The subject of Adaptation came up in the comments section of my post about Catch Me If You Can, so without further ado—well, actually a week of ado, but who’s counting?—here are my deathless thoughts on Adaptation.
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Darin and I have not been having an easy time of it, movie-wise, since Sophia was born. It’s been a combination of not having enough time, having different priorities, and living through one of the suckiest periods in American cinema.
What’s been strange is that a lot of the movies we’ve seen have been critically acclaimed and we’ve still hated them. In the middle of Amélie Darin turned to me and said, “Do you think we’re just out of the habit of watching movies?” And he asked at almost the exact moment I was thinking, “Holy crap, this is the biggest movie in French history?” (Call me wacky, but I don’t enjoy movies that find stalkers “fun.” And the prologue, which explained how Amélie got to be the way she was, was so deeply unpleasant for me I was simply predisposed to dislike the rest of the movie.)
Every review we’d heard about Adaptation had been so overwhelmingly positive. You’d think we’d have learned our lesson on believing reviews after Mulholland Drive (Hated it! And yes, I understood it just fine—I still thought it was pretentious artistic crap), Amélie, Sexy Beast, AI: Artificial Intelligence (I want the 18 hours of my life that movie sucked away back), or Donnie Darko (well, actually, Darin saw that one without me, but I’ll take his word for it).
You’d think we’d learn our lesson, but you’d be so wrong.
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