Post by Capo on Apr 25, 2008 23:53:04 GMT
Adaptation.
Spike Jonze 2002 | USA
Suffering from writer's block, scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman turns to his less talented twin brother Donald; meanwhile, the writer of the book he wishes to adapt falls for the subject of what is to become her book.
Kaufman's predictably self-aware writing becomes the subject of its own self-scrutiny, with self-effacing frankness and a whole splatter of indulgence. It's as if he himself was unable to make a straight adaptation of Orlean's book, and so made it into a success by exploring the struggles he faced when writing it; but this, as a result, is a far more multi-layered film than any adaptation of that sort would have been: its narrative is embedded in lovely recurring gestures dealing with writing itself, the unique nature of twinship, and makes a fascinating and passionate account of rare plants, too, an allegory for humanity's search for the belovedly rare qualities that lie beneath our own projected selves. Cage is hilarious; Cooper, too; Streep is the perfect bind. Kaufman's script has little place to go after a certain point, though, and so, as in Being John Malkovich, it explodes from genuinely fascinating comedy to conventional melodrama; as with Malkovich, Jonze goes along for the ride with complimentary direction, and whether this final-act turn into hectic territory rubs you the right way is simply down to preference; oddly, as it is, it seems when fiction is finally required of Kaufman, he falls short.
Spike Jonze 2002 | USA
Suffering from writer's block, scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman turns to his less talented twin brother Donald; meanwhile, the writer of the book he wishes to adapt falls for the subject of what is to become her book.
Kaufman's predictably self-aware writing becomes the subject of its own self-scrutiny, with self-effacing frankness and a whole splatter of indulgence. It's as if he himself was unable to make a straight adaptation of Orlean's book, and so made it into a success by exploring the struggles he faced when writing it; but this, as a result, is a far more multi-layered film than any adaptation of that sort would have been: its narrative is embedded in lovely recurring gestures dealing with writing itself, the unique nature of twinship, and makes a fascinating and passionate account of rare plants, too, an allegory for humanity's search for the belovedly rare qualities that lie beneath our own projected selves. Cage is hilarious; Cooper, too; Streep is the perfect bind. Kaufman's script has little place to go after a certain point, though, and so, as in Being John Malkovich, it explodes from genuinely fascinating comedy to conventional melodrama; as with Malkovich, Jonze goes along for the ride with complimentary direction, and whether this final-act turn into hectic territory rubs you the right way is simply down to preference; oddly, as it is, it seems when fiction is finally required of Kaufman, he falls short.