Rating: 
Summary: A movie about the writing of itself
Review: Adaptation is a film with a gimmick that works. The gimmick is that the movie is about the screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, writing this movie. The movie, in turn, is based on an actual book, The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean. This film is easier to watch than to describe; the plot has several layers but is not nearly as confusing as the average spy or action thriller. Nicolas Cage is great as both the neurotic screenwriter and his more confident and superficial twin brother, Donald. Much of the film is about the dynamic between the twins who represent the two extremes of moviemaking; Charlie is the introspective artist while Donald is the easygoing extrovert who can churn out the kind of formula plots that drive Hollywood. Adaptation deeply explores and satirizes both sides of this dialectic between art and commerce without offering any simple answer. Real life screenwriting workshop guru Robert McKee is portrayed as a zealot who compels his pupils to conform to the traditional rules of structure which Charlie so disdains. Yet when Charlie finds himself unable to finish a script based on this book about orchids, he deigns to ask for McKee's help. After showing McKee the script (i.e. the film we've been watching), McKee tells him that all he needs to do is make the end exciting. This is a clue to the unlikely developments that occur in the final half hour. The movie also focuses on Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), a writer for the New Yorker whose book becomes a desperate quest for direction and fulfillment. She becomes fascinated with the subject of the book, John Laroche (Chris Cooper), a brilliant eccentric who steals a rare species of orchid from protected state land in Florida. The orchids provide the second part of the title's double meaning. In contemplating these flowers, Susan and John confront the Darwinian aspect of adaptation. This movie brilliantly explores on several levels what it means to adapt, both in art and in life and at the same time erases the boundary between the two.
Rating: 
Summary: Although the acting is pretty good, to sum up Adaptation
Review: in one word: pretentious. I couldn't get into the struggle of adapting The Orchid Thief that the Nicholas Cage character was experiencing because I found the whole premise behind The Orchid Thief to be pretty lame. As a result, the Meryl Streep/Chris Cooper segment of the movie was pretty uninteresting which made the Nicholas Cage segment of the movie just as uninteresting. I had high hopes for Adaptation because I really liked Being John Malkovich. Oh well, this usually happens to sophomore efforts.
Rating:
Summary: A film that has you asking questions
Review: Only thing I want to say is, this film was the first film to have me wondering where the fantasy of the movie started and where the fiction ended.That question STILL is not answered. This was one of the rare movies where I could not predict the outcome long before it ended. And it's based on a non-fiction book.
Rating:
Summary: "ADAPTATION" a simply beautiful film
Review: Imagine yourself a timid, insecure, overly self-consciencious Hollywood screenwriter in his mid-40s. Having just penned and had produced your first breakthrough script, you are handed your next assignment; to adapt Susan Orlean's "The Orchid Theif", a New York Times bestseller about a hick farmer who has devoted his passions toward the obsessive pursuit of the ghost orchid, as well as raising and illegally smuggling various species of orchids from the state swamps of southern Florida. Add to the picture your ambitious and outgoing twin brother, who also aspires to be a screenwriter. Unlike you, he is compelled to write the ultimate witlessly action-driven screenplay, and he is trumping and triumphing over your already advanced screenwriting skills all because you simply cannot bring yourself to adapt "The Orchid Theif". A fierce and antagonizing writer's block has settled over you as you feverishly attempt, in any literary direction you can, to adapt a novel you simply cannot adapt. Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman (who is, for the most part, the individual the movie is based upon) have created a brilliant piece of film that bespeaks of the art of creation and adaptation, both in the written word and in nature. From the frankly bizarre cinematic concoction that was the irreverant and brilliant "Being John Malkovich", Jonze and Kaufman, along with bravura performances by Nicolas Cage (as Charlie Kaufman and his twin brother, Donald Kaufman), Chris Cooper, and Meryl Streep are centerstage. As an audience, we are engaged ourselves in a film which questions how far we go to adapt to informalities or structure in art, whilst listening to the off-key tunes of our own desires. Fiction becomes stranger than life, and you soon discover that you have written your own character into the screenplay, and where it goes from there....? Careening headlong down a dark and tragic spiral into choas.
To call this film "ooky", or "wierd", or "off-beat" does it a severe injustice. Complex in its plot, subtext, and inner composition, Jonze and Kaufman have created a simply beautiful film.
Rating:
Summary: "Don't say 'industry.'"
Review: A second triumph for "Being John Malkovich" team Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, "Adaptation." is a painfully funny look at the mechanics of inspiration, obsession, and ultimately, of course, adaptation. The film is based on Susan Orlean's bestseller "The Orchid Thief," and is about a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman trying to adapt a book called "The Orchid Thief" for the screen. If that sounds confusing, it isn't. More verbally adept than "Malkovich," "Adaptation." manages to keep its head planted firmly in the clouds, giving the actors (especially Cage, in his best performance since "Raising Arizona") room to give us charming and even endearing performances, the lack thereof being "Malkovich's" main flaw. Most of the characters in this film are "real," including screeenplay seminar guru Robert McKee, Kaufman, and Orlean, though Kaufman and Jonze's verbal and visual trickery keeps us guessing. The real centerpiece here is Cage, who plays Kaufman and Kaufman's fictional twin (credited as the co-writer) with such a tender sense of brotherhood that the logistics of such a feat simply vanish. I found myself wondering if he would be competing with his own performance for an Oscar. An extraordinarily moving film.
