Rating: 
Summary: Cage regains it.
Review: Nicolas Cage regains his craft as a artist. He transforms himself into a screenwriter that is pure to his art. He has a twin brother, or does he? He falls in love and struggles admitting it, because he is so drawn into his work. Meryl Streep, can't spell, is brilliant! She turns 180 degrees to her "class". A complished writer for the New Yorker and a book writer. She falls in a trance with a "flower" and a man. Then, they meet. 2 on 2, and one flower. Not actually that dramatic. The video is Superbit and the story is an "A". It's brilliantly acted and crafted. It's a must for anybodies collection.
Rating: 
Summary: Being Charlie Kaufman
Review: All the people that are so amazed at the originality of this film must missed films such as THE PLAYER and GET SHORTY. The whole story within a story technique has been done many times before. Nevertheless, this is a good film. Anyone who does not like the ending of this film, does not understand anything this film is saying.
Rating:
Summary: Kaufman & Jonze deliver another offbeat potential cult fave
Review: Director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman follow up their hit BEING JOHN MALKOVICH with a film that is even more bizarre and devilishly clever: ADAPTATION.
Nicolas Cage plays Kaufman and his identical twin Donald. While the manipulative Donald harangues his brother and gradually works on a serial killer script with a daft twist (Jonze making fun of Hollywood's lack of originality), Charlie is handed the mammoth task of adapting journalist Susan Orlean's fact based novel THE ORCHID THIEF for the big screen. So naturally he heads straight for the source and meets with Orlean (played by Meryl Streep) and the inspiration for her book John LaRoche (Chris Cooper in an award winning performance); the renegade redneck Orchid Thief in the flesh.
With so much raw material in front of him, Charlie sets about working his interview subjects into his script along with his own experiences. This makes for a film that is sometimes confusing on first viewing; but try and bear with it, because this is a movie where the viewers patience helps reap the reward.
As usual, Cage and Streep are excellent and Cooper, of course is dyanamite. Kaufman's (the REAL Kaufman) script breaks EVERY screenwriting rule in the book, so as a guy who enjoys bending rules, I can fully applaud this. Kaufman and Jonze even manage to work in a dig at BEING JOHN MALKOVICH into the movie; which film buffs will especially enjoy.
To give an idea of how complex ADAPTATION is, it's taken me two weeks to actually get around to writing this review. I ACTUALLY HAD TO USE MY BRAIN! So I thunk hard. I thunk and thunk until I felt like my bonce would explode; just like the guys in the SCANNERS movies. In fact its taken this long for the swelling in my head to go down. For the past fortnight I've looked like Henry from David Lynch's ERASERHEAD. You could have projected a widescreen print of BEN-HUR on my forehead. So if it gave ME something to think about then you ought to enjoy it too.
DVD extras include subtitles, cast and crew filmographies, a behind the scenes featurette and the trailer.
Rating: 
Summary: Cage is uninspired as Charlie Kaufman
Review: I laughed a lot during my first viewing. But my second viewing was awesomely different. While the information found in Susan Orlean's book, THE ORCHID THIEF, is indeed still inspirational, it is Nicolas Cage's portrayal of the brilliant Charlie Kaufman that I find most problematic now. Nic Cage isn't asked to do much with the character, and doesn't do much with it, compared to the charisma he exudes thoughout the picture in his portrayal of Donald Kaufman. Charlie is a character without inspiration. And Nic Cage portrays the character without any idea as to how he could make it moving, or funny. How I managed to overlook the flaws in his perf' during my first viewing is simple. ADAPTATION, just like BEING JOHN MALKOVICH before it, is a totally original story, that only gets weirder and more surprising as the narrative continues to its ultimate finale, on a first viewing, of course. The screenplay is the star. Nicolas Cage, Meryll Streep, and Chris Cooper, are not starring in Spike Jonze's picture. But Charlie Kaufman's. His script, at first, is a ride down a rabbit-hole, whose scenary is perfectly overwhelming in its glorious oddities. Virgins are in its clutch. But when you whipe away all of the weirdness, no longer surprised by it all, there's still Nic Cage's uninspired portrayal of Charlie.
Rating: 
Summary: Adaptation
Review: This movie was bizarre, slow moving, and disjointed. While the acting by Nicholas Cage and Meryl Streep was excellent in the parts they played, the depressing self-examination that dominated the plot was hard to follow and thoroughly unentertaining. The dark attempt at artsy comedy was absolutely disappointing and about as far from being comedic as anything I have seen.
Rating:
Summary: Never finished it.
Review: If I had to sum this movie up in one wored, it would have to be Pointless. You don't care about any of the characters. You want they all to just go away and leave you alone. After about an hour and a half, In couldn't stand it anymore and shut it off.
