Covonia and Kaufmann

this is just a thought, but i think my impressions of Charlie Kaufmann's new film Synecdoche, New York (out in May, in case you're interested) might have been slightly impaired by the fact that i drank an entire bottle of Covonia cough medicine before seeing it, plus another half during. It's potent stuff - even a small whiff is like inhaling ammonia. but my cough was so bad that i had to swig shots from the bottle followed by chasers of strepsils, plus vast quantities of water to keep my choking fits under control. no one at the cinema likes a cougher. but i do think that my linctus inebriation may have helped me enjoy the film's more bizarre aspects (one of the characters, for example, lives in a house that is permanently on fire. no explanation. a situation that means nothing and leads nowhere. funny though). In the queue for the loo after the screening all the girls were bemoaning its length and tediousness but i rather liked it. even if it is 2 hours and pretty bleak. i mean it's weird, but it's Charlie 'Being John Malkovich' Kaufmann for god's sake, if it wasn't weird that would be weird. In a nutshell, Philip Seymour Hoffman is a washed up provincial theatre director who, after his wife and daughter move to Berlin, embarks upon an epic production of a play about the minutiae of his life (after 17 years of planning). he hires actors to play the people in his life, which eventually means the actor playing him as the director has to hire an actor to play him and so on like it's some kind of infinitely reflected, nightmare hall of mirrors. meanwhile, off set, uncorresponding versions of characters get involved with each other, as each person responds to the same events and versions of people in different ways. it's complicated. but interesting, i think. a bit like seeing how different characters would handle your life if they literally did exactly the same thing as you - would they take control of the chaos, tread water, or kill themselves? that's what i took from the film anyway, but, in reality, it could just have been the cough mixture talking - a fact which i think CK might like.