger Ebert's Journal. Blogs.suntimes.com. Retrieved on 2010-12-19. Further directorial work includes the stop motion animated film ''Anomalisa'' (2015) and ''I'm Thinking of Ending Things'' (2020). In 2020, Kaufman made his literary debut with the release of his first novel, ''Antkind''. One of the most celebrated screenwriters of his era, Kaufman has been nominated for four Academy Awards: twice for Best Original Screenplay for ''Being John Malkovich'' and ''Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'' (winning for the latter), once for Best Adapted Screenplay ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Likely Story
Likely Story is an independent film production company founded by its president and CEO Anthony Bregman in October 2006 with Stefanie Azpiazu. It is based in New York City with an office in Los Angeles. History New York City-based producer Anthony Bregman founded the production company 'Likely Story' in October 2006 along with his longtime working partner Stefanie Azpiazu. Azpiazu, who had been the Head of Production and Development at the NYC-based office relocated to LA-based office with its opening in November 2011. In June 2015, Likely Story hired Peter Cron as VP Production in the film division and Jeff Stern as VP Scripted Television in the TV division, while Ryan Featherman was promoted to Story Editor also in the TV division. Collaboration deals Likely Story previously had a deal with PalmStar Media to produce films together since December 2013. The company now has a first-look deal with Netflix In 2018, it has a first look TV deal with Anonymous Content. Filmograp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert (; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Neil Steinberg of the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' said Ebert "was without question the nation's most prominent and influential film critic," and Kenneth Turan of the ''Los Angeles Times'' called him "the best-known film critic in America." Ebert was known for his intimate, Midwestern writing voice and critical views informed by values of populism and humanism. Writing in a prose style intended to be entertaining and direct, he made sophisticated cinematic and analytical ideas more accessible to non-specialist audiences. While a populist, Ebert frequently endorsed foreign and independent films he believed would be appreciated by mainstream viewers, which often resulted in such film ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Synecdoche
Synecdoche ( ) is a type of metonymy: it is a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something is used to refer to the whole (''pars pro toto''), or vice versa (''totum pro parte''). The term comes from Greek . Examples in common English use are ''suits'' for ''businessmen'', ''wheels'' for ''car'', and ''boots'' for ''soldiers''. The use of government buildings to refer to their occupants is metonymy and sometimes also synecdoche. "The Pentagon" for the United States Department of Defense can be considered synecdoche, because the building can be considered part of the bureaucracy. In the same way, using " Number 10" to mean "the Office of the Prime Minister" (of the United Kingdom) is a synecdoche. Definition Synecdoche is a rhetorical trope and a kind of metonymy—a figure of speech using a term to denote one thing to refer to a related thing. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Schenectady, New York
Schenectady () is a city in Schenectady County, New York, United States, of which it is the county seat. As of the 2020 census, the city's population of 67,047 made it the state's ninth-largest city by population. The city is in eastern New York, near the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers. It is in the same metropolitan area as the state capital, Albany, which is about southeast. Schenectady was founded on the south side of the Mohawk River by Dutch colonists in the 17th century, many of whom came from the Albany area. The name "Schenectady" is derived from the Mohawk word ''skahnéhtati'', meaning "beyond the pines" and used for the area around Albany, New York. Residents of the new village developed farms on strip plots along the river. Connected to the west by the Mohawk River and Erie Canal, Schenectady developed rapidly in the 19th century as part of the Mohawk Valley trade, manufacturing, and transportation corridor. By 1824, more people worked in manufac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Play On Words
Word play or wordplay (also: play-on-words) is a literary technique and a form of wit in which words used become the main subject of the work, primarily for the purpose of intended effect or amusement. Examples of word play include puns, phonetic mix-ups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, double entendres, and telling character names (such as in the play ''The Importance of Being Earnest'', ''Ernest'' being a given name that sounds exactly like the adjective ''earnest''). Word play is quite common in oral cultures as a method of reinforcing meaning. Examples of text-based ( orthographic) word play are found in languages with or without alphabet-based scripts, such as homophonic puns in Mandarin Chinese. Techniques Some techniques often used in word play include interpreting idioms literally and creating contradictions and redundancies, as in Tom Swifties: :"Hurry up and get to the back of the ship," Tom sai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hyperreality