Rating:
Summary: Loopy, brilliant.
Review: The most impressive thing about this film was not its loopy plot, its great script, its great acting nor its inspired ending. Its most impressive aspect was that, by introducing the tale of a screenwriter trying to connect random passages of "The Orchid Thief," a book he considers unfilmable, and connecting the random book passages through that story, the film manages to be an incredibly faithful adaptation of that book. Nicolas Cage, playing twin screenwriters, gives the best performance I've ever seen from him, and Meryl Streep gets a chance to show off her remarkable range by, at first, playing a character you'd expect her to play and then playing the same character as she defies type.
Rating:
Summary: Clever but uninteresting
Review: Yawn. Another Hollywood movie that relies on gimmicks in the absence of a good plot. But then, I guess that's the joke right? You can't write an interesting movie about flowers. It just doesn't zing and pop as much without graphic violence, sex, and fantastic chase sequences, right? So, you write a movie about writing a movie about flowers so you can insert the aforementioned ingredients to make it more palatable for us mindless moviegoers. How cute. And insulting. We get it already - hollywood knows how to poke fun of itself (in it's own self righteous kind of way). Great. Now quit being so narcissistic and start putting out movies with actual plots. This movie is filled with sarcastic jabs at contemporary moviemaking, and little else. In fact I thought the only interesting part of the film was Merryl Streep's initial observations of the obsessed orchid collector Laroche (Chris Cooper) - you know, the part that wasn't supposed to be interesting. And, in the end, maybe that is the biggest joke of all.
Rating: 
Summary: the glories and risks of being a nonconformist in art
Review: ***1/2 Spike Jonze' quirky new movie entitled "Adaptation" is basically a 21st Century redux of Federico Fellini's 1963 masterpiece, "8 ½." Out of ideas for a movie? No problem. Just make THAT the subject of your next film. Find the inspiration you need in the fact that you HAVE no inspiration. Make yourself and the movie you are creating the focus of this new project, thereby turning bitter-tasting lemons into sweet-tasting lemonade. Who knows? It worked once for the Italian master, and might very well work for you. Both "8 ½" and "Adaptation" deal not only with the creative process, but also with what happens when that process suddenly stops dead in its tracks. In this case, it is writer Charlie Kaufman who, fresh from the critically acclaimed hit "Being John Malkovich," is confronted with the need to move ahead onto his next project. Only his creative well has run dry. Fearful of failure and riddled with self-doubt, the writer, played by a paunchy, balding Nicolas Cage, struggles with adapting a nonfiction magazine article, Susan Orlean's New Yorker piece entitled "The Orchid Thief" (about, you guessed it, orchid collecting), into a commercially viable screenplay. Meanwhile, as deadlines approach and tensions mount, Charlie stares at blank sheets of paper curled up in his typewriter which seem to haunt, taunt and mock him for his inability to bring it all together. Charlie wants nothing more than to finish his work, yet he refuses to compromise his integrity by going for the obvious in his screenplay. He wants to distill the essence of Orlean's work and to capture on film the exquisite beauty of the flowers without recourse to phony melodramatics or manufactured conflicts. The problem is, of course, that film, by its very nature, virtually demands drama and conflict, so Charlie is left with little to work with from the source material. More galling even than that is the fact that his twin brother (the fictional Donald Kaufman, who earns co-screenwriter credit on the film) is feverishly writing his own screenplay (no writer's block here), a crassly commercial, by-the-numbers, formulaic affair that is the direct antithesis of everything the highly principled Charlie is trying to accomplish. After all, in the world of commercial moviemaking, "compromise" is the great force that ends up moving mountains - and it is the rare artist who can have a successful career without it. The third major character is Susan Orlean herself, a celebrated writer who discovers that, in spite of all her talent and acclaim, she has never found any one thing in her life to be truly passionate about. In many ways, it is this lack of passion and this tendency to over analyze and over intellectualize every aspect of life that is inhibiting Charlie's creative impulses as well. When Susan hooks up with this simple orchid collector, John Laroche, she feels that she has finally met a person who, through a profound dedication to a single cause, has unlocked some of the meaning of life. There is certainly much to praise in "Adaptation." The Pirandellian, film-within-a-film narrative structure is clever and challenging, as the moviemakers consistently cross over the line separating fiction from nonfiction. The sly movie industry "in" jokes (especially those concerning the "art" of screenwriting) are often sharp, witty and incisive. Kaufman is not afraid to take a few good-natured jabs even at himself, as when Charlie admits that only the most pretentiously self-indulgent and vacuous storyteller would make himself the subject of his own work. The relationship between the two Kaufmans, both expertly played by the same Nicholas Cage, is fascinating in the way