Adaptation

I rarely praise anything with Nicolas Cage in it. Raising Arizona would be one of his greatest in my opinion. But last night I was jus browsing through random movies and saw Adaptation. Not sure how this one slipped passed me. The movie is very self aware of it's existence, quite literally in fact. Brilliant writing on Charlie Kaufman's part whose fictional twin brother Donald, is also credited for writing. Kaufman (who wrote Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) throws very original dialog around in this movie. It's very slow at the beginning but picks up a little later. Cage has an excellent performance in this very original, not-so-Nicolas-Cage-Role. He performs a perfectly timed awkward man, with nothing going for him, struggling to write about a real book, The Orchid Thief. It follows Meryl Streep as a writer for The New Yorker, who wrote the book, in her dry existence meeting a man who is an orchid poacher. Chris Cooper in a very hillbilly way, pulls off this character. He teaches her about the subtle beauty in flowers and thats what the book is about. Cage struggles to put this together and finds himself discovering things about the author and the subject he didn't quite expect. The movie is very quirky, funny, and at times brutally dramatic. I would recommend this movie.