Adaptation

Last week in class we watched the Movie Adaptation it was a really unique movie. I enjoyed it even though it wasn’t really my cup of tea. The movie is about a screenplay writer who is tasked with writing a script for a book about orchids. This proved to be a struggle because there was no real plot devices in the novel. Charlie Kaufman, the main character wants to stick to the book as closely as possible. He believes that nothing big happens in real life and therefore the book shouldn’t have anything too crazy in it. This is ironic because he goes to a writing workshop that his brother Donald, recommended and is taught that movies must have all of these elements such as sex violence drugs and life or death situations. The movie then starts to have crazy scenarios happening that were just kind of dropped in. Which is exactly what the writer didn’t want in his movie.

All of the characters in the movie except the twin brother Donald were real people. The author and the book was real. This is a really interesting phenomenon in the movie because it seems as if the movie is being written as it is being played out. I think this is an interesting technique because it allows the viewer to watch critically the parts that the writer was critical about. I think that the writer was very intentional in using this as an avenue to critic the film industry, or more specifically the writers. This is also evident in Charlie’s disdain to Donald using words like “pitch” and “industry”. He was constantly telling him to stop using those words.

The over sensationalized ending was really ridiculous. The Charlie and his brother get into this whole scenario where drug trafficking and violence was happening. They had a car wreck and the brother dies. All of this stuff is just kind of thrown into the plot with hardly any relation to the stuff happening earlier in the movie. This makes the ending incredibly hard to watch, especially after hearing all of the criticism about this sort of stuff earlier in the movie.

There is also an underlying theme of “adaptation” which can be defined ad moving away from the essence of who you are. Not only does Charlie adapt the film into a movie, but he adapts himself in order to make the film industry happy with his end product. It is a very well thought out movie, and it was fun to watch in class. A very good end to our movie nights.