Happy Thanksgiving!

I give you my favorite and yours, Nic Cage:

And then...

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

And then...

Happy Birthday, Nicolas Coppola!

46 today - wow! Coincidentally, that's the same number of projects that Cage has in the works currently. Sadly, I was never aware that this day was Nic's birthday - he shares this special day with both my father-in-law (birthday) and parents (anniversary). They must feel so honored.

And then...

So, who's ready for The Wicker Man Returns?

The original title of Nicolas Cage's 1994 film It Could Happen to You was Cop Gives Waitress Two Million Dollar Tip. I can't think of anything more ironic. Cage is currently married to a former waitress and, as the video below explains in great detail, is wildly in need of that two million dollars back.

Seriously, though: all this hullabaloo about a broke (whaa! whaa!) Cage is, although on the surface quite pleasing to me, really just a sad p.r. move or something. Aside from constantly getting paid millions of dollars (I chronicled many of his upcoming projects a few months ago, many of which have been released by now), we're told how he's had to sell mansion after castle after mansion in order to pay off his IRS debts. I'm no math major, but six million in back taxes versus 30-some million in sold (or on the market) real estate properties tells me that the former Mr. Coppola will be alright, even if (God forbid!) he has to sell them for a loss. Guess what, buddy - it's a shitty economy. Everyone's that's selling is selling their homes for a loss these days.

And then...

The definition of "Schadenfreude"

Boo! How'd you like to wake up with that picture in front of your eyes? I'd be asking for the sweet, sweet solace of death. Anyway, I'm not here to scare you with pictures of Nic Coppola, but rather to take joy in this news, from New Orleans' Times-Picayune:

"Actor Nicolas Cage may have more trouble selling his homes in New Orleans than most other people who have plunked for-sale signs in front of their houses.

That's because the Internal Revenue Service has placed a tax lien for $6.26 million on his properties for failing to pay income taxes in 2007. Another IRS lien for $360,545.84 stems from unpaid income taxes between 2002 and 2004.

The presence of the liens means that Cage must pay the debts before he can sell or refinance his properties, or the proceeds will be taken out at closing. The IRS can attach liens after it notifies a taxpayer about unpaid taxes, and the taxpayer neglects or refuses to pay the debt in 10 days.

Cage, the nephew of director Francis Ford Coppola, owns two houses in New Orleans. He put both of them on the market this spring."

The story later goes on to say that "Cage has had a string of unsuccessful movies in recent years, including Knowing, Bangkok Dangerous, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Ghost Rider and Grindhouse."

Jesus, Times-Picayune, even I, one of the leading Cage haters on the internets, would be hard-pressed to classify the nearly-half-a-billion-worldwide grossing Book of Secrets and the $200 million worldwide grossing Ghost Rider as "unsuccessful." Give the guy a break, will ya?

The full article can be found here.

And then...

$24.8 million?

The top films at the box office each weekend for 2009:

Jan 2-4: Marley and Me, $24.2 million
Jan 9-11: Gran Torino, $29.5 million
Jan 16-18: Paul Blart: Mall Cop, $31.8 million
Jan 23-25: Paul Blart: Mall Cop, $21.6 million
Jan 30 - Feb 1: Taken, $24.7 million
Feb 6-8: He's Just Not That Into You, $27.8 million
Feb 13-15: Friday the 13th, $40.6 million
Feb 20-22: Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail, $41 million
Feb 27 - Mar 1: Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail, $16.2 million
Mar 6-8: Watchmen, $55.2 million
Mar 13-15: Race to Witch Mountain, $24.4 million
Mar 20-22: Knowing, $24.8 million

Here are the Rotten Tomatoes scores for each of those movies:

Marley and Me: 60%
Gran Torino: 80%
Paul Blart: Mall Cop: 32%
Taken: 57%
He's Just Not That Into You: 43%
Friday the 13th: 26%
Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail: 26%
Watchmen: 64%
Race to Witch Mountain: 39%
Knowing: 25%

"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." - H.L. Mencken

Are you proud, America?

And then...

Catching up with...Nic Cage

What would Superman be without Lex Luthor? Batman without The Joker? Seinfeld without Newman? It's been some 4+ months since CAGEFEST, and you'll have to forgive me if I've been feeling a bit like I'd encountered some kryptonite lately. What can I say? The man is my nemesis and, sad as it sounds, Blog Cabins suffers when my distaste for him is not brought to the forefront for months at a time. When I'm not bagging on the guy, I can feel my powers draining from my body and I hate to say it, but 2008 was a bad year in this respect, what with just a single Cage "film" hitting theaters (none other than one Bangkok Dangerous, of course).

