Adaptation

I’m a fatass. I’m a loser. And I’m bald. People know. They look at me all the time because of it. But they see trailers first. MAX–Now THIS is a concept! Max (John Cusack) is a Jewish artist who strikes up a friendship with a young German named Adolph (Noah Taylor from Almost Famous). Yes, that Aldoph.

Then Max starts to see his young friend change. As he becomes a better (and more frightening) artist, he also starts forming his fascist political beliefs.

I can’t WAIT to see this movie. Looks like it’s going to be great.

GODS AND GENERALS–So, was the Civil War fought over religion? I had no idea!

Actually, I’m sure this will be a great movie. It’s by the same people who brought us Gettysburg and I hear that was excellent, so I have no fewer hopes for this one. But did they really have to tell us that one general was “fighting for God and the other for His kingdom on Earth”? That doesn’t even make sense in context.

Promises to have some pretty damn good battle scenes, though. I’ll try to see it.

TEARS OF THE SUN–Antoine Fuqua (director of Training Day and The Replacement Killers) is back with another thought provoking flick. This time he’s bringing Bruce Willis along for the ride. Hopefully it’s as good at least as Training Day was reported to be. (Haven’t seen it yet. I hear it was not too bad with some amazing acting.)

Mr. Willis plays a soldier who leads his troop into a war-torn country to save one doctor (Monica Bellucci). On the way he finds his heart and decides that he has to save all of her patients as well.

This could be a great film with a good turn from Bruce…or it could be totally sentimental crap. Antoine is very hit or miss…mostly miss, though. I’ll check it out at least on video because I like to give Bruce the benefit of the doubt. God knows why.

But let’s get back to the adaptation of the movie of the book.

I have been wrestling with a pretty serious bout of writer’s block. (Yes, I fancy meself a writer.) I know that there are some out there who claim that it doesn’t exist. If you just sit down and force yourself to write, it will come. Well, my bout has gone on for about a year of rounds, so I’m pretty certain that it exists.

Ok, I’m fucking lazy, too. But that doesn’t belie the fact that I have had NO inspiration for that year. Not a sausage.

For those of you who aren’t writers, let me tell you what having a block is like: think of the worst fucking feeling you’ve ever had in your life. I’m not talking physical pain, here. I’m talking about just a bad, bad feeling. The feeling like you’re completely alone and no one will ever be with you again. The feeling that the world has just left you behind.

No, multiply that by about 15 billion and you’ll have some inkling of how fucked up this feeling is.

You’re sitting there staring at blank screen (or sheet of paper for you old schoolers) with your fingers on the keyboard and……nothing. You stare for about an hour. Or, more likely, you stare for about 10 seconds and then you start playing with your Iron Giant action figure that you keep by your computer.

This is the feeling that Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) was feeling when he started writing his first adaptation. It didn’t help that he was adapting a book that really has no story. Susan Orlean (Merle Streep) wrote The Orchid Thief not as a story per se, but as a report about a John Laroche’s (Chris Cooper) life and why he was stealing rare orchids from the Florida swamps. What was it about him that made him need to find new and interesting ways to get these orchids even though it is completely illegal to pick them. And her story ends up being more of a history of orchids and the beauty that has entranced people for thousands of years.

A bit of a poser, huh? (How many British expressions can I use in one review? We’ll see.) And Charlie wants to hit on all of that. He doesn’t want it to be just another story. He doesn’t want any action or real development because people don’t develop. They stay the same. He just wants the movie to be about flowers and their beauty.

His block only gets worse when his more outgoing twin brother, Donald starts to write a screenplay that is filled with clichés and follows every one of Robert McKee’s (Brian Cox) Ten Commandments Of Screenwriting. And, as more time goes by, Charlie has more and more people breathing down his neck for the finished product: his agent (Ron Livingston), the woman from the studio who optioned the book (Tilda Swinton looking better than she has in ages), even the girl he’s in love with (Cara Seymour).

Then real inspiration hits! He’ll write himself into the story! He will show his struggle with writing this story!

And, for some reason, the real Orlean loved the idea.

That’s right, folks. This is, for the most part (sort of) a true story. Ok, so there probably is and never was any such person as Donald Kaufman. And the end of the movie (after the book ends) is hopefully all fiction. And I sincerely hope that Charlie Kaufman isn’t as dysfunctional as he is portrayed in the film. But he really did struggle and ponder it for a long time. I think.

The reality of this movie is extremely hard to figure out. And that’s the real fun about it. Long after the movie was over my friend and I were knocking our heads together trying to figure out what the hell was true and what wasn’t. The more I think about it the more confused I get.

But whatever the truth is, the movie is pretty brilliant. And Donald Kaufman is wonderful creation. He is everything that his brother isn’t. Where Charlie is painfully shy and completely introverted, even rude at times, Donald is friendly and ready to be pals with anybody. He walks onto the set of Being John Malkovich and immediately starts a relationship with the make-up girl (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Charlie is a total chickenshit when it comes to, well, pretty much everything, but Donald wants to rush in head first. Where Charlie is a radical screenwriter who wants to throw the rules out the window, his brother is a very traditional writer who follows every rule specifically. And, of course, where Charlie is stuck on the first word, Donald writes his screenplay in about three weeks.

The dualities between Charlie and Donald show us the dualities of all of us. We are all introverts and extroverts. We are all chasing after a dream while shying away from it for fear of rejection. And we are all looking for love but looking for a way to protect ourselves from the heartbreak. Even someone as seemingly stable as Susan Orlean.

And Nic Cage plays both of them absolutely brilliantly. He puts in two of his best performances in years. At least since Leaving Las Vegas. And he did so well playing against himself that, for a split second, when I only saw three names on the poster I thought, “Why didn’t they put Donald on there?” There wasn’t a seam to be seen.

The rest of the cast was just as good. Meryl, of course, was great. Has she ever been even mediocre in anything? And she looked damn good in this one. I have never thought of her as being a very beautiful woman, but for some reason she really was in this. (No, those aren’t her breasts in the partially nude snapshot.) And Chris Cooper was awesome as the sleazy title character of the book. He made us at turns love him and hate him with such ease that you forgot that he was missing his four front teeth and just saw him as a very strange human being.

Of course there’s Spike Jonze. He and Charlie Kaufman should only work together from now on. Charlie’s gone off on his own (Human Nature, which I hear isn’t very good, and the upcoming Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind), but Spike has yet to do so. I’d like to see what he can do without a cool and fucked up story by Kaufman, but I’m more excited to see what they’ll do together. Their styles fit together like a frozen waffle and mulberry syrup.

In fact, the only problem I had with it is one that a friend of mine had with Kaufman’s last two films, and now I can kind of see it. He really seems to hate his characters. He finds new ways of destroying their lives…or just making them look as bad as possible. Nic looks terrible in this movie.

I also can’t wait to see what happens when the two Kaufmans get the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. (Um…well…I guess that’s what it goes under.) It had better win. I don’t think there’s been a better adaptation this year. Not bad for a guy who used to write for The Dana Carvey Show.

If you’re a writer, GO SEE THIS FILM!!! It ranks up there with Barton Fink as one of the best movies about writer’s block ever made. If you’re not a writer you may not appreciate it as much, but you should still like it. It may not be fore everybody, but give it a shot. It’s one of the most original movies I’ve seen since, well, Being John Malkovich.

By the way, I’m not really a fatass bald guy. And “loser” is relative. I don’t hate myself QUITE that much.