Rating:
Summary: Adaptation
Review: In the story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" the writer, Borges, authors his narrator to pen the following words: "...Bioy Casares had dined with me that night and talked to us at length about a great scheme for writing a novel in the first person, using a narrator who omitted or corrupted what happened and who ran into various contradictions, so that only a handful of readers, a very small handful, would be able to decipher the horrible or banal reality behind the novel." Adaptation is a story about twin brothers who are screenwriters. Together they write a screenplay adaptation of a book about flowers. We the audience see none of this happen. We never get to see the twin brother Narrators. We never get to see them working on a screenplay. It is all happening in that conceptual space where sits the Narrator - it is not filmed. What we do get to see, though, is the film/adaptation they made, The Orchid Thief, starring Nicholas Cage and Meryl Streep. The twin narrators have written themselves into The Orchid Thief and thus of course appear as twin characters (both played by Nicholas Cage) who are both made to look homely and inferior in their own ways. We are at first led to believe that we are watching a story unfold - a story about the process of writing a screenplay adaptation of a book about flowers. Eventually though, through a series of self-referential remarks and incongruous events, the audience is several times clued that they are indeed watching the finished film - not the process of making the finished film. The elegant and hilarious final quarter of the film is the result of one Narrator/twin having taken over writing for the other. Even this Narrative-level switch is humorously referenced at The Orchid Thief level right before its effects are shown. In the passage from Borges we are told that a handful will decipher a meaning from the Narrator's spotty writing. But what of the very big handful who do not? Naturally they will be attentive enough to spot the "various contradictions" (or in Adaptation, the self reference and incongruous ending) but perhaps not patient enough to notice that these imperfections have design - that they are all pointing at something very solid. To the distracted observer these various incongruities may seem like errors on Borges' part (or Cesares', or Kaufman's) - careless or amateurish mistakes - or even worse, deliberately sophisticated ambiguity. It is to the credit of Kaufman and Jonze that they could make Adaptation tolerable to the large handful who were glued to The Orchid Thief. The Orchid Thief is, in its own right, a very very good and funny film too. Critics find all sorts of snazzy things to chomp on here but can't seem to put them together to make anything but an "almost-there" for Kaufman. Kaufman is apparantly staying mum about the "meaning" of the film, allowing critics to apprehend his film the way Donald would. If you want to read about it just go online and read the reviews. The Orchid Thief, the film, is the only part of Adaptation that anyone ever seems to talk about.
Rating:
Summary: Maladaptation
Review: There is a basic rule of cooking which states that if you use very good and very fresh ingredients and you neither over cook nor over spice them, the resulting dish will invariably be delicious. That simple formula does not apply to what Hollywood serves up, and this is an unfortunate example of how to take excellent actors (Streep, Cage, and Cooper), a good book ("The Orchid Thief"), use superb photography, enjoy a large budget, and produce what at best could be considered a mild emetic. There is no excuse to waste Meryl Streep's acting genius on this idiotic, solipsistic, attempt at cleverness. It will be a long time before I manage to erase from memory the image of Streep in a Florida swamp holding (Pieta-like) the body of Chris Cooper, who has just been killed by a (rubber?) alligator and screaming at Nicolas Cage (who is trying to escape the situation, as they probably all were} ...Oh, my! The pain in her expression must have come from the realization of how her art was being iolated. The movie tries to exploit the terrain of self-deprecation, self-doubt, and a paralyzing sense of inferiority which Woody Allen has profitably cultivated over the years. Allen is funny precisely because he is not incompetent or inferior; but here the script renders Cage as incompetent. And inferior. There is nothing funny about that. The worst of this horrible mixture is the artsy-craftsy pretensions with which it is riddled. Discontinuities in time and narration might be here to give the movie a certain "avant-garde" flavor, but they don't, they just irritate. Cage plays himself and his twin brother (a technical virtuosity); together they are twice as painful to see as a single Cage would have been. Streep's part is so undemanding that it could have been played (equally well) by any one of a thousand aging actresses. There is nothing in the script that allows her to shine, and therefore the Academy awarded her an Oscar for best supporting performance. Chris Cooper does shine in his role as a Florida hick with graduate school knowledge of everything. He too received an Oscar for his work, proving the inscrutability of the Academy. This aberration was directed by Spike Jonze, who should be charged with malpractice and kept out of the kitchen.
Rating:
Summary: Very Good
Review: Many past reviewers have commented that the end was bad because it followed the generic Hollywood style that Kaufman was trying to avoid. But that was the point. After Charles asked Donald to help him with his screenplay the rest of the film was Donald's idea for the ending of the screenplay. The only scene that could have been added to the end so more people would understand would be a scene where Charles is giving the screenplay to the movie company and asking how they liked it. So the ending was supposed to be like that, for it obviously didn't actually happen.
Rating:
Summary: Strange But Unique
Review: Adaptation is a film that pulls in the audience right from the very beginning. To the brilliant performances, incredible writing and outstanding direction. The movie is about Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), who is hired to adapt a book into a film, called 'The Orchid Thief' which is written by Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep). This novel is taken from her experience of meeting with a 'flower man' named John Laroche (Chris Cooper). All I can say is that 'Adaptation' is a film that I have never experienced before. I saw Spike Jonze's other film, 'Being John Malkovich', and was very confused by it. Probably because I never really got what it was all about. But, watching 'Adaptation', and seeing that they incorporated that movie into the film wasn't that bad for me, because even though, 'Being John Malkovich' didn't entice me that much, it just made me feel complete that I saw that movie first, before watching 'Adaptation'. Moving along, the cast is Excellent! Nicolas Cage is an actor that I was never really into, but after seeing him in this movie, I have to say that his performance is superb. Also, Meryl Streep gives her real life character Susan Orlean a very good twist. Streep went all out on this movie, and didn't hide anything. I probably liked her performance, in this movie more than in 'The Hours' (which is also worth watching). Chris Cooper won his Oscar for this movie and deserved it as one of the characters that is starnge but also very funny, complete with the long hair and the gold teeth. All of the performances are exceptional! This movie should have won immediately right from the screenplay category. This is filled with many back to back dialogue that is very emotional but funny at the same time. I like the way this movie could have ended in many different situations. Overall 'Adaptation' Is a movie that is strange but captures the audiences with just the right amount of clevernes that makes it very unique. Go give Adaptation a try, and you'll see what it's all about.
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