Has anyone seen this movie? This has to be the weirdest film I've seen all year. On Thursday I had the day off, so I drove from Las Vegas to Los Angeles just to see this movie. (Hey, I was bored.) Well, I have say that it was worth the four and half hour drive. The movie hasn't been released here in Vegas.
The movie is about a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicholas Cage) who is hired to write a screenplay based on a book called "The Orchid Thief" by a reporter named Susan Orlean (played by Meryl Streep). The movie follows Kaufman as tries to write the screenplay and it also deals with his personal problems which include his fear of women and his twin bother, Donald (also played by Cage), who is writing a screenplay of his own.
The scenes with Cage are undercut with scenes of Streep as she is doing research for "The Orchid Thief." The plot of "The Orchid Thief" deals with a guy named John Laroche (a great performace by Chris Cooper) who tried to steal several rare, expensive, and endangered orchids from a national park in Florida by using a loophole in the law where he could hire some Seminole Indians to accually take the orchids because they could not be prosecuted by federal law.
NOW HERE IS WHERE IT REALLY GETS CONFUSING! Charlie Kaufman is a real life screenwriter who's credits also include "Being John Malkovich" (in fact the movie begins during the filming of that movie) and he also wrote the screenplay for this movie. There really is a book called "The Orchid Thief" written by Susan Orlean and there is a real John Laroche who really did try to steal some orchids from a national park. So basically the movie is about how the real Charlie Kaufman tried to turn "The Orchid Thief" into a movie. Now obiously there are some parts of the movie that are made up (I have read that Kaufman does not have a twin brother), but it still has to be one of the best films I've seen all year.