Lucky for us (?), 2008 was dry for Nic only because he'd been working so hard on 2009 and beyond. The man amongst men is up to eleven projects in one level of development or another. If only IMDb would let curious fellows like myself go into hardcore statistician mode to see if that was a record - as you know, Nic is nothing if not a giant whore, pimping himself out wherever there is a dollar to be made.

"But what are these eleven projects?," you might be asking yourself. Well, lucky for you, I am here. Below I have previewed them, in chronological order and in all their glory, and even provided a Projected Level of Cageness (a synonym for sucktitude, as you must know), from 1-5 Cages. Enjoy!

Post-production
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Director Werner Herzog wants you to know that this is not a remake: "No, it's not, although I cannot fully verify it because I have never seen Bad Lieutenant made by Abel Ferrara. I do not know who the man is, although he has made a lot of noise about this." Classy, Werner. He also has this to say about our main man Cage: "I took him where he has not been before." Where? Talentville? Cool City? Hairland?

On the other other hand, Bad co-stars Val Kilmer, Eva Mendes, Fairuza Balk and Shawn Hatosy. Interesting...
Projected Level of Cageness:




Knowing
Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City) directs this mystery/thriller that stars our man Cage as a teacher that, through a sequence of events, comes to believe that he and his family may hold the key to the future of the world. Or something like that. Typical ego-centric character choosing by Nic, but the plot actually does sound kind of interesting, and though Proyas hasn't been all that hot as of late (I, Robot), he's know for being somewhat of a visionary.
Projected Level of Cageness:




G-Force
Hard for even Nic to screw this one up too much. It's an animated flick (brought to you by Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer) about specially trained guinea pigs that help save the world. Other vocal talent: Bill Nighy, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Will Arnett, and Penelope Cruz.
Projected Level of Cageness:




Filming
Kick-Ass
Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake, Stardust) directs this comic book adaptation about a high school boy who takes his love of superheroes way too far, attempting to train and become one himself. Sounds like Spider-Man without the, you know, skills. Anyway, Cage "will play a former cop who, in his quest to bring down an evil drug lord played by Mark Strong, has trained his 11-year-old daughter to be the ruthless vigilante Hit Girl," says Wikipedia.

This is a tough one. Vaughn has a good rep...but something about it reminds me too much of Wanted, and if you'll recall, I was no great fan of that. Though Christopher Mintz-Plasse (McLovin) has a role as well. Hmmm.
Projected Level of Cageness:




Astro Boy
More "teaming" with Bill Nighy in this animated tale of...wait a sec. Read the plot summary from IMDb and tell me if it reminds you of anything: "When a scientist's young son dies, he secretly creates a powerful robot child to replace him, however the robot uses it's incredible powers to become a world famous super-hero, and faces his biggest challenge when an alien race threatens Earth."

Hi, A.I. with a superhero twist thrown in! Could they have stolen more blatantly? That's it, I'm changing the name of this site to Rotten Roma Tomatoes.

Freddie Highmore voices Astro Boy.
Projected Level of Cageness:




Season of the Witch
Nicolas re-teams with Gone in Sixty Seconds helmer Dominic Sena (boy, Kalifornia sure is looking like a fluke) for this actioner about knights in the 14th century suspecting a witch of nasty things, not the least of which is being the source of...dunh-dunh-duh...the Black Plague. Cage is pictured at right in a pic from USA Today (click image to enlarge).
Projected Level of Cageness:




Pre-production
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Yes, you guessed it - a live-action "adaptation" (haha) of the classic poem that inspired the classic sequence in Fantasia, starring Cage as the sorcerer and Jay Baruchel (Knocked Up, Tropic Thunder) as the apprentice. Brought to you by Disney (!), Jerry Bruckheimer (of course), and director Jon Turtletaub (the National Treasure flicks). Good christ - what an incenstuous bunch.
Projected Level of Cageness:




Riot
"As part of the crime-prevention program Scared Straight, a governor's delinquent son is sent to prison for what's to be a short period of time. While behind bars, however, the kid is taken hostage during a riot, forcing a lifer (Cage) to come to his aid." Directed by John Carpenter.

Is it just me, or does Cage have a serious hero complex? I'm surprised that his death at the end of Leaving Las Vegas didn't simultaneously cure cancer. Play a janitor already.
Projected Level of Cageness:




Amarillo Slim
Biopic of the famous poker player. Ok, sounds pretty good. To be directed by Milos Forman (Man on the Moon, The People vs. Larry Flynt). What?!? Does this mean Cage is going to grace us with real acting ability? I don't effing believe it.

