First up is the new Spike Jonze/Nicholas Cage/Charlie Kaufman film, Adaptation.

The film follows Kaufman’s attempts to adapt The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. Paralysed and unable to write anything good he starts to write himself into the script. The movie comes out of the machine as much more than the book, or Kaufman, and is a cool reflection on writing, movies, stories, characters, the people they relate to, life, the universe and everything. It’s great that Kaufman manages to turn the process of writing the script into the adventure itself and still come out of it with the author of the book liking the adaptation! Hardcore.

It was definitely on the bleeding edge of clever-clever, but, for me at least, never quite crossed the line. The cyclic self-reference moved along enough to stay funny and the ending was cool. Often it’s the endings that ruin a film, but this one was sweet. It probably had the highest film-quality to ending-quality ratio of any film I’ve seen for years. The addition of Charlie’s fictional brother, Donald, resulted in a nice wobble, as the film was tugged by the screenwriting of both brothers as well all the other creative work that went before them. Cage’s performances as Donald and Charlie was excellent and the direction and editing that subsequently brought them together was done extremely well. At no point was my suspension of disbelief broken. It’s worth seeing the film for the experience of coming out of the cinema and rationalising the fact that both characters are actually one man.

I didn’t think it was super-fantastic, but it was cool and it’s always nice to see new things being done well. It made me want to write a screenplay!