Friday, January 18, 2008
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angst movie
We watched a depressing movie, The Weather Man, right, last night. About all the good I can say is that it captures the existential angst of a meaningless life quite well. A Chicago weatherman played by Nicolas Cage is making a 6-figure salary working 2 hours a day and knows nothing about weather. The NYT reviewer says he's hard working, but doesn't say at what. I'd say he works hard at screwing up his own life and that of his ex-wife and two kids.
Actually, he works hard at trying to get the approval of his dad, played by Michael Caine, who won a Pulitzer prize for a novel at age 33, and is now dying of cancer at age 70 or so. But the dad is having a hard time finding something good to say about anything the weatherman does. Because there's not much good.
The movie does also capture a bit of postmodern culture's worship of Nihilism -- that is, the view that life is essentially meaningless, anyway, so get over it.
So, why did we watch it, anyway? Simple -- we thought it was a comedy. And kept watching, thinking the comedy would soon turn up. There actually was one scene where a buxom groupie thinks that a romp with a celebrity might cause something meaningful to rub off on her, and he rubs off on her, as her bra struggles unsuccessfully to hold her in. That and the liberal use of the F word as an expletive earned the R rating, I suppose.
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Comments (1)
The very worst thing about this movie was Nicolas Cage. This movie would have been much better had an actor actually been cast. It's obvious what the director was trying to say, but Cage had no depth in portraying the sentiment to the audience. The emotion was lost in the attempt.