I watched The Weather Man - Nicholas Cage - on DVD the other day and then checked out the user reviews on IMDB to see if anyone agreed with my reaction.
Interestingly, some reviewers loved it, giving it 9 or 10 stars, and some hated it, giving it 0 or 1 star. Very few reviewers were in between. So I found myself wondering: Just what was it in the viewers that resulted in such widely polarized reactions to this movie? What kind of personalities loved it and what kind of personalities hated it? What was each type of person looking for in this movie–or any movie in general–and how did this movie fulfill their expectations – or not?
What I, personally, expect in a movie: an interesting plot, some good characters interacting with each other through actions and interesting dialogue, conflicts that are resolved through growth in the characters. Things like that.
What I found in this movie: zero. Possibly the most boring movie I have ever seen in my life. A sad sack who stumbles through life with sh*t happening to him while an internal monologue narrates. Period. This is entertainment?
Then I remembered another movie, popular in its time, that I disliked intensely for approximately the same reasons: Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue. Maybe the reason that some people like these movies is that they like to watch other people being afflicted with pain? And get a kick out of it even if there is no real resolution…except more pain? What?
So what’s going on here? Maybe we can get a dialogue going that would help me to understand just what it is that some people see positive about this movie.
OK, one boxed spoiler: If, in the first ten minutes of watching, you get the feeling that you really don’t like this movie much, you can look forward to this:The growing realization that it doesn’t get any better.
I find that a lot happened in this film. Films are about change. The change in this case are internal changes to the main character Nic Cage.
His life does suck, at the beginning, but he makes changes. What is interesting is that the things he wants at the start of the film don’t all turn out. He does not get back with his wife, but he becomes a better father.
At the end of the film he says
People don’t throw stuff at me anymore, maybe because I carry a bow around.
(why this line was in the preview I don’t know)
But that’s it. The people throwing stuff at him was symbolic. The fact that he didn’t get upset when people did it shows how felt that he deserved to be treated like shit The movie is about him deciding not to be treated like shit and figuring out how to make that so.
The CT bit was great! And it’s something that starts off looking one way and turns to another. Her explanation as to why the kids call her camel toe is priceless.
Huh. I really liked it, but I can see that it is quite a downer. Did you notice how much it was raining or overcast through much of the movie? That surely contributed to the mood.
I liked Cage, though, and a lot of the dialogue. I laughed out loud at the scenes where stuff was being thrown at him.
The dark “humor.” Like the camel toe, not really something that one should be laughing too much about, but there it is. Or like when Michael Caine calls his granddaughter morbidly obese and unhappy, it isn’t really funny at all, but just the manner in which Caine puts it out there kind of makes it funny because it’s just so damn true and visceral. I mean, to me it’s borderline absurdism for a grandfather to say something like that.
The internal changes that Cage goes through. He starts off with a pretty good life, actually. He makes a quarter million a year doing an easy job. He isn’t happy though, he dislikes many things about his life, feels like he’s in his father’s shadow, feels he is a failure as a man and a father. By the end of the story, there’s still some shitty stuff in his life. But the point the movie makes is, so what? Everyone has some negatives in their life, and as an adult you work through the bad and try to live a rewarding life. Cage does that by recognizing his problems aren’t something he should bitch and moan about, and that he has to work through them as an adult. He can’t get his wife back, but he can make changes so that him and his ex-wife get along so that he can be an influence in the lives of his kids.
I think some people hated the movie because they either didn’t really notice or care about the changes Cage went through, or because they just don’t enjoy movies in which that kind of internalized change are the primary “actions” in the story.
It’s sort of like Seinfeld in that it’s supposed to be a story about a slice of a man’s life. In real life, shit doesn’t happen like in a movie, there aren’t big epic events or easily pinpointable “climaxes” or plot lines that perfectly resolve themselves.
And then I think some people hated the movie because more or less from the trailers it’s advertised as a comedy and it really isn’t, so they may have gone in with the wrong expectations.
WHY??!!! For the life of me, I cannot figure out why.
I love dark humor. Some of my favorite movies include very dark humor: The Loved One, Ed And His Dead Mother, NBT: Never Been Thawed. In spite of or because of the darkness, they’re funny!
About fast food being thrown at the weather man, funny might have been some gag following the Rule of Three:
He gets hit with fast food. This is odd, surprising, an event you remember.
He gets hit with fast food again. This establishes a trend and sets up your expectations for the next encounter.
Fast food is thrown at him for the third time, he sees it coming, jumps aside, and it hits the pedophile. Or something like that. The sudden switch in action versus expectation is surprising and triggers the laugh reaction.
As it was in this movie: …just sad.
It’s true that Seinfeld was supposed to be “about nothing.” But, just trying to have a slice a life, Seinfeld kept falling into sitcom situations. The contradiction was one of the reasons it was funny.
True enough, mostly. But, if you’re interested in seeing a slice of life, look around you, out in the world. Why pay money to see it in a theater, pretending that it’s entertainment? If I’m paying out cash for a ticket, I want to see something I can’t see on the streets for free.
I’m still at a loss here. I may be in the minority…but I’m still at a loss.
As far as why do people seem to strongly react to the film, I would say this: The movie is true to itself.
A lot of movies get made by comittee. They get the original story and then someone says, “People like romance, there should be a stronger romance in this film” or “People like a good action sequence” so one is put into the film.
This film strikes me as being very true to itself. As far as people hating it, so what? So you hated it. Big deal. They didn’t make the movie to please the audience, the made the movie to please their own artistic vision and they HOPE the audience likes it, but if they don’t, so what.