Described by Jean Baudrillard, the concept of hyperreality captures the inability to distinguish "The Real" (a term borrowed from Jacques Lacan) from the signifier of it. This is more prominent in technologically advanced societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins. It allows the merging of physical reality with virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR), and human intelligence with artificial intelligence (AI). Jean Baudrillard is a French cultural theorist, sociologist and philosopher. His most notable work consists of establishing the concept of hyperreality and the simulacra. Some of Baudrillard's most influential theorists consist of Karl Marx, Freud, Levi Strauss, Nietzsche, etc. Baudrillard's work stems around his interest in the theories of post-structuralism and post-modernism. Some famous theorists who contribu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Realism (arts)
Realism in the arts is generally the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding speculative and supernatural elements. The term is often used interchangeably with naturalism, although these terms are not synonymous. Naturalism, as an idea relating to visual representation in Western art, seeks to depict objects with the least possible amount of distortion and is tied to the development of linear perspective and illusionism in Renaissance Europe. Realism, while predicated upon naturalistic representation and a departure from the idealization of earlier academic art, often refers to a specific art historical movement that originated in France in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1848. With artists like Gustave Courbet capitalizing on the mundane, ugly or sordid, realism was motivated by the renewed interest in the common man and the rise of leftist politics. The Realist painters rejected Romanticism, which had come to dominate Fre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Psychological Drama (film Genre)
Psychological drama or psychodrama is a sub-genre of drama that places emphasis on psychological elements. It often overlaps with other genres such as crime, fantasy, black comedy, and science fiction, and it is closely related with the psychological horror and psychological thriller genres. Psychological dramas use these genres' tropes to focus on the human condition and psychological effects, usually in a mature and serious tone. Psychological dramas explore thematic elements such as abandonment, coming-of-age problems, denialism, disability, distorted sequences, dysfunctional relationships, human sexuality, mental disorders, mood swings, odd behaviors, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychological abuse, psychedelic art, social issues, and other serious discussions that highlight both issues of the characters' lives and reality. Known filmmakers *Paul Thomas Anderson - An American filmmaker known for his depictions of flawed characters and exploration of subjects and th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Postmodernist Film
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism, opposition to epistemic certainty or stability of meaning, and emphasis on ideology as a means of maintaining political power. Claims to objective fact are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization. Initially emerging from a mode of literary criticism, postmodernism developed in the mid-twentieth century as a rejection of modernism and has been observed ac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Box Office Mojo
Box Office Mojo is an American website that tracks box-office revenue in a systematic, algorithmic way. The site was founded in 1998 by Brandon Gray, and was bought in 2008 by IMDb, which itself is owned by Amazon. History Brandon Gray began the site on August 7, 1998, making forecasts of the top-10 highest-grossing films in the United States for the following weekend. To compare his forecasts to the actual results, he started posting the weekend grosses and wrote a regular column with box-office analysis. In 1999, he started to post the Friday daily box-office grosses, sourced from Exhibitor Relations, so that they were publicly available online on Saturdays and posted the Sunday weekend estimates on Sundays. Along with the weekend grosses, he was publishing the daily grosses, release schedules, and other charts, such as all-time charts, international box-office charts, genre charts, and actor and director charts. The site gradually expanded to include weekend charts going b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
British Board Of Film Classification
The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC, previously the British Board of Film Censors) is a non-governmental organisation founded by the British film industry in 1912 and responsible for the national classification and censorship of films exhibited at cinemas and video works (such as television programmes, trailers, adverts, public information/campaigning films, menus, bonus content, etc.) released on physical media within the United Kingdom. It has a statutory requirement to classify all video works released on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray (including 3D and 4K UHD formats), and, to a lesser extent, some video games under the Video Recordings Act 1984. The BBFC was also the designated regulator for the UK age-verification scheme which was abandoned before being implemented. History and overview The BBFC was established in 1912 as the British Board of Film Censors by members of the film industry, who preferred to manage their own censorship than to have national or local gove ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
