I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Netflix)

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I wouldn't say it's too emotionally draining, personally. It's, essentially, a condemnation of
WARNING: spoilers below
incels
. While that's a rough subject in and of itself, once you get a grip on its themes and the implications of them, it should be pretty manageable to stomach. Compared to something like Synecdoche, New York, it's a walk in the park.
Really? I didn't really think of it that way, i thought it was a little more complicated than that...ive never been great at interpreting fiction though.



Really? I didn't really think of it that way, i thought it was a little more complicated than that...ive never been great at interpreting fiction though.
For what it's worth, I'm planning to rewatch it later this year when I create my top 10. I'm familiar with the references in the film (Oklahoma!, Robert Zemeckis, Pauline Kael), so I'm curious to see how it goes. I've been slowly chipping away at it ever since watching it a couple months or whenever ago.
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Plot-wise, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is deceptively simple — and yet it likes to dance around its subject, figuratively an literally; towards the end there is an actual interpretive dance number which is as close to an explanation as we are going to get.

But then this is a surreal masterpiece (a bridge of sorts between Buñuel and Lynch) that must be experience and enjoyed, not explained and understood. The first twenty minutes are akin to a moving poem whose refrain is the film’s title.

Writer/director Charlie Kaufman has filled worked in dozens of references to books and other movies; for example, the John Cassavetes classic A Woman Under the Influence is discussed at length, and protagonist Jessie Buckley not only quotes verbatim excerpts from Pauline Kael’s review but also mimics Gena Rowland’s character’s mannerisms. This is, for lack of a better term, nerd porn.

Finally, the film is highly enjoyable on a purely visual level, an extension of the aesthetic identity Kaufman established in Synecdoche, New York (here I confess my suspicion that Kaufman cast Jesse Plemons at least in part because of his physical resemblance to Philip Seymour Hoffmann).