Adaptation.

Adaptation reminds me a lot of The Wall and The Cabin In The Woods. Yes, I will explain. The Wall, if you're not familiar, is about a self-centered rock star with emotional issues who blames the world for his problems. His dad died in the war, school was hard, his mom was overprotective, his wife didn't understand him ... all these are reasons he seals himself off from the world and from his emotions, until he realizes the common thread: himself. He suddenly understands the adage "if you meet one asshole in a day, it's them; if everyone you meet is an asshole, it's you". The thing is, this story is somewhat muddled on the album. Glimpses of it are there -- "Another Brick In The Wall Part 2" is clearly about his treatment at the hands of sadistic teachers, and "Mother" is, well, about his mom, duh -- but the way the story is told, it doesn't come through so clearly. The themes of anti-authority, anti-fascism that are meant to be in the background are in the foreground. That is, unless you watch the movie version of The Wall, where it's laid out in very plain and simple terms. With the movie in your back pocket, the narrative of the album is much clearer. That is, honestly, a weakness of the album; it shouldn't need homework to make sense. The album is a fantastic album, but the movie provides context the album lacks, connecting all the dots the album leaves hanging in open space. The Cabin In The Woods, meanwhile, is a meta-slasher horror movie that takes all the tropes you know of and re-contextualizes them. A group of teens vacation in a cabin, unaware they're being controlled by a shadowy agency that has to sacrifice them to appease elder gods. Why do the characters make dumb choices? Gases, medications, and subliminal suggestion. Why are the characters in these movies written as archetypes like The Slut or The Jock or The Virgin? Because that's what the elder gods want to see. The manipulative shadow agency controlling their actions? Movie directors. The elder gods? Us, the audience. Adaptation is about a screenwriter who is commissioned to turn a popular book into a movie. The problem is, the book has no plot. It is a non-fiction book about a journalist who interviews a guy who looks like a toothless hillbilly but is actually a genius-level horticulturalist and businessman, as he hunts for a very rare and elusive flower. The journalist, who leads a rather humdrum life lacking passion or purpose, uses the hunt for this flower as a metaphor for life, but because the flower is never found, there is no great catharsis or change or struggle. The screenwriter, Charlie, can't figure out how to make this script happen. Meanwhile, his twin brother attends one screenwriting class, whips out a derivative thriller with an impossible premise, and gets attention from Hollywood. In the end, Charlie decides to pivot and turn the movie he's writing ... into the movie we're watching. He literally writes a script about not being able to write the adaptation of the novel, and his brother, and injects a whole bunch of fake details and an action-movie-style final act with a car chase and guns and murder. What you, the viewer, may not know is that Adaptation, the movie you're watching, is about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's struggle to adapt a book, The Orchid Thief, into a movie. Literally. In our world, he was hired to write the adaptation, had paralyzing writer's block, and turned that into the script of the movie Adaptation ... which is about a fake Charlie Kaufman's struggles to write a script based on the book The Orchid Thief, blah, blah, blah. The snake is eating its own tail, and somehow, the snake's head is also up its own ass here. Look, I'm not gonna say I didn't have fun watching this movie. It's well-acted all around. This may be one of my favorite Nic Cage performances. The entire cast is hitting it out of the park here. There's plenty of humor, the drama is well executed, the characters are enjoyable. This is a good movie. But I can't pretend it's great, because of the snake, up its own ass, eating its own tail. This is where the Serious Film Lovers will chime in with "you just don't understand it", and that criticism and the people who say it can go jump in a river. I shouldn't have to do homework for a movie to have enough context for its premise to make sense. The fact that I had to go to Wikipedia and read more about it for all the pieces to fall into place. That is not a well-written movie. That is a writer being overly precious and meta for the sake of being the smartest guy in the room. It's insufferably egotistical and smug. I should get everything I need from a movie's runtime; if there's homework assignments, that's not on me for failing to understand it, that's on the creators for failing to put all the meat that should be on the bone. And on top of that, the meta aspect of writing a movie about not being able to write a movie, and then the character having the epiphany of writing a movie about not being able to write a movie and writing the movie you the viewer are watching ... that kind of lamp-shading is obnoxious in the extreme. That's twee 90's auteur indie filmmaking garbage. You don't get an intelligent movie by stuffing it up its own ass, and then calling it out for it. There is nothing clever about attempting to satirize Hollywood's callousness towards the artistic and simplistic acceptance of the most rote, mundane ideas, and then ending the movie with a preposterous, out-of-left-field murder plot and car chase through a swamp like a Steven Seagal movie. Lamp-shading, when done correctly (like Cabin In The Woods), acknowledges the tropes and the hackneyed bits that make up movies, but also gives them purpose. Done well, lamp-shading acknowledges the viewer's intelligence. Adaptation's lamp-shading assumes the viewer is an idiot and uses it to sneak past lazy, uninspired choices under the guise of artistic cleverness. It also assumes that the average viewer will be interested in going behind the curtain of the creative process, and seeing the ennui at the heart of the writer. I write as a hobby -- I wrote a wrestling column for over a decade -- and lemme tell ya, it does not make for thrilling viewing. You sit, you type at a device. You stop and sip something. Writer's block is even less interesting, because it's an inability to write. Most people could not care less about the creative process; in fact, they WANT it to remain a mystery, because it adds an air of intrigue to the end result. There is an audience for this movie, but it's not mainstream. It's not even the next rung down from mainstream. Most people don't care about going inside-baseball. If it sounds like I'm really down on the movie, it's only because I had high hopes for this. I'd heard for years about how quirky and unusual and intelligent this movie is, and while it is well made and definitely well acted, it is also a smug, self-satisfied piece of forced Art (capital A) that is way too concerned with being smarter than you. I don't need that from a movie. Be clever, but don't be arrogant about it.