Word: daughterly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first is Schenectady, the working-class city near Albany where Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a theater director, lives with his artist wife Adele (Catherine Keener) and their young daughter Olive (Amy Goldstein). Caden, who's had a critical success staging Death of a Salesman with young actors in the middle-age roles, is himself a premature old man; he hears mortality gargling at him everywhere. In the first scene, he wakes to a radio talk-show report about how the coming of autumn is a harbinger of death; from then on, Caden's life is one long fall. Reading...
...Hazel a doppelganger (Emily Watson), who's also a magnet for his desperate sexual itch. But none of this gets Caden closer to realizing his project, or even naming it. (One title he toys with: "Infectious Diseases in Cattle.") Ensuring his despair are occasional glimpses of his now-grown daughter. First he spots Olive as a sex-club dancer, nude and tattooed. Later he visits Olive on her hospital deathbed. He stares at the rose that is tattooed on her arm and sees a real petal fall...
...obvious inspiration is Federico Fellini's 8-1/2, in which Guido, a moviemaker with director's block, is beset by memories and fantasies as he dodges all the women in his life, from mother to wife to whore to mistress to muse. Caden has women problems (wife, daughter, mistress, actress); but Synecdoche, bless it, doesn't demean or dismiss any of them - except maybe the family shrink (Hope Davis), who tells Caden her new best-selling book can help him, then charges him $45 for a copy. And this artist's problem is not the lack of an idea...
...sabotage. Except perhaps in the performance of budding comedian Ashley Tisdale, there's not one second of acting worth watching. There's not one line in the script that's not ridiculously predictable. You know that you've reached a new level of obviousness when your 7-year-old daughter says the next line before the actor does...
...Batman & Robin. Plus Ventura's appeal to populist sympathies and his downscale campaign wardrobe--faded jeans, scuffed sneakers, an occasional camouflage jacket and bush hat--belied the fact that he is a wealthy man. He lives with his wife of 23 years, Terry, and a teenage son and daughter on a 32-acre horse farm in the suburbs of Minneapolis. Posted above the front door of his red brick colonial house is a sign: FORGET THE DOG. BEWARE THE OWNER...