The full story from the Hollywood Reporter.
Projected Level of Cageness:




Announced (very little info available)
Electric God
Hmmm..."God" in the title, no less. Very subtle. The story was broken in Variety. Seemed fine and dandy to me until the last line said "Saturn [Cage's production company] is in post [-production] on Andrew Niccol's Lord of War and is prepping The Wicker Man, written and to be directed by Neil LaBute." I'm thinking, "All those movies have come out already!"

The Electric God story came out in 2005. Don't hold your breath for this one...
Projected Level of Cageness:




The Dance
Biopic of boxer/boxing coach Billy "The Kid" Roth. Based on a documentary from 2003. Full story here (c'mon people, even I can spell Nicolas' first name right). Co-stars 50 Cent.
Projected Level of Cageness:




There you have it, folks. The next 2-3 years of Cage. Are you at the edge of your seat yet?

Cage on IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000115/

And then...

CAGEFEST ENDS! The Nic Cage Film Festival - Leaving Las Vegas

CAGEFEST comes to a close and boy are its arms tired. A BIG thanks again to all participating sites - you guys and gals rock the house all the way to the middle of the street. For previous entries, click here.

El Gringo of He Shot Cyrus runs my kind of site. An excellent mixture of meme/blog-a-thon participation, movie reviews, fun regular features...wait a sec, even the template is the same! What a damned thief! Of course I'm joking. Seriously, though, what's probably most impressive is that he's set up his successful blog and garnered quality traffic in such a short amount of time (69 posts, started 4/27/08). Now, he's here to praise LLV, the film that gave true legitimacy to Cage's career. Well, for awhile anyway...

PRO

"The film pulls no punches, takes no prisoners and flies in the face of feel-good pictures." Leonard Klady, Variety

I thought I'd start out my argument with some backup. This might be a tough one. Anyone can see where Cage's career's been heading since the 90...er...80...um, well, since the very beginning: the $5.50 bin at Wal-Mart. Feel free to take your pick between Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Windtalkers, or Bringing Out the Dead. They're all there, waiting for you.

Leaving Las Vegas is different. Cage has a pattern. He'll make a Raising Arizona and follow it with three Amos & Andrews. For every Moonstruck there's four Snake Eyes sitting around the corner. Leaving is one of the good ones. For those who haven't seen it, Cage plays a drunk. He's Ben Sanderson: binge drinking World Champion. But being the best comes with its costs, wives, kids, and jobs, for example. Now he's in Sin City ready to drink himself to death.

Ben meets a Sera, a prostitute (Shue), and the two bond over a shared distaste for life. The film just keeps coming at you. I'm generally a happy guy but this movie makes me want to suck on a pistol (in a good way). Cage plays a failure like no other. Shue also has a real grasp of her character. Sera may be a hooker but her heart's not made out of gold. This isn't Pretty Woman, when the shit goes down, she is forced to handle it herself. In one disturbing scene, Sera, is assaulted by three teenage boys. Where's her Richard Gere? He's busy entering the final stages of brain damage.

Cage's performance is surprisingly poignant. It's one of those that makes you sick to your stomach as you grasp just how hopeless his character's fate is. You keep waiting for things to turn around and they just don't. Pay attention when the previews for Kick-Ass and G-Force start coming out. They might say something like, "Starring Best Actor Nicolas Cage." That's right. Nic Cage won a Best Actor award for this movie. Figgis picked up two nominations and Shue almost won "Best Actress." I'll be honest, before writing this post, I had no idea he'd ever won anything. Thanks, Fletch.

...The More You Know...

Here's another plus, Nic Cage's hair doesn't look like it's leading the asylum inmate orchestra. His hair can't see two minutes into the future. His hair doesn't look like a balding version of The Crow. It's just a regular, good ol' I'm a Drunk do.

Let’s end with the obvious pro point. Elisabeth Shue. Naked.
Now, I usually try my hardest not to be that blogger. Judge a film by it's actual merit, not by how much skin it shows. Praising a movie for its objectification of women is wrong. That’s what I usually say. But this is Elizabeth Shue!

80s babies have been waiting for this for a long time. From the moment Ali almost got trampled by a game of beach soccer. Ever since Jennifer asked for a ride in the big, black truck. For years, we had to be jealous of Larusso, jealous of McFly, but no longer. What I'm saying is that even movies about suicidal alcoholics and disheartened prostitutes have upsides.


Our opinions don't always match up perfect, but few in blogville have such similar tastes as I pre-viewing as WaywardJam of Reel Whore. Maybe that's why there's such a mutual respect. He's also a champion for the LAMB and a damn cool guy, and that stuff doesn't hurt, either. Be sure to check out his pimp-tastic site if you haven't yet. Below, his wonderfully twisted take.

