{"id":493,"date":"2004-01-10T14:16:15","date_gmt":"2004-01-10T19:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=493"},"modified":"2004-01-10T14:16:15","modified_gmt":"2004-01-10T19:16:15","slug":"adaptation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=493","title":{"rendered":"Adaptation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Watched Adaptation<\/a> over the holidays with the brother and sister-in-law in New Jersey. I enjoyed Nicholas Cage’s acting tour de force, playing an angst-ridden, intellectual, original screen-writer, and his cheerful, confident, cliche-loving twin brother, with similar mannerisms and different personalities.
\nI was entertained by the dogged resistance to making a movie without hollywood plot cliches — sex, drugs, chase scenes, personal revelation — and eventual surrender to a short, devastating parody of hollywood style.
\nThe film even plays games with emotional trajectory; there’s one red herring, the striving of the New Yorker writer and screen-writer to “follow their bliss”; and the emotional moral the movie chooses; to “be confident, despite critics.” The film could have easily swapped themes and worked as well; it’s a critique of the tacked on “moral of the story” chosen from at random from the cliches of therapeutic culture.
\nIt’s either a measure of a small bit of heart in the movie, despite overall cynicism; or personal vulnerability, but I resonated with the intellectual snobbery toward his sincere and middlebrow brother that the main character has to unlearn.
\nUltimately, though, as Judith<\/a> comments, the film-school cleverness isn’t as smart as it thinks it is. A film-school student watches oodles of movies, realizes that there are no new stories left, and that the industry uses golden chains to tie film-makers to sentimental and dramatic cliches.
\nShakespeare had that problem — the groundlings all wanted fight scenes; comedies have a happy ending; tragedies end with blood on the stage. Homer presumably had that problem — there were hundreds of years of story-telling; he had to get the audience to listen to him, and somehow do something new.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watched Adaptation over the holidays with the brother and sister-in-law in New Jersey. I enjoyed Nicholas Cage’s acting tour de force, playing an angst-ridden, intellectual, original screen-writer, and his cheerful, confident, cliche-loving twin brother, with similar mannerisms and different personalities. I was entertained by the dogged resistance to making a movie without hollywood plot cliches … Continue reading “Adaptation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-7X","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}