The Weather Man

This movie was a great piece of social commentary on the emptiness of our current American culture. Being the weatherman appears to be a great job. It pays almost $300 Grand a year, and you can afford a nice apartment and a mansion for your beautiful blonde ex-wife and your two estranged children.

A job as a weatherman, without a meteorological degree entails absolutely no challenges. You become lazy and bored, because you think you have everything. After all, isn't the entire purpose of life to make money, drive nice cars, and wear nice clothes, and eat out every night of the week? You are able to spoil your children, hence never teaching them the value of challenging themselves and depriving them of ever working toward a goal and feeling satisfied.

This is what we think living is today in this country! We have no depth! We have toxic vocabulary, eat useless toxic food, we watch useless toxic entertainment, and we have completely useless jobs that create nothing. We wonder why our children have no idea what to do with themselves? Wealthy Americans, which most of us are by the standards of the world, have no skills, no integrity, and no character. The only things our children grow up knowing for sure, are what a Frosty is, and a Big Gulp. The gap between this generation and their grandparents is vast. Our elders worked hard at jobs which created the foundation of wealth and substance that we erode every day with our irresponsible selfish consumerist conduct. Mr. Spritz has no idea what a Big Gulp is, but he's dying of the cancer that eats this country.

The Weatherman (Nicholas Cage) has a better time with himself, and everyone else as soon as he figures this out. Hilariously, he had to actually get hit in the head with a Big Gulp. We need to focus on the things that matter, take responsibility for our children, and ourselves. The one thing that I think was off in the movie was the line about how being an adult does not include the word easy. The big secret to life, is that when we do things the correct way, often the hard way, life actually gets easier, for everyone.

I went to the theater expecting the usual vacuous Hollywood bomb. I was blown away with the power of this movie. On the way out, we asked a young man that was working the theater what he thought. He said that he thought The Weatherman was incredibly dark and very far fetched. I agree, our culture is dark and far fetched. The movie, however, was dead on. Our current life is a bubble about to burst. This movie offered a solution - find some meaning in your life and get after it. Pretending this vacuum doesn't exist, and that Jessica and Ashley Simpson are talented individuals worth our time and interest, is incredibly bleak to me. On the other hand, I was pretty sure this young man had no idea the scale of these problems. How could he, when he has never experienced anything else.

I saw a screening of this tonight, and I was very impressed. I expected a rather shallow comedy, but instead, received a well-thought out and delivered work which was insightful, quirky, funny and touching film which was far above my expectations. Cage delivers a great performance as usual, and the father-son relationship between Cage and Caine was authentic and balanced. This is not just a comedy, but is a study of the importance of family, and an overlying existential questioning of what our lives are all about. I highly recommend it for men and women alike. On a side note... Verbinski's works are diverse, fun, and interesting, and this is no exception.

When I first saw the advertisements for "The Weather Man", it seemed like the movie was going to be another formulaic, feel good Hollywood redemption tale. In reality, it is a dark, scathing satire of American values. The marketing likely scared away a lot of people who would enjoy the film, while attracting an audience who was presented with something unexpected and perhaps uncomfortable. The comedy is quite raunchy, the tone is bleak, and the story is anything but formulaic, throwing industry conventions right out the window, which leads to a film that's more believable than most.

David Spritz is a man whose life has become the ultimate exercise in futility. Each day, he wakes up and goes to a job that, despite paying a handsome salary, is entirely unfulfilling. His relationship with his ex-wife is strained, his relationship with his children distant. To make things worse, his Pulitzer Prize winning father seems to be disappointed in what David has done with his life.