CON
Before I submit my official entry into Cagefest, I want to be clear. I have no particular hatred for Nicolas Cage. Over the years, I have enjoyed more of his performances than you can count on one hand. But I can name just as many that still make me groan at their mere mention. Fletch has done well at selecting films that spark both reactions in me. I look forward to the pros and cons of Cage's cinematic contributions.

My criticism, and it is criticism, is for Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas. Be forewarned that herein may lie spoilers, but if you haven't seen this film within the last twelve years, you've probably had good reason. If you didn't have one, let me give you a handful from which to choose.

I despised the depressing tone of Leaving Las Vegas over a decade ago when I saw it and my recent second viewing didn't change my mind. First off, Leaving barely utilizes Julian Sands, an actor at the top of his game in the nineties. You don't drop actors like R. Lee Ermey and Lou Rawls in for a weak cameo. The worst of it all is that this story is made even less palatable thanks to a littering of indigestible smooth jazz made insufferable as only Sting can.

Proponents of this film will be quick to mention the cache of awards and nominations it received. If you've seen even one awards show, you know voters often get it wrong. I'm not saying Cage wasn't deserving of his Oscar; his portrayal of the suicidal alcoholic Ben was erratically endearing in a twisted sort of way. I'd love to ask Mr. Cage why he never questioned the motivation of his character. We are led to believe Ben has been driven to drink himself to death because of deep-rooted depression at the loss of his wife. There have been some serious break-ups throughout history but I can't think of a single suicide spiral that couldn't be cured with some serious Shue loving! Elisabeth Shue plays Sera, Ben's soulmate, who happens to be a hooker. Seeing the bodacious babysitter turn tricks should have been a milestone in the memories of an entire generation of young adult males. Instead Figgis has our beloved Shue fall head over heels for a loser like Ben. Sure, he's charismatic, but no man, no matter how drunk, wouldn't sober up for a little of that action. The best Sera can hope for is to get groped and licked by Ben after she douses herself in booze. Pathetic. Actually, what's most pathetic is the only shared moment of physical passion ends with Ben blowing his load and checking out of this cruel world. Yeah, a world where Elisabeth Shue lovingly rapes me before I am allowed to die is cruel indeed. I blame you, Cage, for this whole debacle. After taking one look at your costar and the script, you should've called Figgis on the absurdity of the entire premise.

And then...

CAGEFEST: The Nic Cage Film Festival - The Rock

CAGEFEST thinks San Francisco is a great, great town. For previous entries, click here.

Mixing it up one more time before the Cagefest finale. Frequent contributor Gaylord is back to give us his love for Cage and, specifically, The Rock. I've decided to tackle the CON position here, but since I don't have a ton of hate for The Rock, and since it's my site and like Cartman I do what I want, I'm eschewing the typical CON format. Instead, I'll rip into Gay's post, since he's so skilled and well-versed at ripping into others. And trust me, it's ripe for the ripping. Below is Gaylord's post, with my thoughts interspersed in bold.

PRO & CON
The year was 1996 and Nic Cage was fresh off an Oscar, and riding high, hell Irwin M. Fletcher hadn’t even started his irrational hatred of this young promising actor. [This is true. Mr. Coppola had yet to fall from grace and sell out his career for paycheck after paycheck.] Cage had already reached the summit of acting; next, he set his sights on blockbusters, and after he was done the movie landscape would never be the same.

I’m talking about a little movie called The Rock, the first big blockbuster since Top Gun, a respectable $140 mm, and the movie that made action summer blockbusters trendy again. [Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Batman - what do these have in common? Apparently, Gaylord has never heard of them or the 700 other movies that grossed more than The Rock between '86 and '96.] As Dr. Stanley Goodspeed, it was up to Cage to carry the movie, and of course he did, winning us over immediately as a Beatle maniac, chemical superfreak FBI agent, who goes home and bangs the prom queen every night. Obviously, everyone who’s not a moron [Let's just not tell everyone about the myriad typos, run-on sentences and comma splices in your post before I edited it.] knows the plot of the movie, it’s one of the 5 best action movies of all time, so I won’t rehash it for the .1% of Irwin’s fanbase that only watch gay indie films [Hey man - all of my fanbase watches gay indie films. All three of them. Get it straight.].

Connery and Harris, as an Oscar winner and Oscar nominated actor, respectively, play capable supporting roles to the powerhouse performance by the patron saint of the Blog Cabins. Cage and Connery are an electric team back before action movies got too corny, sure Cage made a joke about Elton John’s "Rocket Man" before shooting a rocket into an evil Marine, but he didn’t even have a “witty” line when he force-fed the last bad guy a VX ball or stabbed himself in the heart (“How’s this for breakfast” and “This’ll be like the time I got dumped in high school” might be what Brett Ratner would go with…). The movie overall was tight, with some early action scenes (terrorist gas package and a little car chase) [Note: Gaylord likes terrorists.], mixed in with some well done character development before the big faceoff, which did not disappoint with Connery and Cage delivering with crackling chemistry, great storyline, and of course, great acting.

