Adaptation

I final­ly got around to see­ing Adap­ta­tion, which has been rec­om­mend­ed to me for about the past year as a flik I should see. It was pret­ty good, I was amazed by Chris Coop­er, impressed with Nicholas Cage but not real­ly with Meryl Streep. As an added bonus, the love­ly Judy Greer was in the film as well. I believe I have a slight crush on her.

It is a movie about mak­ing a movie about mak­ing a movie about flow­ers.

This is new ter­ri­to­ry for Hol­ly­wood, but old hat to inde­pen­dent film­mak­ers. One of these, my old pro­fes­sor Jill God­milow, has been mak­ing films and encour­ag­ing oth­ers to do so for quite some time. But actu­al­ly, what she and oth­ers have pro­mot­ed is just mak­ing a movie about how it is hard to make a movie about [insert sub­ject]. Self-reflex­iv­i­ty in this form is used to point out the weak­ness­es of the film form, but Hol­ly­wood takes it one fur­ther iter­a­tion, which makes the self-reflex­iv­i­ty a mere gim­mick that makes many things in the film into a kind of joke. [Kauf­mann does not want to write a screen­play about drugs, sex, vio­lence, etc. but he ends up doing that very thing, which we are actu­al­ly watch­ing on the screen]. The psy­cho­log­i­cal exam­i­na­tions of the char­ac­ters are quite inter­est­ing, but at times the edit­ing got a bit too slop­py. For instance, the scenes in which Cage as Kauf­mann was engaged in con­ver­sa­tion with Cage as Don­ald were a bit obvi­ous. The strength of this movie lies def­i­nite­ly with the screen­play and the act­ing, oth­er filmic qual­i­ties did not impress. Nonethe­less, it was some­thing much bet­ter than I would usu­al­ly expect from Hol­ly­wood.

3 thoughts on “Adaptation”

  1. Boooooooooooooo! While I find the plot fun­da­men­tal­ly sound, the twists and turns toward the end of the film were ludi­crous. Adap­ta­tion for­gets to be “a movie about writ­ing a movie” and becomes “a movie about writ­ing a movie, and oh yeah, there’s some hel­la-kewl unex­pect­ed stunts too.” Oh broth­er. I believe the film betrayed ulti­mate­ly betrayed itself.

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