Adaptation. DVD (Region 1)

7.5	Listal rating

Manufacturer : Sony Pictures
Release date : 20 May 2003
Number of discs : 1
UPC : 043396011731

Hollywood (1), Action/adventure (1), Brothers (1), Dramas (1), Superbit (1), Based On A Novel (1), Comedies (1), Academy Award Winners (1), Essential Cinema (1), Authors (1), Film About Film (1), Comedy (1), Adaptation (1), Dark Comedy (1), Surreal (1)

Description

Twisty brilliance from screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze, the team who created Being John Malkovich. Nicolas Cage returns to form with a funny, sad, and sneaky performance as Charlie Kaufman, a self-loathing screenwriter who has been hired to adapt Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief into a screenplay. Frustrated and infatuated Twisty brilliance from screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze, the team who created Being John Malkovich. Nicolas Cage returns to form with a funny, sad, and sneaky performance as Charlie Kaufman, a self-loathing screenwriter who has been hired to adapt Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief into a screenplay. Frustrated and infatuated by Orlean's elegant but plotless book (which is largely a rumination on flowers), Kaufman begins to write a screenplay about himself trying to write a screenplay about The Orchid Thief, all the while hounded by his twin brother Donald (Cage again), who's cheerfully writing the kind of formulaic action movie that Kaufman finds repugnant. By its conclusion, Adaptation is the most artistically ambitious, most utterly cynical, and most uncategorizable movie ever to come out of Hollywood. Also starring Meryl Streep (as Susan Orlean), Chris Cooper, Tilda Swinton, and Brian Cox; superb performances throughout. --Bret Fetzer

From The New Yorker
The hero of the new experimental comedy by the writer Charlie Kaufman and the director Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich") is Kaufman himself, played by Nicolas Cage. He's in a dreadful quandary, having signed on to adapt Susan Orlean's "The Orchid Thief," which grew out of a 1995 article in this magazine. "Great sprawling New Yorker stuff," Charlie calls the book, by which he means it's a screenwriter's nightmare-ruminative, descriptive, but lacking the clear kind of "arc" that can be shovelled into a movie. Cage's Charlie, a malcontent who wears a flannel shirt in Los Angeles, works himself into a fury of self-loathing, and, for about an hour, the movie is a funny, deft metafiction that jumps back and forth among Charlie's feverish self-doubts, his erotic fantasies, and the story he is attempting to write. We see that story: Orlean (Meryl Streep) tags along with John Laroche (Chris Cooper), a Florida man who was arrested while stealing a rare form of orchid from a state wilderness preserve. Unsocialized but erudite, a moralist, a theorist, a swamp-bred crank, Laroche fascinates the melancholy Orlean, who feels her life lacks a consuming passion. The performances are all expert, especially Cooper's, but the movie takes a disastrous leap into melodrama at the end, which can be interpreted as either a sellout to Hollywood convention or a savage self-parody of selling out. Either way, it's a mistake. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Product Description
The Superbit titles utilize a special high bit rate digital encoding process which optimizes video quality while offering a choice of both DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. These titles have been produced by a team of Sony Pictures Digital Studios video, sound and mastering engineers and comes housed in a special package complete with a 4 page booklet that contains technical information on the Superbit process. By reallocating space on the disc normally used for value-added content, Superbit DVDs can be encoded at double their normal bit rate while maintaining full compatibility with the DVD video format.
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