Cage’s Dr. Stanley Goodspeed was really responsible for carrying the movie and advancing it from scene to scene, as the focal point of every scene, it was on Cage to make sure that his phenomenal script [Believe it or not, the three guys responsible for the "phenomenal" script were not nominated for any awards. Shocking, indeed.] lived up to its promise. Luckily, Nic made it happen, his actor VORP (for all the baseball nerds out there [I'm a baseball nerd - that stands for Value Over Replacement Player.]) was probably the highest of his career. Replace Cage with some non-Oscar winning, not as good looking, run of the mill, average actor like 1996 Oscar nominee Travolta [Or 1995 for '94's Pulp Fiction.] , and the movie tanks miserably. Maybe his legacy has been buried a little [Yeah...maybe. Heh heh.] by train wrecks like Next and The Weather Man, and of course jealous vindictive bloggers, but in his prime there was no one better than Cage [Except everyone. But seriously, NO ONE better? Sure, the guy was good, but where should I start?].

Remember that - he could always pull off any role, and always came across as likeable, plus there is a respectability that comes with winning an Oscar (well unless you're Cuba Gooding, Jr. - Snow Dogs, Boat Trip… seriously?? [Or Mira Sorvino. Or Whoopi Goldberg. Or Halle Berry. Or, well, Nic Cage.]). Cage won his Oscar, then he cashed in a bit [Note: Cage has approximately 10 flicks in the works...right now.] by headlining a spectacular stretch of action movies. Seriously, over a four-year stretch he knocked out The Rock, Con Air, Face/Off, and Gone in 60 Seconds; those blockbusters match up to pretty much the top four action flicks of anyone else’s entire career [If Gay is going for comedy, he's certainly hit the right chord here. Listing off those four flicks reminds me of the bad Michael Keaton flick Multiplicity - you know, the one where he keeps making copies of himself, but like a piece of paper that you keep copying the copies of, they keep degrading. Are you seriously citing Gone in 60 Seconds as a good flick?]. For example, here's the top four from two of the best of our generation…Cruise: Top Gun, Days of Thunder, Mission Impossible 2, Minority Report, and Schwarzenegger: Termintaor, T2, Predator, Total Recall. [Interesting that Gay chose Mission: Impossible 2, the worst of that franchise by far; no surprise that it was made by the same hack that made Face/Off - Mr. John Woo. And Ahnuld's foursome easily dominates either Cage's or Cruise's, by the way.]

Cage is one of the best, and The Rock was him at the pinnacle of his powers, great actor, great cast, great script, great, great flick. As Connery says in the movie with that classy English accent [I thought it was Scottish? No?], “Welcome to the Rock,” you and Nic can welcome me anytime Sean, I’ll catch you guys whenever you’re on TNT and of course on my DVD whenever I want to see one of the greatest action flicks of all time. [Kill me now.]

And then...

Nic Cage is Crazy

Just for fun...



Source: Break.com

And then...

CAGEFEST: The Nic Cage Film Festival - Raising Arizona

CAGEFEST wants to have a child, too. For previous entries, click here.

Raising Arizona had to be included as a part of Cagefest. Had to. Though, it's not surprising that, of all the films you've seen talked about over the last couple weeks, this is the only one that didn't attract anyone for the CON position. As such, Rachel from, appropriately, Rachel's Reel Reviews (a kickass no b.s. review site and an old-time LAMB) will be the owner of the sole opinion levied today. Who am I to argue? Raising Arizona is not only one of the Coens best, but it's almost without doubt Cage's best film, made in the prime of his acting days.

PRO
My mom is really into the British author, Jasper Fforde. She says he is to literature what the Coen Brothers are to cinema: they look at the world sideways. I can’t think of a better way to describe the Coens, and one of the best examples of this assessment is their second film, Raising Arizona.

In what other world would the audience truly root for a couple who kidnaps a toddler? Only the Coens can draw out the compassion for such people. A convict falls for a cop, whom he gets to know better with each arrest after his many failed attempts of robbing convenience stores. She in turn falls for him too. Already the quirkiness begins. He finally gets out of prison and they get married. The next logical step is to have a baby, but as luck would have it they can’t. Adoption is out of the question due to his prior conviction record. What options are left? Steal a baby from the richest family in town that just had quintuplets, of course. Hilarity ensues.

