1. Ah neat. 2. Also neat. The director's lab I'm in at the moment is for the stage, not for the screen, so improperly used terms are because I'm not in film skill. Hey, if I use enough wrong stuff and you keep commenting, I might never need to. I'll print out a kleinbl00 diploma. It'll help my employment opportunities exactly like a regular diploma.

3. So I have to admit an embarrassing secret. I've never actually seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Steve Carrel or Being John Malkovich. Period. There are actually a whole bunch of movies that I haven't seen, mainly because I really started getting in to film only maybe 4-5 years ago at this point. Part of the reason I review so many films a week is because I've got some catching up to do.

I also have to admit a equally embarrassing secret. I subscribe to the "Death of the Author" mindset. Once a work leaves the author's hands, it is the audiences to interpret, based on the event presented in the work. I don't mean that everyone's interpretation of a work is valid, but if the interpretation can be defended by aspects of the work reasonably well, then its valid, and if the author meant differently, well they can suck it.

First thing I didn't do was view this film as a parody. I have no clue what it would be parodying. I guess itself? The process of script writing? Okay? I don't know almost anything about how to write a script, but I know vaguely how to write and how frustrating that is, so if the movie was trying to tell me about how awful writing a script is then it's going to fall on the ears of a person who doesn't even know the language. I don't know the first thing about writing a script. I can write a poem. Or an article. Scripts? Fuck that.

Maybe I enjoyed the movie because I didn't know a great deal about the process going on behind it, so I just got to watch it as a movie about writing. Writing I can understand, art I can understand. The sheer number of writers I am friends with, combined with my passing interest gives me a bit more of an insight in to that world. As a movie about writing in general, its actually pretty good at capturing how frustrating it can be to realize what you have inside your head on a page.

Problem is, if Kaufman intended the movie to be viewed differently, then I do have to look at it from that perspective. As a movie about duality in script writing, it's kind of trite. Writing a script will twist your original vision? That's been done. A lot. We get that Hollywood is corrupting. We got it in 2002. We've known that for ages. That kind of shit was in Citizen Kane its nothing revolutionary.

I am also glad I didn't know how seriously people took this movie, because that changes how I view it immensely. This movie is not Oscar-nomination material. Well, okay, it is, but only because movies-about-movies tend to get in to the Oscars alot because of self-congratulatory bullshit. See Argo.

The wit and humor in the script is cute. Its small self-referential stuff that makes me chuckle a little bit. It is not mind blowing quality and its certainly nothing amazingly clever or insightful. It is a slightly above average intelligence movie. It is not Brief Interviews with Hideous Men or anything similarly cerebral. If Charlie Kaufman thought he was being really clever or original with his jokes, then I am very sorry for him, because he wasn't. He was just being above-average.

Taken as itself, just a movie about Nicolas Cage trying to adapt a script, then the above-average intelligence is fine. Its still clever enough that I can enjoy it. Its just a shame that Charlie Kaufman adds so much backstory to the whole thing that it sort of ruins an otherwise perfectly acceptable movie.

Also, yes. Dead or Alive has a fantastic ending.