As derivative as Cold Souls is — and it looks very derivative, so far — it still may be awesome. For one thing, Giamatti is one of those actors who was born to do Kaufman-esque surreal anomie. I'd way rather watch a Kaufman clone starring Giamatti than one starring Will Ferrell, pretty much any day.

And Cold Souls, from writer-director Sophie Barthes, is clearly about something: At least, the trailer makes it clear that the "soul removal" thing is a blatant metaphor for anti-depressants, and our fixation with chemical solutions to psychological problems generally. And then it takes that fun right turn with the "soul trafficking" thing, before going fully surreal. So I'm pretty much down. And maybe having a better class of imitators will spur Kaufman to new heights?

(According to someone at IMDB, mentioning the similarities between this film and Kaufman's work is a good way to get Barthes annoyed. Sorry about that.)

Cold Souls comes out in "limited release" in the United States on August 7.

No one working in film today has perfected the art of the trippy, mind-bending script quite like screenwriter Kaufman. As a screenwriter, he proved that it was possible for a writer to truly make a movie his own, and to achieve a level of notoriety for writing rare in Hollywood. But it is almost impossible to review Synecdoche, New York, the latest effort from Kaufman's fevered brain, since the movie doesn't abide by any movie rules I know.

This time Kaufman the writer also stepped into the role of director, and the result, while defying every convention you've ever heard of, ultimately runs on in sore need of an editor. But even this could be an intentional effect — because everything is speculative in the strange, half-scifi world of Synecdoche.

The story starts out mundanely enough, introducing us to Phillip Seymour Hoffman's Caden Cotard (Kaufman loves his quirky names) and his strained family life. Caden is a theater director in a small, upstate New York town, about to launch a new production of Death of a Salesman. He's married to a free-spirited, frustrated artist, Adele Lack (Catherine Keener), and they have a precocious young daughter, Olive. It soon becomes clear that Caden is suffering from a life-threatening, mysterious illness, with doctors urging that he see a neurologist. The affliction is manifested as a sort of light-hearted grotesque — emphasis on toilet humor, bulging pustules and uncontrollable body gyrations abound. With his marriage to Adele barely functional and his future uncertain, Caden flirts forlornly with buxom box-office girl Hazel (Samantha Morton, with a lot more hair than she had in Minority Report).

This seems to set the stage for a story about relationships and life crises, all done up in what Kaufman is really best at: the art of making awkward dialogue poignant, scripts saturated in quibbling exchanges made brilliant in their accuracy. But everything goes haywire after Adele elects to take Olive to Berlin — that's when Caden's reality, and the audience's, begins to come undone. Before long, the movie, which had already shown hints of its surrealism under the surface, jumps any recognizable genre. We all start experiencing time dilation and strange skips; the world seems to progress around Caden without his knowledge, and he's our anchor in it.

Caden, still sick, but still not dead, is finally spurred to action when he receives a MacArthur genius grant, and decides to mount an epic production that will be "big, and true, and tough." This comes to be in a massive warehouse in the heart of New York City, featuring a cast of thousands, though they have no script yet. That's when things get really weird.

There are many elements to Synecdoche that are flawlessly executed: its character portrayals and their dialogue; the imaginative and evocative sets and painstakingly chosen backdrops. There are dingy hospital corridors like something from a horror film, and scaled-down replicas of New York City within more replicas. The clothes always fit the characters just so, and the faces are intimately framed. No one can fault Kaufman's fine attention to detail or how fully he's realized an imagined, alternate world. You can see that it must have all gorgeously made sense in his head.

While the film breaks new ground in terms of narrative free-fall and unabashed oddity, it must be argued that everything is taken a bit too far. Kaufman's ideas and themes are unerringly interesting, and the movie wants to be making important, existential statements, but there are too many of them. Running at just over 2 hours, Synecdoche suffers from its length and too many curveballs. We're along for the twisting ride, and mostly game. But after so much relentless weirdness, it's hard not to want your feet back on solid ground.