Raising Arizona is full of scenarios that would never happen in reality, but that are done so well that to accept them in this strange world of H.I. and Ed is almost as easy as breathing. It all just flows brilliantly, from beginning to end, never once feeling contrived for oddball characters such as these. The actors flawlessly deliver the laughs through snappy dialogue, facial expressions and eccentric actions. Each performance contains the right amount of farce to keep you in stitches, but holds enough back to keep from dissolving into blatant slap-sticky rubbish.

And even through all the laughter, the characters of H.I. and Ed are so painfully tragic, that you can’t help but feel sorry for them. After all is said and done, when H.I. is having his final dream of sitting down with their children and grandchildren to a beautiful dinner, this is when you realize the true frailty to this married couple. All they wanted was a family and it really isn’t fair that “some should have so many, while others should have so few.” This very human quality in H.I. and Ed is the heartbreaking piece of reality that the Coens flipped sideways to create this exceptionally funny, and touching, cult classic.

And then...

The CAGEFEST definition of (mild) success

Click image to see full-size. I rule - that's without quotes, bitch. Cage, I hope you're reading these.



Other search results:

"Nic Cage" - 5th page
Nic Cage blog - 1st page, 4th overall
"Nic Cage" blog - 1st page, 2nd overall
Cagefest - 1st page, 3rd overall
Bang Dang - 1st page, 4th overall
"Bang Dang" - 1st page, 1st overall!

Googlers looking for Cage info don't know what they're in for...

And then...

CAGEFEST: The Nic Cage Film Festival - City of Angels

CAGEFEST is ticked off at me. It's hungry and sick of the shade. For previous entries, click here.

From my chair, Nayana Anthony of The Center Seat really has only one big problem: not enough time to blog. Still, she graces us with her excellent wit and passion whenever she can, whether it's helping us help our friends avoid the crappiest of the crap or enlisting accompanying reviews or advice from her friend Pistola Whipped. She also earns my praise for being one of the best damn LAMBs out there, always doing her best to visit the new sites and welcome them to the fray. She does the impossible to heaping praise on one of Cage's most hated movies here (see polls to the right).

PRO
I've had a growing impatience lately with movies that depict love unrealistically. Like, most of them.

You know what I'm talking about: the couple sees each other, has a few furtive conversations, and suddenly they're "in love" and are willing to move heaven and earth for each other. That is SO NOT how it works. In real life, love is immensely complicated, hard to come by, and requires effort, time, and sacrifice.

So why do I love City of Angels so much, given that it's the textbook example of this "instant love" phenomenon? Easy. I don't accept love as the turning point of the story.

If you don't know the movie, here's a big fat SPOILER ALERT... and now I'll fill you in. The premise of City of Angels is that an angel (Nicolas Cage) falls so deeply in love with a surgeon (Meg Ryan) that he chooses to forsake his immortal life and become a human, just so that he can be with her.

It's a sweet idea, if that was what really happened in the movie. Oh, they definitely feel lust for one another. Longing, too. But I think the real draw for our angel is not love, but life.

Let me explain. There's a lot of imagery in City of Angels of the simple, sensual pleasures of being human: the way a pear tastes; sunlight filtering through trees; the bracing ecstasy of a really hot shower. I get that stuff completely, because as anybody who knows me well can tell you, Nayana is all about the sensual pleasures*. I find it really easy to lose myself in things like dazzling sunsets, light reflecting on water, kickass thunderstorms, cherry cheesecake... So if I were in Seth the angel's position, would I give up immortality and the ability to sit on overhead freeway signs in order to experience all these things? Hells yeah.

I guess my point is that the real romance of this movie is not the Nic Cage/Meg Ryan slobberfest, but the romance between a human being and life itself. Get it?

*OK, perv, that's not what I mean. Sensual. We could talk about the other thing too, but that's not the topic of the day.


In less than a year, MovieZeal has established itself as one of the "go to" places for cineasts on the web. With a group of intelligent writers, including the writer of the below essay - Luke Harrington - it's shown itself to be a full-service site, covering just about all of the latest releases to theaters and DVD, including audience favorite features like Coens Month and Noir Month along the way.

CON
As heart surgeon Maggie Rice, Meg Ryan walks down the darkened hallway of her hospital, long after visiting hours have ended. Standing in a corner is a pale, badly shaven man who looks a lot like Nicolas Cage, dressed mainly in a black leather duster. He tells her nearly everything about her past few days—it’s like he’s been watching her all this time.

And she doesn’t call the cops.

