The AV Club New Cult Canon: Synecdoche, New York:
In truth, Synecdoche, New York is like a Rorschach test, one that prompts a spectrum of reactions—some people I know felt defeated by the film, others thought it was the most moving thing they’d ever seen—and different readings, depending on the viewer. (To quote Williams’ sycophantic actress: “It’s brilliant. It’s everything. It’s Karamazov.”) With a film this dense and impossible to unpack wholly, I think the natural reaction is for people to latch onto a specific thread and follow it through to the end. For example, when I first saw Synecdoche, New York, the auteurist in me was trying to puzzle out the connections between it and Kaufman’s philosophical inquiries, and maybe get an idea of where his work was going. (And the first time—and the second and the third and so on—there’s also the ever-present problem of figuring out what the hell’s happening, period.) Now I’m a husband and the father of a young daughter, and to me, the pain of Caden losing his family seems more central to the film than ever before, informing every decision he makes in his personal life (and some in his creative).
Gateway To Geekery: J.G. Ballard:
J.G. Ballard was 78 when he died in 2009, but even at that grandfatherly age, many people still viewed him through a lens of violence, perversion, and sheer weirdness. He’d earned that reputation, of course. David Cronenberg made Ballard’s most infamous novel, 1973’s car-wreck porno Crash, into an equally puzzling, off-putting film. It’s easy to forget thatEmpire Of The Sun, Ballard’s account of spending his childhood in a Shanghai internment camp during World War II, is also the basis of the 
Steven Spielberg film of the same name, and that Ballard’s 50-year career spanned everything from pulp science fiction to magic realism to stinging satire to moving memoir. Still, many challenging, unsettling themes recur obsessively throughout Ballard’s work, and can make his sprawling catalogue tough for newcomers: Armageddon, sexual deviance, the subjectivity of time, the thespian qualities of human identity, the spiritual liberation of flight, and above all, the barbarism pulsing just beneath the skin of civilized society.
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