I wanted to love this movie the way I've loved Kaufman's other creations, especially Eternal Sunshine. But Synecdoche could have been trimmed to a far more palatable shape that would have better showcased its bizarre sensibility and made its biggest themes bolder. It's to Kaufman's credit as a storyteller that we are invested in these strange, often unlovable people at all.

"Speculative" may be the best way to describe what's going on, sometimes tipping into even more apparent realms of science fiction. There's certainly many ideas that flirt with it, like Caden trying to train his ailing body with bio-feedback and the threatening zeppelins that patrol the night sky in his future. The normal rules that govern time and space are askew, and people constantly encounter the extraordinary alongside on the regular. While Caden's staged drama progresses, spanning years and acquiring a life of its own, the "real" New York world seems to be experiencing an increasingly violent, encroaching, unexplained war. Kaufman has his characters stroll through shooting and screaming and dying unremarked upon, still caught up in their domestic affairs.

Synecdoche sports a cast of exceptional actors, many of whom must age decades in the movie's elastic timeline. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is in almost every scene, and inhabits Caden with a sullen emptiness so exact it's hard to imagine anyone else in the role. British actresses Samantha Morton and Emily Watson play doppelgangers of the same part to great effect. Their Hazel has all the trappings of a Kaufmanesque heroine, down to the red hair, colorful clothes and ever-present quirkiness. Hope Davis has a small part as an eccentric therapist, and Dianne Wiest another as an actress turned director. Michelle Williams is so good as an ingenue who catches Caden's eye that I am forced to retract Dawson's Creek jokes forever.

But having all the trappings of a brilliant film does not mean that they come together to form one. The various threads and subplots threaten to collapse under their own weight as fiction becomes meta fiction becomes meta fiction becomes meta fiction. By the time Caden is directing a full-scale replica of his own life, shadowed by actors who grow to know their roles better than the originals, the search for a cohesive narrative or the emotional payback we usually expect from a film is off. We are kept in our seats by the desire to see what could possibly happen next, growing cautious as Kaufman shows no qualms about killing off important characters.

Death is, in fact, the main theme underlying Synecdoche, always looming larger than the challenges of life. Love is desired and endlessly pursued, but portrayed as ultimately fleeting and tragic. "Everyone," the characters say more than once to each other, "is disappointing." While the newspaper ads crow about this all being hilarious, I have to say that this was one of the most relentlessly depressing movies I've ever seen. You will laugh many times, but it will mostly be awkward.

By the time Kaufman calls in a modern deus ex machina, I was ready for this long strange trip through psychological and English and drama theory to end. But Synecdoche will have as many ardent fans as it will befuddled viewers calling bullshit. It's easy to see that Kaufman is trying to make deep investigations into the human psyche: the themes of life, death, war, family and romantic love are writ large and sometimes literally preached at us or given a special monologue. But the movie is impaired by how much of a free reign its writer-director has been given — his hands are in too many pots. Its run time could be nearly halved and still maintain the parts that are the most affective and revelatory.

See Synecdoche, New York if you love Charlie Kaufman's uncommon worlds, if you have a fond taste for the bizarre, and the willingness to give up all narrative bearings. See it especially if you enjoy endlessly ruminating on the nature of existence. Just don't see it with your friends who have short attention spans, or anyone not keen on all that's meta and much too self-aware.

Hoffman is suffering from some weird disorder that is causing all his autonomic nervous system functions to break down. And it looks as though Hoffman's warehouse is inside a larger warehouse, and also the model of New York seems to contain a model of the warehouse — apparently with its own model of New York inside. As Life Without Buildings points out:

When this film was announced last year, I wondered what would happen if we discovered that the portion of New York being reproduced includes the very warehouse within which the model is being constructed? Is it possible that the play will include an actor hired to play the director, who then hires an actor to play himself? Will this create some sort of infinite spacial vortex, like two face-to-face mirrors, the land-o-lakes butter label, or some sort of spatial Tristram Shandy? Judging from what we’ve seen so far, it looks like that’s exactly what happens.

