I watched two movies yesterday. Adaptation and In the Bedroom. These two movies are above-average, or my tolerance for unbelievable lines and inconsistent or underdeveloped characters has gone up. It's more likely the former.

I don't read reviews or commentaries about movies before or after the first time I watch them because I don't want my initial impressions to be influenced changed by them. Here, I'll write my own reviews/commentaries for these two movies... for you to choose whether to read or not.

Adaptation. Original, witty, entertaining, and almost never predictable. Plot-in-one-sentence: Kauffman and Orlean are inadvertently led into trying to find plots to their own lives while one generates a plotless book about orchids, and the other creates a plotless movie based on the plotless book about orchids. I haven't cared much for Cage's acting or characters since Leaving Las Vegas (I fell in love with Elizabeth Shue) and Face/Off, but in this movie, he plays the movie's own convincing fat, balding, pathetically desperate screenwriter - Charlie Kauffman. You hear your own thoughts in the intro and, thus, begin sympathizing with Kauffman from the get-go. Even the zany, hickish, front-toothless Laroche character is insightful and endearing. You're almost surprised that you are not surprised (strange as that sounds) when you, along with Orlean, begin to be taken up with him.

You're constantly wondering how the movie is gonna end, while simultaneously wondering how it's even able to go on. You imagine either a huge epiphany or huge anticlimax will occur when Kauffman and Orlean meet. Suspense mounts. When they finally meet late in the movie, it's smack-dab in the middle of an embarrassing, very unromantic, uninspiring, ultimately destructive moment. I loved it! They don't end up inspiring each other, but cause the deaths of the two people in their lives that do. It's satisfying to imagine that Orlean's life is ruined after the showdown in the swamp because you suspect all along that the happiness she found in her affair with Laroche is fake and temporary, brought on by the orchid drug and her addiction to its power to make her feel passionate about something... anything.

The movie didn't disappoint me until the end started unfolding... and when the woman (I can't remember her name - it might have been Julie) says "I love you too". By the time you reach this scene, you think you can guess the way the movie will end. You expect the woman to walk away and Kauffman to be left being what he loves and not what loves him. You know he's already changed, so the most you expect is a repeat of the HS scene Kauffman and his brother recount earlier. You don't need or want more. Hm... Maybe the fact that what you expect doesn't happen, even in the final scene, is...well...a gasping attempt by Kauffman to leave the audience with a last twist. But I dunno. The hopeful and sunny ending was still a bit of a letdown for me. In a movie that starts out the way it does, that sort of ending seems self-contradictorily trite.

In the Bedroom. Such realism. I enjoyed this movie less, though. The best part of the movie, for me, is when Dr. Fowler and Mrs. Fowler blame each other for their son's death. Kudos to the actors and the scriptwriters. I was almost disappointed toward the end of the movie, when Dr. Fowler actually kills Richard Strout. I expected or wanted more irony and surprise, but was satisfied with things being unresolved... with Fowler being haunted by the picture in the hallway of Natalie and Strout. It would've been pretty disappointed if the movie hinted that the Fowlers' lives were bettered and they were finally at peace after the killing.

Two other things the movie made me think about for a couple minutes... the young-guy-going-out-with-a-way-older-woman thing, and the fact that guys sit around round tables to play poker in a lot of movies.

A little sad that these movies are all I really have to blog about today, huh? I think I'd rather talk about some of the people in my life. Freely. But I can't. Not here.