The big film news here at home? Apparently we should celebrate the fact that Passchendaele took in a million dollars at the box office in its first week. Errr ... hello? This thing cost over twenty million to make - some estimates are as high as thirty - twenty million drawn almost entirely from Telefilm tax dollars, I might add, and the fact that it made just five percent of its cost back in its most lucrative week is supposed to be good news?

This, people is EXACTLY what's wrong with the Canadian film industry. Somebody in power somewhere decided to spend a shitload of money making this film because they decided that we "need" it and it would be "good for us" just like some nasty ass medicine, completely forgetting that things that are both "nasty" and "ass" are not exactly sought after by the masses. Damn.

For the money being flushed away on a movie that has no local audience and no international prospects whatsoever Telefilm could have completely funded at least FIVE other films that, maybe, somebody somewhere might have wanted to see. And we're supposed to thank Paul Gross and his inflated ego for sucking a huge amount of money out of the system, killing god only knows how many worthwhile projects in the name of servicing his enormous vanity play? Hell, if I'd been trying to finance a film here anytime in the past couple years - or hoping to in the next couple - I'd be hunting Paul Gross down, hauling him out to the curb and putting the boots to him. And then I'd do the same to the deep thinkers at Telefilm. Stop making shit nobody wants. Or if you must insist on making shit at least make it cheap shit.

Here ends the rant so that we can shift our attention on to something that's actually good.

After carving out a very peculiar niche for himself as the writer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman has taken the leap into the director's chair himself with Synecdoche, New York. Usually when writers become directors you can count on a certain amount of bloat - writers tend to fall in love with the script on the page rather than the performance on screen - and that's certainly true to some extent here but also true is that Kaufman is a mad genius with the unique ability to match his wildly restless imagination with some true human soul.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is Caden Cotard, a gifted but neurotic theatre director plagued by doubts about his own abilities and convinced that his body is slowly breaking down, that his death is creeping up upon him. He doesn't sleep well, he's beset by a host of ailments, he barely speaks to his wife. The only person Caden seems truly at ease with is his young daughter, the only person truly interested in him the girl who works the ticket counter at the regional theater where he mounts his plays. So when Caden's wife not only leaves him but also takes their daughter with her Caden is truly cast adrift, lost in a sea of his own neuroses.

Hazel - the ticket girl, played by Samantha Morton - could be a way out but a poorly timed crying fit scuttles that notion and so all that Caden is left with is his empty house, his inability to take any significant action, and a growing list of physical problems. And then, one day, he strikes gold, landing an open ended theater grant to mount the production of his dreams. He will create a play about life and death, he will encompass everything. he will make the grandest statement that has ever been made. And he will do it by recreating the daily life of both himself and all of his actors continuously within an enormous warehouse set.

Self referential? You bet. Neurotic? That too. Absurd? Yes, having Samantha Morton live in a house that is perpetually on fire definitely counts as absurd. But while Kaufman's fertile imagination continuously spits out surprising and perplexing images what marks him as a truly great writer - and now director - is that he never loses sight of his characters, the imagery serves his people and not the other way around.

At its core Synecdoche is not about the surprises, it's not about the absurdity or Kaufman proving that he's smarter than the huge majority of writers out there - though he certainly is - it is instead the horribly tragic story of a man so consumed by doubt, so worried that life may go bad, that he ends up as a living dead man. Caden is so afraid of dying that he never really lives even though he outlasts every major connection he ever has in his life. I once read a description of Being John Malkovich that said it played like a drunken bet between Mensa frat boys. If that's true - and I think it is - then Synecdoche marks Kaufman's arrival into full-on adulthood. This is where he has fully understood what he is capable of and settled on a story worth his talents. This is the film that marks Kaufman as a legitimate auteur.