It's worth reading the whole reaction, which references my favorite Paul Auster novel, The Music Of Chance. [Yahoo! Movies and Life Without Buildings]

Does Hoffman need a neurologist? Or a urologist? Are the eyes part of the brain, or something separate? As you might expect from a film with "synecdoche" in the title, things being part of other things is an important theme.

Early summaries of the film suggested that Hoffman's character is staging a huge play in a warehouse (as seen in the first clip) and the warehouse slowly transforms into a scale model of New York, the city it's in. In other words, it becomes a synecdoche for New York itself. And meanwhile, Hoffman's mystery scifi disease becomes a metaphor for parts of the whole shutting down or becoming unreliable — as Hoffman himself becomes unreliable. Oh, and there are cute tattoos. [Slashfilm]

Methods: We compiled a list of 35 or so movies that we believed were unsung science fiction classics. And then we winnowed it down, eliminating movies that weren't great, or which everybody already acknowledges as science fiction. And here's what we ended up with.

8 1/2. A director, trying to finish his next movie — a science fiction epic — becomes creatively blocked, and starts falling into a fantasy world of his own id. The real and the imaginary become more and more blurred, until you can't tell what's happening in Guido's head and what's actually happening.

Adaptation. Okay, we just talked about the reality-warping powers of Charlie Kaufman's movies, but Adaptation deserves to be included here. Everybody acknowledges Eternal Sunshine and Being John as science fiction or slipstream, but Adaptation also warps reality in amazing ways, with its made-up mind-warping flower and blurring twin Kaufmans.

Babe: Pig In The City. Okay, first of all, Babe himself is a mutant, as we discover in the first Babe movie, where his miraculous powers of reasoning and communication startle the humans around him. And then this sequel takes him to Metropolis, a city that's a CGI blend of 5 cities. Mad Max maestro George Miller creates his most compelling future dystopia yet.

Brimstone and Treacle. The 1980s were full of movies where people are sort of aliens. Blue Velvet and Sex, Lies & Videotape both feature characters who are so alienated and bizarre they might be from outer space. But B&T is the ultimate alien-among-us movie. The title might fool you into thinking Sting is the devil, but the movie doesn't actually say so. He's like the protagonist of Karen Joy Fowler's classic novel Sarah Canary — a strange interloper that we're never told is an alien. We just sort of know.

Chumscrubber. This dark comedy takes place in a weird alternate present where everyone's on prescription drugs, and reality starts to blend with the video game of the movie's title, which is all about a postapocalyptic warrior who carries his own severed head. It's a Tim Burton-esque suburbia without any actual Edward Scissorhands.

Confederate States of America (CSA). This is possibly the greatest alternate history movie ever, because it does such a great job of reworking our media-saturated culture to a very different timeline. It's yet another "South won the Civil War" narrative, but with a sharp satirical edge to it. In the early 21st century, large swathes of America still own slaves — and drugs like Prozac are used to keep the slaves under control, as we see in fake ads. CSA is not just alternate history, it also pays tribute to Brave New World.

The Conversation. This Gene Hackman film takes surveillance technology to its furthest extreme. Says Film.com: "Decades ahead of its time, the brilliant final scene shared with us a glimpse of the future that was to come in which technology could see or hear us at almost any time. And Hackman's performance nails down a generation's feelings on the coming technology."

Deep Cover. Lawrence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum star in this tense thriller about a fictional designer drug created by a combinatorial chemist. The brutal drug trade becomes a metaphor for the destruction of the nation-state by the global economy.

Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai. All of Jim Jarmusch's movies are full of quasi-aliens, but this one is actually a superhero narrative. He's a black samurai who works for the Mafia, and he communicates via carrier pigeon. He clings to the Bushido, the way of the Samurai, in the midst of a world of randomly murderous thugs, and seems to have almost superhuman fighting abilities. Plus he can communicate somehow with his friend who only speaks French. (Telepathy?)