In real life, progress in one's personal life is generally made in baby steps. Usually, people don't undergo a drastic transformation over the course of several months. David attempts to improve his standing in life, at times failing entirely, at times succeeding in small doses. The results of these attempts range from very funny to downright saddening, and this helps lend the film an air of realism. This is a complicated character study about a man coming to grips with the fact that he's failed to meet any of the goals he set for himself in life, despite attaining a social standing that many people are envious of. There aren't any easy answers or life altering epiphanies; self-improvement is a long, gradual task that will probably never be completely fulfilled, and "The Weather Man" reflects this reality. While not for all tastes, this movie deserves credit for tackling a relatively conventional subject in a very unconventional, at least for a mainstream Hollywood movie, manner. I imagine that this film will be a bigger success overseas and on DVD than it will be in its US theatrical run.

Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean X3, The Ring, The Mexican) has an uncanny way of moving strange characters through bizarre plots while maintaining our interest and our empathy. THE WEATHER MAN was so poorly promoted when it hit the theaters that it seemed like it was going to be one of those asinine food throwing slapstick comedies instead of the very serious examination of contemporary life in the big cities, or even more about the struggle of a disillusioned man who cannot find a balance between business success and family/marital failure, it is. This viewer almost ignored it completely - until the DVD.

David Spritz (Nicholas Cage) is a TV pawn the station uses as a weatherman: he is untrained as a meteorologist, skilled only be his TV persona success dependent on a created gag/tag line - the Nipper (the peak worst day in the forecast). His personal life is a mess, separated from a disconsolate wife Noreen (Hope Davis), distanced from his successful writer father Robert (Michael Caine) and on shaky territory with his two children - fat and sad Sully (Gemmenne de la Peña) and sweet but troubled pothead Mike (Nicholas Hoult). To make life worse his TV persona follows him into the streets of blustery Chicago where his viewers either seek autographs invading his privacy or throw food at him as the progenitor of the lousy cold weather. This polarized existence is invaded by an offer to become weatherman on Bryan Gumbel's Hello America show in New York (a career jump for which he longs for many reasons), serial confrontations with his father whom he emulates but always feels a failure, the finding that his father has lymphoma, the ridicule of fat Shelly at school, Mike's edgy involvement with his drug counselor Don (Gil Bellows), and Noreen's new live-in Russ (Michael Rispoli). How David meanders through this quagmire of dilemmas is the story and while it is not pretty, it is pungent.

Cage inhabits the strange role of David finding a way to make this loser with a short temper someone about whom we care. It is a tough assignment but Cage meets it on every level. Michael Caine provides some of the more eloquent moments in the film: his words of wisdom and view of life are the only grounded elements of the story. Likewise Hope Davis is fine as are the cameo roles of the children as sensitively played by de la Peña and Hoult. The subject of the film is tough and the excessive use of potty mouth language is overbearing and at times one wishes Verbinski would have edited some of the gross food slinging scenes.

But as an overall message movie there is much here to admire. It simply is not the mindless slapstick the posters and trailers would indicate. The PR folks on this one blew it. Worth your time and attention. Grady Harp

I can already tell that people are going to have very strong reactions to The Weather Man. People are either going to love it or hate it. They're going to find it shockingly hilarious or just plain shocking. I loved it and found it hilarious, but I'm not easily offended (I do a show with Jegar, how can anything offend me?). There were many instances where I was the only person laughing in the theater. For instance, Michael Caine, who plays Robert Spritz, tells his son David Spritz (played by Nicolas Cage) that David's daughter is getting teased at school and called "Camel Toe". Just to hear Sir Michael Caine use the expression "camel toe" is pretty unexpected. But then various shots of camel toes pop up on the screen to illustrate this phenomenon to anyone in the audience who's unfamiliar with the concept. I found it all absurdly hilarious, but I don't think many of the grey-haired audience shared my sentiments.

This movie was not at all like I was expecting. The Weather Man is crass and silly, but it's also extremely dark and sad. David Spritz is a sad, lonely man who's trying to reconcile with this ex-wife and get his family back together, but despite his best intentions, things just never work out the way he wants. More than anything, he wants to prove to his dying father that he can be a great man too, but time is running out. This is not your typical comedy. It's not easy to watch sometimes, but according to Robert Spritz, "Easy doesn't enter into grown-up life."