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I’ll spare you a drum roll. It’s Synecdoche, N.Y.

Ebert called it the best movie of the decade. The AV Club‘s Scott Tobias bestows it cult status this week. My stomach turns.

Synecdoche, New York is horrid. It is exactly the type of pretentious tripe prompting critics to unleash elitist admonishments. You didn’t get Synecdoche? Well, let me explain it to you. Reviews lauding a dead-in-the-water story like this should result in confiscation of the critic’s laptop. Which, by the way, I’m sure is a Mac.

I mean, look at this nonsense from Tobias:

It’s no great slight against the film for me to confess that it’s hard to digest, especially in its second half, when the story-within-a-story and all the doppelgängers within reach a tipping point where they start to lose coherence. And the troubles aren’t alleviated by Kaufman’s directorial style, which mimics Spike Jonze’s unfussy, excessively drab approach to shooting his scripts; this complements the matter-of-fact surrealism that bleeds into his characters’ lives, but in Synecdoche, it can be suffocating, too, to be denied the cinematic grandeur of what Caden is creating. Maybe a more distinctive touch will emerge when (or if) Kaufman directs again, but my sense is that he was so consumed with the practical challenges of making this film (which was independently financed, in addition to being barking mad logistically) that he wanted to keep the shooting as simple as possible.

That, folks, is a paragraph of absolute shit. Written only to stroke the writer’s ego, written only to exert some sort of intellectual superiority, which is, in fact, motive similar to Charlie Kaufman’s entire self-indulgent purpose in creating Synecdoche, N.Y. This movie sucked, and that review sucked worse. Kaufman failed. Don’t bail him out.

Solely a pretentious exercise in flagrant self-importance. Charlie Kaufman spins his lead character’s tale in endless, interminable circles designed to comment on how bleak life is, I guess. Which is totally fine (I like bleakness!) if you care one iota about the characters. Instead, we’re exhausted and disgusted by the time Synecdoche ends, and eager to return to our own bleak lives. I guess in that case it’s the most realistically uplifting movie ever! (Rolls eyes.)

That’s not the point, of course. Instead, it’s Kaufman’s comment on society and the artist’s mind, or something. Fucking please. Kaufman already did this, with Adaptation. He already described haunting pain, in Eternal Sunshine. Those films are good. This one is root canal surgery. Themes and plot devices and swirling character studies are all fine, but at some point your movie has to be a movie. And this fails miserably. It’s the type of film that critics and eggheads are scared to dislike – for doing so means they “missed something” or maybe aren’t quite as intelligent as their brand purports.

If a movie can’t hold attention and doesn’t have any coherent narrative or authentic genuine characters, then it cannot be good. In the end, the writer’s commentary – whatever the fuck it is – is fine. But if there’s no story, there is precisely no reason to watch. Underline that, dipshit critics.

I’m not saying movies and stories should all be popcorn escapism. But story, hook and entertainment are each important. Synecdoche prefers to refute all that; and its defenders would cite its rebuff of all storytelling as some sort of jumbled commentary on the futility of life. Gag me with a fucking spoon.

At some point, the movie needs to be consumable. Not necessarily enjoyable (Examples – Requiem for a Dream and Closer are fantastic, painful movies), but worth the audience’s time. In Requiem, it’s drug dealer verite. In Closer, it’s the futility and selfishness of love. Synecdoche has not one – NOT ONE – reason for you to invest your time and brain power.

What would make you want to sit through three hours of overindulgence, of bland acting, of stalled narrative, of a story that goes absolutely nowhere? What makes you want to sit through any of this?

What, pray tell?

So you can learn that life doesn’t follow a verse-chorus-verse plotline?

Please. Didn’t you already know?