The Weather Man
I really didn’t think I’d like this one as much as I did – I mean, come on, what kind of a title is that? And with Gore Verbinski, I never really know quite which way it’s gonna swing – I loved the original Pirates, of course, hated the first sequel and simply couldn’t have less interest in the second (I’ll watch it when it crosses my path and by this stage it can only be better than expected); I loved The Mexican but got very little out of The Ring.
Well, this one definitely fell on my good side – and I wanna put it down, as I would those other Verbinski goodies, to the screenplay. Steve Conrad’s screenplay is kind of an updated “Death of a Salesman”, Cage’s weather man struggling all-too-hard to be all things to all people the way he imagines his ex-wife, his father, generally everyone else around him, as able to do. The ultimate lesson he learns, the thing Willy Loman never learned of course, is that in growing some of us simply have to drop dream by dream till we’re only left with one thing, and that thing is who we are. It’s sort of a downer message, I guess, but for some reason this movie didn’t leave me with anywhere near the kind of conflicted feelings I felt at the end of, say, Clerks II, whose slightly similar message was basically, “some people are just plain meant to have sh*tty jobs,” lol (not that Cage’s job here seems particularly sh*tty, of course, aside from the food assaults it seems pretty cushy from the off in fact). I notice Conrad also wrote the recent Pursuit of Happyness which I’ve been putting off watching for way too long, must move that up the to-do list.
This is not to say Verbinski isn’t entirely just a hired hand here, though – though the way he somehow squashed this in before the Pirates sequels certainly beggars the question “how?” (in fact, as I was pursuing this line of thought, the thought occurred that maybe the goodness here explains the step down there). There are some really nifty visual ideas come in – and Verbinski can be an extraordinarily visual director when he needs to be … it was about the only thing I found interesting in The Ring and the one thing that seems to have gone completely out of the window in favour of basic “bigger! better!” spectacle in (last mention, I promise) the Pirates sequels.
In fact, the only thing that stuck out to me here as being about as plodding as I expected the whole movie to be is Hans Zimmer’s score … or, maybe we should put his name in inverted commas here as, as always, he’s assisted by his team, the score is co-written by someone else, and there’s “additional music by” someone else. How something so barely noticable took so many people to produce is nothing short of baffling. Other than that, this is highly recommended … just a shame about the title.