Adaptation.

When I looked on the syllabus and saw that we would be watching a film called "Adaptation," I immediately remember glimpses of its cover in Movie Gallery: a broken pot with a flower spilling out of it, and maybe there was a face on the pot? Creeeeepy. Well, it turned out to be my favorite film we have watched all semester. First of all, it has an all-star cast. Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Tilda Swinton.. just to name a few. Cooper actually won his first Oscar for this performance, and deservingly so. The film is about a Hollywood screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman (Cage) who is struggling to match the success of "Being John Malkovich," which had written a few years before. Kaufman is a self-loathing man who is balding slowly but surely. He also believes he is fat, but really he's about average. It's from the loathing.

Arguably the most intriguing character in the film Is John Laroche (Cooper), an odd, tooth-less man who hunts down rare flowers (particularly the Ghost Orchid) for illicit drug use in the swamps of Florida. Susan Orlean (Streep) is a successful writer for the New Yorker pursues Laroche about his escapades to aide in the book she is writing about flowers. They become great friends and eventually estranged lovers. The plot eventually digresses into a cheap Hollywood style ending complete with gory deaths and car chase scenes to symbolize how writers are forced to "sell-out" their intriguing endings to their screenplays for entertainment purposes.

I think my favorite part about this film was Kaufman's obsession with Orlean's novel, "The Orchid Thief." The book sounds very intriguing; I'd love to read it someday. Kaufman cannot grasp why Hollywood would not accept a film accept a film strictly about the beauty of flowers. He is told by a professional screenwriter than it could possibly be done, but an ending would have to captivate the audience. I wonder why audiences cannot settle for an ending that doesn't necessarily resolve in a way we are told it should. A movie about flowers that simply ends doesn't seem feasible to most people. However at the end of the movie (after all of the trite scenes of gore and violence) there is a shot of a flower over a span of a few days. It's like he got what he wanted after all. Great ending and a great movie that I highly recommend to anyone.