Strangely, she actually seems comforted by the experience, and inexplicably, she even falls in love with the guy. (Yes, he turns out to be angel, but since she disavows any sort of belief in angels early on, that’s hardly relevant.) This is the sort of stuff you’ll have to swallow to appreciate Brad Silberling’s City of Angels, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. City of Angels is the sort of film that asks you to believe whatever it throws at you, without any respect to logic or narrative. Oh, and it sucks.

Typical of Hollywood, City of Angels is a mediocre remake of a great film that didn’t need to be remade—specifically, Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire, which used its angels as a metaphor for the yearning in the heart of Berlin at the end of the Cold War. Needless to say, City of Angels throws that depth out and replaces it with a generic love story. Here, if the angels are a metaphor for anything, it’s the crass commercialization of religion (hi-yo!). Nicolas Cage stars as Seth, an angel who falls for a female heart surgeon (in the original, she was a circus performer—go figure) and becomes human so he can be with her.

So yeah, it’s basically Superman II, minus Gene Hackman. Cage and Ryan seem more-or-less perfect for each other, since they both go through the whole movie with the same clueless, mouth-agape look; but beyond that, there’s not much here that’s believable. Characters are expected to know as much or as little as each scene wants them to. For instance, shortly after Seth becomes human, he tries hitchhiking by standing beside the road and holding out his thumb, but when a driver actually stops, he seems clueless as to what he’s supposed to do. Similarly, Maggie can’t accept the reality of angels, but seems to instinctively know that another character (who, by the way, played by Dennis Franz of NYPD Blue, who is one of the few bright spots of the film) is one, and asks him all sorts of incisive questions. It all makes for tense moments of drama, until you think about it for more than two seconds.

This is also true of the film’s portrayal of angels, which is just as offensively bland as anything else Hollywood has ever put together about religion. It’s not that I don’t understand—moviemaking is a business after all, and everyone’s beliefs about angels are different, and they want to maximize profit by offending no one (which they fail at—clearly, I’m offended by the badness of this film)—but really, do we actually need another movie that portrays angels as blandly nice guys? God is mentioned briefly (which puts this film slightly above cheesy New Age gurus on my personal scale of blandness), but only in the sense that he’s out there…somewhere (thank you, Bette Midler). Sure, this all may be what many people (certainly the more wishy-washy of us) might want to believe, but here’s a tip, Hollywood: piousness - conflict = dull and insulting.

Even stranger than all this is the number of angels who desperately want to be human. Things like “feeling the breeze on your face” (which angels can’t do in this movie, by the way) are some sort of Holy Grail to nearly every character in the movie. I’d say that the filmmakers here are shamelessly pandering to the human demographic, but that would just be weird. (Last I checked, the core audience for almost every film ever made consisted almost exclusively of humans. Go figure.) In any case, I’m done trying to make sense of this mess. Go watch The Preacher’s Wife (that other unnecessary remake of a love story about angels) instead.

And then...

CAGEFEST: The Nic Cage Film Festival - Wild at Heart

CAGEFEST knows not the bounds of space and time. For previous entries, click here.

J.D. of Radiator Heaven doesn't post much, but when he does, you best pay attention. The Lynch fan (um, I'm guessing from his blog's title, a shout-out to Eraserhead) gives in-depth analysis on a wide variety of films, from classics like Fletch to current DVD recommendations, and seems to participate in at least one blog-a-thon a month - like this one, for example. Here, he gives Lynch a little more love.

PRO
Remember when Nicolas Cage wasn’t a sell-out? His sell by date was 1995 with Leaving Las Vegas and he’s still forcing the world to swill down his sour-ass milk. Let’s go back to a more innocent time when Cage was still capable of exciting, unhinged performances like the one he delivered in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), an unexpectedly explosive adaptation of Barry Gifford’s unadorned novel, which went on to win the coveted Palme d’Or at that year’s Cannes Film Festival. At its core, Lynch’s film is a passionate love story between a couple whose love for each other remains constant despite all of the obstacles that life throws at them, including a psychotically over-protective mother, a dentally-challenged psychopath, and a grizzled rocket scientist.

Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) and Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern) are young lovers on the run from her mother, Marietta (Diane Ladd). Sailor has jumped parole (after serving time for manslaughter) and takes off with Lula for sunny California. This doesn’t sit too well with Lula’s mom who sends her boyfriend, (and private investigator), and, unbeknownst to him, her lover, (and ruthless gangster) on the trail of the young lovers.

Cage plays Sailor as an instantly iconic figure, where pointing an accusing finger at Marietta (after killing a man with his bare hands no less) is akin to a declaration of war. Sailor, like many of the characters in this film, is larger than life with his snakeskin jacket credo (“This is a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom!”), his unorthodox style of dancing (involving martial arts kicks and punches), and his habit of singing Elvis Presley songs to Lula in public. Cage not only affects an Elvis-like drawl but also sings two songs made famous by the King.

