The Weather Man

Sat up last night because I was determined to eat bread and cheese and watch a movie and ended up watching The Weather Man, which was a miserable and disappointing experience. The central premise, that Nicholas Cage's character is searching for authenticity among the many pretences and false selves he creates, as symbolised by the weather man's blue screen, is lost in the movie's self-pitying whiny narcissism. The idea that we are an envious and violent society (people keep throwing things at Cage) which reinforces its own envy by creating media personalities fails to be explored satisfactorily - Cage sublimates his anger into archery, expresses it appropriately to the man who tried to abuse his teenage son, ends up "accepting himself for who he is" - while the subplot of the father's terminal illness and death which removes pressure for Cage to live up to his projected expectations of himself is poorly interwoven with the other strands of the story, jarring particularly because of Michael Caine's astonishingly bizarre accent. The whole experience felt akin to watching Gore Verbinski masturbate - potentially enjoyable if that's the kind of thing you like to watch, but you can't help feeling that he's having a whole lot more fun than you are.