THE WEATHER MAN

I, for one, would never throw a soft drink at my local TV weather guy.

Now, Vickie and I had completely adverse reactions to this here Nicolas Cage movie called The Weather Man. I, personally, didn't feel strongly enough to have an all-out duel, but I think Vickie was all riled up because of her recent visit to a roller derby championship (a whole 'nother story). She keeps picking email fights with me. Picking. Picking. Enough! So, Vickie, the bout is on!

The Weather Man is not a classic movie by any means. Nor will it even make my Top Ten for the year. But I enjoyed it. There, Vickie! I enjoyed it. It made me laugh. I thought it had the same tone of a couple other mid-life crisis movies I've enjoyed in the past: Lost in Translation and The Wonder Boys (two movies that are superior to The Weather Man, by the way). All of the above movies are about mid-life-crisis white-male sad sacks, who have everything but can't for the life of them keep it together. Yes, this is a tried and true formula for movies (we never see movies about sad-sack mid-life women trying to keep it together, now do we?), but I'd rather see a film about these "regular guy" sorts with believable lives than another movie where Woody Allen chooses one 30-year-old hot babe over another one.

But let me confess another thing, Vickie. I have this "thing" about the weather. I'm not ashamed to admit that I LOVE watching the weather report on TV. In the morning, I know that at 7:27, then 7:37, then 7:57, that Good Morning America breaks to the local weather. I know which times have my beloved 7-day forecast, and which ones just tease me with the forecast for that day. Sure, I know that it is 54 degrees and drizzly where I live 9 months out of the year. But I still love it in the same way some people like watching cooking shows, and others watch Shark Week. One summer when I had to get up obscenely early for a class I was taking, I got what I call a "newscaster crush" on the morning weather man, and went through withdrawl when my schedule changed and I got to sleep in.

Nicolas Cage's David Spritz in The Weather Man might be what my local guy is like in his outside life. On the TV screen, his teeth are eerily perfect and his hair doesn't move. But offscreen, his life is in shambles, his parent is ill, and his kids and (ex) wife are distant. He thinks he can pull it back together, but everyone else knows he just needs to move on.

There isn't really much of a backbone of a plot to The Weather Man. There are a few storylines that run their course—one involving a creepy counselor, played by Gil Bellows, coming on to Spritz's son, and another involving patriarch Michael Caine's critical illness—and for the most part, the movie plods along as Cage's character flails in his personal life while professionally he starts to experience greater success. And that is all without a meteorology degree.

To paraphrase the guy who actually forecasts the weather for the station (Spritz just reads it on TV), "It's wind, man! It just blows around!" That's kind of how The Weather Man felt to me... but I mean that in a good way. Sometimes I don't need Big Plots to propel a movie. Sometimes the slice-of-life ones are just fine, and that's how The Weather Man worked for me.