'K. Few things:

1) What you call "camera" is typically called "cinematography." "camera work" is generally the purvey of 1st Camera (if it's a single camera shoot) or 1st and 2nd camera (if there are 2 cameras, etc) as well as 2nd unit 1st camera (if there's a 2nd unit, and there almost always is on anything with people whose names you recognize in it). The gestalt of "things that appear on screen" is the work of the Director of Photography, or DP. He's in charge of all things related to the camera, how it moves, what it passes over, and what lights all those things.

2) "blocking" is an interim direction that you, as an audience member, do not see. Once it's in the camera, it all rolls into "framing."

3) I have not seen ADAPTATION, nor will I. I hated the fuck out of BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and hated the fuck out of ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND even more. That said, I read the draft of ADAPTATION that got the movie launched. It cemented my hatred of Charlie Kaufman more than anything else, I think, because he turned his own self-referential laziness into parody and got an Oscar nom for it.

So here's the thing about ADAPTATION. It is an exercise in duality, not so much a parody or satire as a schizoaffective exploration of the medium of film presented as humor and wit.

- The Orchid Thief is a real book. I haven't read it, but I read the article in the New Yorker it was based on and I was fascinated. It's an incredibly interesting tale if you're the sort of person who reads articles in the New Yorker - but a movie based on The Orchid Thief would be a lot like a movie based on Guns, Germs & Steel. Nonetheless, Johnathan Demme optioned the movie rights in 1994.

- Charlie Kaufman does not have a brother, twin or otherwise. Donald represents his duality of purpose - Charlie is trying to adapt an unadaptable book and fighting terrible, pussilanimous struggles to do it; Donald is Shane Black (who is an asshole).

- Brian Cox plays Robert McKee, one of the guru-est gurus in writing. I have not attended his lectures; a friend did and noted that John Cleese was in his class. Me? I read Story and thought it was 70% obvious truths, 10% insight and 20% bullshit. That said, Kaufman's inclusion of McKee is about as inside baseball as you can get in the world of movies-about-movies. It's even worse than when they mention Nikki Finke in Entourage.

- The ending is Kaufman's way of saying "truth and purity die in Hollywood" as the only two real people in the film (besides himself) are killed in a cavalier and off-handed way... after all attempts to adapt the book into something reasonable have been wholly abandoned. Donny's approach has won; Kaufman pierces the veil in order to reveal his fever dream about being incapable of adapting an unadaptable book. He's cribbing heavily from the ending of Takashi Miike's *Dead or Alive* (watch to the end) in which a difficult and intractable situation is resolved through sheer farce. Actually, now that I think about it, he's cribbing from the end of Monty Python's Holy Grail but watch the Miike anyway 'cuz it's awesome.

So. The audience for ADAPTATION are all those WGA-w choads who are members of the Academy but haven't worked in a long time. That's why it got nominated. Kudos to you for sitting through it; I fucking hate the man.