I think this was the second or third time NetFlix sent us Adaptation, but it was the first time we put it in.

An intense, twisting, confusing, mid-bending path through a screen-writer's endeavor to adapt a best-selling book about orchids and a man who cultivates them into a script gives us insight to some of the strange happenings in our screen writer's turmoil, and the more successful antics of his twin brother.

The screenwriter is none other than Charlie Kaufman, who is also credited with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, both of which are similarly twisting. Sunshine is, of course, more fantasy because it involves mind-erasing techniques that don't really exist, as far as I remember... Similar to Confessions, Adaptation draws us into the character enough to make us think, "this might have happened," with some enthusiasm thrown in by Hollywood, of course.

Kaufman, played by Nicolas Cage, struggles to bring a book to the screen. He's just finished filming Being John Malkovich (another brilliant brain-twister) and wants to be true to the flower in the real-life book The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. He wants to write with the focus on the flower, and be true to the horticulture and all the wonder and whatnot that he believes from reading the book, not so much about the characters involved in the book, which turns out to be more of an allegory of the author's experiences with a man who sneaks into Florida preserves to steal the flowers.

The movie we're watching seems to be a diatribe of the torment the screenplay author went through to while creating the screenplay, which in the end is the movie we're watching, not the one he so strongly wanted to write. A wicked twist, eh?

At one point in the film, I was creatively sucked in and started to wonder how autobiographical the movie was intended to be. Even to the point where I looked up the twin brother in the movie, Donald Kaufman, who was both nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay of Adaptation and is fictional, existing only in this film.