So I thought, too, until I saw that fucking movie. Watch it again just for performance. She's off. She's phoney. Really.

No, you're wrong, it's not possible.
Meryl Streep is the variable in a movie formula that gives a result of "holy fucking shit that was good."

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"the height of arrogance is the height of control of those who create God in their own image"

well, for most of the film, she's playing a pretty phoney (phony?) character.

Watch the swamp scene again. Forget about the story you love so much or that Meryl Streep is PERFECTION ALWAYS ALL THE TIME FOREVER. Just watch the fucking swamp scene. She sucks.

....the stoned scene is, also, self-conscious, but it wouldn't have bothered me so much if she wasn't god awful in the swamp...

I think she's just as great as everyone else does, but she sucked in this movie. You could, also, see her overdoing somewhat inappropriate sense memory in The Hours (kitchen scene when she clutches her stomach because she's using a sensory for physical pain to parallel the emotional pain her character is in), but that's a different thread...

firstly, i personally didn't "love" this film. i do like it a lot, and i may have liked it better if i didn't have to watch it over and over again so i could write an essay on it. secondly, i don't usually like meryl streep all that much either.
despite this, i don't remember her being that terrible in the swamp scene. as i recall it, her character was struggling and tired and looked bored, and i thought that was appropriate and well portrayed. and when she finally sees the orchid, she's deflated because it's just a flower.
so basically i just don't know what you mean by god awful.

and i'm going on a bit. i'll watch that scene again.

I just mean that the feelings are forced. The take they used, and I'm sure there were others which she did splendidly, but the take they used for whatever reasons (read: no choice because of tech problems...or an editor with a vendetta against Streep) was crummy. I really wanted to like the movie for a lot of different reasons and was still straining to hold on to feeling luke-warm about it until -- MERYL STREEP sucked! Her acting in the pot scene is really calculated/detatched, but her timing is good enough that I forgave her that. I can't ignore the swamp. Were it someone else, sure. But it's not. It's her.

hah. yeah, i'm not sure we're talking about the same scene. the first one that came to my mind was the one where thingy, i forgot her name, i think it's susan, sees the ghost orchid for the first time. but you might be talking about the swamp scene at the end, which i can't remember as well as the other one for some reason. (that's the weird thing about this film - i can remember some scenes quite vividly but others i struggle with).
but i do agree about the bits when she was on drugs. it was weird.

Basically I'm a massive believer in Charlie and everything he does, and that's all based on Adaptation. which was the first of his films I ever saw. It's stunning! I absolutely adore it. Especially the narration. The narration is great.

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