The Weather Man

Gore Verbinski, 2005

 

HOOK:  What can we learn that will make a difference in life? Really.

 

STORY: Nicolas Cage plays frustrated Chicago weather man David Spritz whose storm is still brewing after a painful separation from his wife, Noreen (Hope Davis). When he gets the chance of a new job on a national TV show in New York, he sees it as an opportunity to sort the rest of his life out too—reconnect with both his kids and his Pulitzer Prize-winning father (Michael Caine).

 

GOSSIP:  Cage is said to be producing a Liberace biopic, in which he will star as the flamboyant pianist. Does everyone want to play gay these days?

 

JOHN: I really liked this film. Cage has played hang-dog before, but this cloudy comedy zeros in on what that really means. His scene in the car with Michael Caine (as his father) is genuinely moving. There are no easy answers, but we have lived with these characters long enough to see their relationship to each other is enough of one. What I really enjoyed was the use of Chicago as the location. Sure the weather is quirky, but more than that the city has always had a built in inferiority complex that mirrors Spritz’s.

 

GO, GO, GO (3 GOs out of 4)

 

SPANKY: More like looking out the window on a rainy day. If you’ve seen Cage in Adaptation, a far better film, and Michael Caine in anything, there is nothing new here. The ambivalence John points to in the plot also describes the audience. Why would anyone watch this if the message is “shit (and weather) happens”? We go to movies to get something we don’t in real life, not more of the same. Even at its best weather is a weak metaphor, and here it is not at its best. “Hang dog,” my ass.

 

“TWO PAWS DOWN” (NO BARKs out of 4)

 

KEEPER: “No one throws things at me anymore. Maybe because I’m wearing a bow and arrows.”

 

Hit the target, Asshole.

ADAPTATION

  

Adaptation, 2002

 

Spike Jonze, director

 

   

  

 

HOOK: In an age of dumbed-down movies (The 40-Year-Old Virgin) can a film be tripped up by its own cleverness?

STORY: A movie adapted from a non-story article in the New Yorker. What’s next, a Dreamworks’ version of the yellow pages?

 

GOSSIP: Well, according to Production Weekly, Charlie Kaufman will make his directorial debut with a film called Synecdoche. Not only that, but he managed to snag Philip Seymour Hoffman for the lead role, as well as Michelle Williams. As far as plot goes, pic will center on an “anguished playwright and several women in his life.”

JOHN: There are two especially remarkable scenes: Charlie (the fictional Kaufman snared into doing the movie version based on The Orchid Thief—the movie which, by the way, we are now watching) attends an orchid show. The species has managed to “adapt” by taking on thousands of shapes and color combinations. Seamlessly his attention wanders form the plants to the women there who he concludes have done the same thing. The second scene is when he is experiencing severe writer’s block. Suddenly he has a breakthrough and excitedly dictates his onrush of ideas into a hand held recorder. The verbal tirade continues but now we are watching the dejected writer listening to it, his face full of the frustration and despair of every writer who realizes what he thought would be his salvation is really shit.

GO GO GO (3 GOs out of four)

SPANKY: John, did you notice this movie begins with the shit Charlie later is listening to? Nicolas Cage playing both the twins is great fun.  Meryl Streep is classy and her performance very moving until the last fifteen minutes of the film. Toothless Chris Cooper is the wild orchid man, John Laroche (and will be no matter what other film he appears in). But here is where Adaptation goes wrong. In another great scene Charlie attends a NYC workshop on screenwriting his hack twin brother has recommended. He discovers what his film adaptation needs as an ending. Ironically we in the audience probably agree. But be careful what you wish for, as the old saying goes, because that ending proves disastrously unsatisfying (car chases, gun fights, death scene “truth.”) On the one hand this is intriguing for a movie buff to experience, on the other it is like some terrible endings in the past (Angel Heart, Jacob’s Ladder) that make you angry about the whole film and pretty well negate anything that has gone before. And if the film is trying to “adapt” to today’s audiences, it is a double disaster. Leave the schlock to lesser “Eternal Sunshine” minds, Charlie, give us something we can passionately love too.

“ONE PAW UP” (2 BARKs out of four)

KEEPER: “I‘ve got to stop sweating.”