the men can be so alike on the outside and yet so different on the inside. Charlie is ingenious, introspective and paranoid, always second guessing his every move and evaluating his every action in terms of how they will make others see or judge him, while Donald is the exact opposite, prosaic, happy-go-lucky and openhearted, letting life just happen to him and not giving a damn what anyone else chooses to think of him. Perhaps, the fictional Donald is really the alter ego Charlie wishes he could be. How much easier it would be to be comfortable in one's own skin and to be able to conform to Hollywood standards with no nagging conscience to worry about. The juxtaposition between the two men provides some of the wittiest and, yet, most moving moments in the film. Meryl Streep does a fine job highlighting the basic emptiness of a searching soul, and Chris Cooper has charm to spare as the toothless orchid collector who serves as the focus of Susan's article and, ultimately, her life. The controversial aspect of "Adaptation," and the one that has proved most troublesome for a large segment of even its most appreciative, receptive audience, is the direction the film takes in its final half hour. As I see it there are a few possible explanations as to just what Kaufman and Jonze are up to here: a) they simply ran out of inspiration and didn't know how to bring their story to a proper close (unlikely); b) they are doing a parody of the infamous Weak Third Act Syndrome that has haunted writers from the very beginning of recorded history (possibly); or c) they are trying to show - as the theme of the film implies - that in order to survive and move ahead in this life, we all end up "adapting" ourselves to our environment and situations, just as Kaufman himself is doing, finally providing the kind of melodramatic superstructure this essentially nonlinear story about orchid collecting needs to make it saleable. Yet, regardless of which interpretation is correct, the fact remains that the final act of this film really IS bad and goes a long way towards undercutting the value of so much of the rest of the film. I wish I could say I loved "Adaptation," but the truth is that Kaufman and Jonze seem to have fumbled the ball right as they were crossing over the goal line. "Adaptation" is an enjoyable, clever and entertaining work, but that it just might fall short of being the masterpiece so many critics acclaim it to be.
Rating:
Summary: Donald, where's your trousers?
Review: [Spoilers herein, I suppose.] Adaptation is a film built around two gimmicks: the good one isn't original, and the original one isn't good. The good but unoriginal gimmick is the old 8 ½/Contempt/Don Quixote business: we watch the events of the film we're watching being conceived as we watch it. Charlie Kauffman, a good screenwriter, searches for ideas of how to adapt the book The Orchid Thief into a film - this film, get it? - and as he comes upon each idea it's incorporated into what we're seeing. Tres meta, dude. (If I wanted meta I'd be hanging out with the Old Man From Scene 24, but regardless...) The original but bad gimmick is that Charlie's brother Donald, a bad screenwriter, takes over from Charlie at the end. Here I think they wanted to turn it into a SATIRE of a bad movie, but they miss and wind up turning it into a REAL bad movie instead. (You know, I've often wondered if those thrift store types who dwell in ironic kitsch can be so ironically kitschy for so long that they go all the way back around to being genuinely kitschy again, and wind up no better than the losers they're trying to make fun of; this film suggests that it's possible. So be careful out there, you guys. Be careful.) So anyway, to criticize ... moviemaking they subject us to thirty minutes of ... movie. Critics of Antonioni like to point out - and I'm sorry about bringing up all these highfalutin filmmakers, but that's where Adaptation is aiming - anyway, as these critics like to point out, you can make a film about bored people without making a boring film. And so too you can criticize bad movies without turning yourself into one. This is the hurdle Adaptation fails to clear. Now one bad idea like this is problem enough, but the real problem is that the "good movie" part of the film wasn't actually all that good in the first place. I mentioned 8 ½ above, but compared to that masterpiece - and a masterpiece it is, by gosh - this looks less like a work of deeply felt cinematic art and more like a made for TV movie, all close ups of talking heads, washed out colors, run of the mill Howard Shore music, etc. etc. etc. The satire is cheap and easy - sure it's occasionally kinda funny, but how hard is it to make fun of The New Yorker? - the characters are weakly drawn, the events are haphazard... and all this is in the GOOD part of the film. I know we're all glad to see a flick like this get made, but when they get to the deliberately bad part I suggest you hightail it the hell out of there. An extra star for sneaking a Beck tune into the soundtrack, and because Chris Cooper is always cool.
Rating:
Summary: Loved it!
Review: This is absolutly one of the most original movies to come out this year. I loved every moment of it! Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper all turn in excellent performances in this film directed by Spike Jonze. It is amazing how Charlie Kaufman can write such wonderful movies. You must see this. It was awesome, and definitly should take home some Oscars!
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