The Manchurian Candidate (original version). A Korean War hero is brainwashed and reprogrammed, using unreal mind-control techniques, to kill the president. The film derives a lot of its spooky menace from the Communists' bizarre mind-warping of Lawrence Harvey. The Jonathan Demme remake substitutes a microchip brain implant for the original's brainwashing.

Modern Times. The original movie about human alienation from technology is also, arguably, the first cyborg movie. Charlie Chaplin becomes so ingrained in his dehumanizing factory work, he actually becomes part of the machine he works with. And then, in a famous scene, he's literally swallowed up by the gears of his machine.

Pleasantville. We dissed this movie a while ago, but it actually is a terrific film. A brother and sister pass inside their television set, thanks to a hacked piece of technology in their remote control, courtesy of Don Knotts. The black-and-white world of the 1950s sitcom where the siblings get stuck is a metaphor for sexual repression and lost innocence, but also an alternate reality which they access through technology.

Sneakers. It's the ultimate spy movie and possibly the greatest of the hacker movies of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Robert Redford leads a team of hackers who discover the ultimate codebreaking machine, which can decode literally anything. You could argue the ultimate decoder is just a fancy McGuffin, but it's wound in to the movie's theme of hackers uncovering secrets.

W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism. Half documentary, half bizarre sexual-psychological drama, Dušan Makavejev's strangest film explores the weird science of Wilhelm Reich, who believed you could collect orgasmic energy in "orgone boxes." It ties that science in with the sexual (and social) repression of Communism, culminating in a representative of Communism having sex with a woman and then beheading her with her own ice skate.

Zelig. Woody Allen not only made Sleeper and the mad-science-heavy Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, he also gave us this story of a man with the strangest superpower of all: he can blend in with the people around him. He not only acts like whoever he's with, he looks like them too. This movie also dips into alternate history, with its warped version of World War II.

Kaufman reportedly wrote Synecdoche for long-time collaborator Spike Jonze, but ended up directing it himself. IMDB has a pretty detailed synopsis, and a columnist for the L.A. Times got a leaked draft back in 2006.

In a nutshell, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a theater director who's directed Death of a Salesman in the small town of Schenectady, NY. He gets a MacArthur grant to do a Broadway production, and wants to create a work of "brutal realism and honesty." So he gathers a cast in a warehouse in New York's theater district and directs them in a "celebration of the mundane," living out their lives in a scale model of New York itself. (Hence "Synecdoche.")

The city model inside the warehouse gets bigger and more detailed, and meanwhile, Hoffman's character is dying of some mysterious disease that shuts down his autonomic functions one by one. (And that's where it starts to sound science ficitonal.) A lot of the movie deals with the women in Hoffman's life, including his painter ex-wife (Catherine Keener), his daughter, who lives with his ex-wife's friend (Jennifer Jason Leigh), his current wife (Michelle Williams), his mentally disabled second daughter, and his self-promoting therapist (Hope Davis).

As the movie goes on, years pass and Hoffman is still in his sprawling scale model of New York. Reality gets more and more blurred with fantasy, especially as the actor Hoffman has hired to play him does too good a job and becomes almost indistinguishable from the real Hoffman. The cast and crew of the play becomes full of dopplegangers. Hoffman's only hope may be a celebrated theater actress who joins the cast.

