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Reviews
Lockdown (2000)
Flickers
Right - another prison flick. Another movie about a young black man, in this case 3 young black men, wrongly accused of a crime, convicted and sent to prison. The statement behind that injustice is bold enough. It's a bit "Boyz n the Hood" up to that point. Once it hits the prison - there are few comparisons to match some of the intensity (how's that for ambiguity?).
This movie has a few valuable segments worth the rest of its deficits. A few scenes may take you to a place you do not want ever to be. There are moments in the prison scenes where the actors are so credible it might as well be real. The directing had flickers of greatness to capture that intensity.
But just like that, in a flicker you're back to watching a $2 film worth a penny. Just watch it for the acting and directing behind a few prison scenes that fairly represent "Lockdown".
Adaptation. (2002)
Stick with the book
I saw this movie with no pretense or knowledge of the subject, theme, or otherwise visual aspect of the story. To my surprise I recognized it as as a movie scripted from this book, "The Orchid Thief". Good book, light reading, but far from movie material. "Adaptation" was an overworked attempt to make a movie from a book.
So Meryl Streep follows the path of the actual author of "TOT" but somehow in a phantasmical shift of events becomes a murderous staff writer for the New Yorker Magazine giving chase through the swamps of Florida waving a pistol. Ummm, yeah, typical behavior from a middle-aged, married, upper-crust, New Yorker carrying on an affair with a toothless subject living with his father in Florida. This was one part of many within the movie where the writers found there wasn't enough material in the book to maintain the interest of the viewers. And there is plenty of this mindless filler along feeble attempts to draw emotion, pity, fear and thrills.
So the writers script messages into Cage's lines queueing the audience into the movie's direction and/or lack of and how it should be remedied, i.e. voice overs, narratives, clues on the script digressing from the book...etc.
Bottom line: Read the book and save your money til it's out on video. And then save your time and rent something else.