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A little while after arriving, Michael calls an old girlfriend. Her name is Bella and she lives in Cincinnati. She agrees to meet Michael at the hotel bar, in the vaguely defined maybe-a-reconciliation ;) scenario perpetrated by every dude with a weakness for nostalgia and hard liquor. Michael ended things abruptly 11 years ago, we learn. He thinks maybe things have changed but he realizes that they haven't. Bella has questions tonight but he has no answers; she doesn't know what she came for but it wasn't this. She storms out.Kaufman has a way of manifesting the demented psychological impulses we have without it feeling like a gimmick.
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Michael is looking for a bulletproof love that doesn't exist. If it feels perfect, you're probably just drunk and naked. Humans are frantic and selfish and twisted, ugly and mean, erratic and whimsical. His wife and kid are back home alone, his ex-girlfriend discarded a second time. He doesn't have much use for anyone. And yet there he is, again, drunk in Cincinnati, Ohio, land of Some Pretty All Right Parking Lots, I Guess, and he meets a girl he's convinced can fix everything. Drunk and in love with someone new is looking at the clouds and telling yourself you see something written in them.The pivot at the end of the film will knock the wind out of you, and on your way, there is a sex scene between Michael and Lisa as authentic as any I have ever seen. Two people there, in the dim light, sometimes entwined, sometimes on opposite sides of the room, hurtling toward something, desperate and utterly defenseless to this moment's own momentum, Lisa's asymmetrical breasts, the cuff on Michael's shirtsleeve getting stuck on his hand and Lisa helping him figure it out. No one looks sexy trying to take their socks off, and there's no use in trying.***There is a scene in Kaufman's Adaptation when Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) is talking to his twin brother Donald (also played by Cage). Charlie wishes he could be as oblivious as he thinks Donald is. Once, years ago, when the two were in high school, Charlie watched Donald flirt with a girl named Sarah. She looked happy, interested. But as Donald walked away, Sarah and a friend started laughing at him. Many years had passed since that day. Decades. Charlie thinks Donald never heard the girls. But Donald did. He kept loving her anyway.Drunk and in love with someone new is looking at the clouds and telling yourself you see something written in them.
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