So in other words, the mini-New York in Synecdoche becomes an altered state of mind for Hoffman, and a metaphor for his shrinking world. Just like the way that places become states of mind in some of Kaufman's other films:

• In Being John Malkovich, a hidden trap door in an office building turns out to lead into the mind of a famous actor. You can walk inside and spend a while experiencing Malkovich's life. Or, if you're Malkovich himself, you just get a trippy experience. It's like the mind of Malkovich is just an extension of the workplace, another office.
• 
  
• In Adaptation, the Florida swamp becomes the gateway to an altered state of mind. It's the place where you find the mind-altering orchids that turn a New Yorker writer into a murdering freakazoid. The swamp is also the place where the identities of the two Kaufmans start to blur together.
• 
  
• And then there's the Montauk Long Island Railroad station where Clem and Joel remeet after erasing their memories in Eternal Sunshine, as if they can re-access the mental space of their relationship by going back to that location. Not only that, but most of the film consists Joel traveling to different locations in his memory, revisiting places and experiences as they're rewritten. The film's horror comes from the fact that we travel back to the same locations over and over again, but they're changing — and in one case being demolished around us.
• 
  
• Okay, this one is a bit of a stretch. But in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Chuck Barris is able to access a whole other side of his personality, that of CIA killer and total bad-ass, only by going to Europe. Europe becomes a whole other hemisphere of Barris' mind.

• Danny Boyle chose to make Sunshine instead of the sequel to 28 Days Later, because he's not a custodian, he's an innovator. (Although he's hinted lately he may make 28 Years Later.) Boyle has alternated between science fiction movies and "realistic" films with surreal touches. Trainspotting and Shallow Grave are both set in the real world, but a veil of unreality clings to both of them. (Not just the ceiling baby, but Ewan McGregor's unraveling characters in both films.) Zombie movie 28 Days Latermanages the near-impossible: it actually manages to feel post-apocalyptic without killing off its entire cast in the first half hour. But Sunshine is Boyle's greatest achievement. The story of a small crew on a desperate mission tor reignite the sun, it manages to blend the horror thriller with the trippy cosmic film. But both genres have a steel underpinning of hard science and psychological complexity, and everything feels like it's happening for a real reason. Upcoming project: Boyle's next film is Slumdog Millionaire, about an illiterate kid who tries to become a contestant on a Hindi game show.
• Guillermo Del Toro is best known for the acclaimed Pan's Labyrinth, one of the most powerful — and darkest — explorations of escapism ever filmed. But he also made two of the best genetic-engineering thrillers of all time: Blade II and Mimic. (Mimic was originally supposed to be a 30-minute segment in an "anthology" film featuring a segment from Boyle.) Both films feature monsters created by science. In Mimic, a scientist creates a super-insect to destroy cockroaches that are carrying disease. But the super-insect evolves into a giant monster that can assume human form. And in Blade, vampires hack their own genome to create near-invincible creatures. Upcoming projects: Del Toro is filming Hellboy 2. He's also working on 3993, a ghost story about the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and At The Mountains Of Madness, an HP Lovecraft adaptation set in Antarctica.

• Charlie Kaufman has only been a writer up to now. But he's managed to create a more consistent vision in his films than most directors. Films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovitch have a shared set of surreal concerns: characters journey into someone's head and discover, to your horror, that identity is always a first draft. Kaufman's characters are always revising their personal narratives and confronting different versions of themselves, like Kaufman and his twin in Adaptation. It's also worth hunting down the little-known Human Nature (directed by Eternal Sunshine's Michel Gondry) in which a mad scientist tries to train a mouse to use a salad fork. Upcoming project: Kaufman's directing his first film, Synecdoche, New York, due out next year. (It's about a director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his cast, creating ever-stranger New York stories inside a theater which is a scale model of New York.)
• Kathryn Bigelow. Her best-known science fiction film is 1995's Strange Days, about a former cop who sells bootlegs of people's memories on data discs. And then one of those discs turns out to contain someone's memories of murdering a prostitute. But Bigelow's CV is full of claustrophobic thrillers with weird touches, from 1987's vampire romp Near Dark and 1990's cop drama Point Blank to 2002's K19: The Widowmaker. As with Boyle, even her real-world stories are so unnerving they feel like alternate reality. Upcoming project: Her next film is an Iraq war drama, The Hurt Locker.