At this point in his career, Cage gravitated to oddball roles like this (Vampire’s Kiss anyone?). There is a show-stopping moment where Sailor and Lula go see speed metal band Powermad at a nightclub and a guy dances too close to her. Sailor gets the band to stop in mid-song and orders the man to apologize. Naturally, he refuses and Sailor delivers a well-deserved smackdown to the hapless guy. As if that wasn’t cool enough, he then instructs Powermad to back him on a note perfect rendition of “Love Me” while the women in the audience scream in adoration in surreal slow motion like something out of a dream. Cage not only pulls off this performance but makes it look good. It is also an important scene in that it demonstrates Sailor’s love for Lula and his willingness to back it up with action.

Wild at Heart is arguably one of the most romantic characters that Cage has ever portrayed. While most people remember the actor’s wild antics in this film, he also displays a tender, sensitive side when he’s alone with Dern. There is real chemistry between these two actors which is crucial as their characters are supposed to be deeply in love. Cage also demonstrated his ability to tap into the equally idiosyncratic sensibility of David Lynch at a time when the filmmaker was a pop culture darling thanks to the Twin Peaks television series. The result is one of the most intense, incendiary films in both of their careers.


Lawrence Sinclair (aka Jose aka JMan), meanwhile, is nothing if not prolific, having put up over 200 posts in less than two months at his new blog, 1,000 DVDs To See (while also maintaining roughly 75 other blogs, including World's Best Films, his other movie blog). But he's also a great sport; Jose originally submitted a few other "Cage positions" for this festival, including a PRO ("lukewarm") for Wild at Heart, but was nice enough to watch it again with a critical eye to give it a CON, as there were no other takers for this position. He's done yeoman's work here.

CON
"Lynched in Limbo"

Ironically, the film starts in Cape Fear, "somewhere on the coast of South Carolina". Mother from hell Diane Ladd (Dern’s real mother) gets her boyfriend to go after Cage with a knife, who beats him to death, picks him up to throw him and the guys legs are still walking. "Hey, let’s do another take, his brains are hanging out already; second that.. it’s lunchtime". Laura Dern (totally hot eye candy here) plays "Lula", Cage "Sailor", but he likes to call Lula "Peanut", as in "rockin good news, Peanut!". Well, it ain’t rockin till Sailor does some time for excessive self-defense.

When he gets out, Lula greets him with his snakeskin jacket. "This here jacket represents my individuality and my belief in personal freedom". They take off together, and we get to hear repartee like this:

Lula: "One of these days that ole sun is gonna come up and burn a hole clean through the planet like an electrical x-ray."

Sailor: "That’ll never happen, not in our lifetime… by then they’ll be driving Buicks to the moon."
Unfortunately, Cage delivers most of his lines like a stoned Elvis, he seems unusually uninvolved with this part, unlike some others where he seems perhaps too involved (National Treasure).

The mother gets boyfriend Harry Dean Stanton to go after them first, then she hires a hit man as well to go take out Sailor and bring her daughter back. Only this hit man, Santos, hates Stanton as well and figures getting to kill him is icing.

Much of the story is told in flashback, which disrupts the continuity, especially since we’re constantly flashing to the same background scene, the manslaughter one. In between those, we get to see languid conversations while they smoke, gratuitous shots of Dern topless, Cage’s Elvis impersonation at a live punk club no less, singing "Please Love Me", complete with fake crowd screaming (why this odd effect I wonder?). Sailor tells Lula, "The way your head works is God’s own private mystery."Lula says, "You remind me of my daddy. Mama told me he liked skinny girls whose breasts stood up and said hello." She also tells him how her dad poured kerosene all over himself and set himself on fire. Yep, typical David Lynch comedy, and typical bedroom banter.

The film becomes a road film, as the couple heads to New Orleans, but it has more style than pace or story. For a crime film it kinda oozes along, but it’s Dern that does most of the oozing, not Cage, he just kind of acts like he’s just hanging out. Lynch throws in some assorted freaks and "trailer trash", as usual, but he doesn’t seem to really know how to use them.

Wild has some Blue Velvet touches, but this time instead of Rossellini singing, it’s a huge blues singer in New Orleans in a blue sequined dress with red hair. Then we get more hot love talk:

Lula: "Sailor, you got me hotter’n Georgia asphalt"
Sailor: "Ok, but go easy on me baby, tomorrow we got a lot of driving to do."

There’s a mysterious car wreck scene in the desert that Lula and Sailor come across, with several bodies, with Sherilyn Fenn running around with a severe head wound, and dies in front of them. I think at this point I was wondering if this was a comedy, or just David Lynch. