Adaptation
Mar. 6th, 2003 08:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gordonzolaIt’s rare that you can pinpoint the moment a movie starts to fail. Maybe that’s the crowning achievement of "Adaptation" the newest movie by Spike Jonze, the director of "Being John Malkovich". In Adaptation Nicholas Cage plays a insecure Hollywood writer who is trying to turn a non-Hollywood book into a screenplay and ends up making himself, and his floundering attempt to adapt the book, one of the central characters.
I actually found the whole pathetic-mess-of-a-writer-who-can’t-figure-out-how-to-write thing endearing for the first half of the movie. Maybe it’s because I’ve been having a hard time myself framing something I’ve been working on. Maybe because I saw it with a friend who’s in the process of writing her dissertation and it was fun to watch her squirm. Either way, I thought it was witty and over-acted in all the right ways to show the point of view of the main Nicholas Cage character. And the twin brother with no artistic pretensions pushing his writing seminar guidelines and non-sensical action-movie script was genuinely funny.
Unfortunately, I can’t describe where the movie goes wrong without spoiling, so if you don’t mind the ending being revealed,
I should have walked out during that Meryl Streep trip scene.
It’s very hard to show a trip scene in the movies. Don’t even try and mention "Easy Rider" because really, that was just embarrassing. I can only think of one that wasn’t laughably bad or crushingly boring: Matt Dillon in "Drugstore Cowboy". But then again, I haven’t seen that since it was in the theaters so I wouldn’t stake my reputation on it either.
The problem with trip scenes, as with watching real life tripping people when you are sober, is that they are boring! And nobody told me I was supposed to get fucked up to see Adaptation. Meryl Streep looks at her toes. Meryl Streep talks slowly. Meryl Streep laughs. Meryl Streep lies around with swamp plants. Where’s the fast-forward?
Unfortunately, that just foreshadowed the boring action scenes that take up the last quarter of the movie. I actually thought it was a really good concept to have the cliched big ending that the writing seminar teacher says is needed. But really, it just proved that Spike Jonze can’t direct action sequences. Every scene lingered too long. The brothers bond while they hide from danger. The joke wore off quickly and the audience squirmed, not from being challenged but by being bored. I wanted to yell, "Ok, we get it, can we move on now?"
The problem with parodying the big-payoff action genre, is that it begs the question what is this film saying so well that it can make fun of others? And the answer is really nothing. Except maybe that art-theater-type movie goers think people who go to action movies are a little simple. Jonze tries to immunize himself from the obvious criticism by having Artistic Cage berate himself at one point for putting himself centrally in his own script. "It’s self-indulgent. It’s simplistic. It’s solipsistic." etc. etc. Well, yes. And saying it out loud, might buy you the benefit of the doubt for awhile, but doesn’t make it less true.
Don’t get me wrong though. I like dwelling on the negative. I actually found this movie mostly enjoyable, just disappointing in its failure at the end. If the trip and action scenes had been shortened by two-thirds I think it would have been a success. Unfortunately, while making fun of "big payoff" movie genres, Adaptation relies too much on, what in retrospect, is its own cheap joke.
I actually found the whole pathetic-mess-of-a-writer-who-can’t-figure-out-how-to-write thing endearing for the first half of the movie. Maybe it’s because I’ve been having a hard time myself framing something I’ve been working on. Maybe because I saw it with a friend who’s in the process of writing her dissertation and it was fun to watch her squirm. Either way, I thought it was witty and over-acted in all the right ways to show the point of view of the main Nicholas Cage character. And the twin brother with no artistic pretensions pushing his writing seminar guidelines and non-sensical action-movie script was genuinely funny.
Unfortunately, I can’t describe where the movie goes wrong without spoiling, so if you don’t mind the ending being revealed,
I should have walked out during that Meryl Streep trip scene.
It’s very hard to show a trip scene in the movies. Don’t even try and mention "Easy Rider" because really, that was just embarrassing. I can only think of one that wasn’t laughably bad or crushingly boring: Matt Dillon in "Drugstore Cowboy". But then again, I haven’t seen that since it was in the theaters so I wouldn’t stake my reputation on it either.
The problem with trip scenes, as with watching real life tripping people when you are sober, is that they are boring! And nobody told me I was supposed to get fucked up to see Adaptation. Meryl Streep looks at her toes. Meryl Streep talks slowly. Meryl Streep laughs. Meryl Streep lies around with swamp plants. Where’s the fast-forward?
Unfortunately, that just foreshadowed the boring action scenes that take up the last quarter of the movie. I actually thought it was a really good concept to have the cliched big ending that the writing seminar teacher says is needed. But really, it just proved that Spike Jonze can’t direct action sequences. Every scene lingered too long. The brothers bond while they hide from danger. The joke wore off quickly and the audience squirmed, not from being challenged but by being bored. I wanted to yell, "Ok, we get it, can we move on now?"
The problem with parodying the big-payoff action genre, is that it begs the question what is this film saying so well that it can make fun of others? And the answer is really nothing. Except maybe that art-theater-type movie goers think people who go to action movies are a little simple. Jonze tries to immunize himself from the obvious criticism by having Artistic Cage berate himself at one point for putting himself centrally in his own script. "It’s self-indulgent. It’s simplistic. It’s solipsistic." etc. etc. Well, yes. And saying it out loud, might buy you the benefit of the doubt for awhile, but doesn’t make it less true.
Don’t get me wrong though. I like dwelling on the negative. I actually found this movie mostly enjoyable, just disappointing in its failure at the end. If the trip and action scenes had been shortened by two-thirds I think it would have been a success. Unfortunately, while making fun of "big payoff" movie genres, Adaptation relies too much on, what in retrospect, is its own cheap joke.
