Adaptation 96
I hate you, Charlie Kaufman. Fat and bald though you may be, you make me feel like a hack.

Hard to say if I loved this movie because of or in spite of the story behind it. See, I know the lore goes that Kaufman was struggling mightily with his adaptation of Susan Orlean's lyrical yet elusive novel, The Orchid Thief — so much so that he wrote himself into the damn thing. But how do I know he didn't set out to do just that from the beginning? I don't. And that's what makes him aces.

I've hardly enough room to go into the plot, but my god, is it a piece of work. An odd, dark self-loathing, self-deprecating take on adaptation itself. What more need I say? Just this: I hardly believed I'd ever dig Nicolas Cage again, but lo, the actor from "Raising Arizona" is back, y'all.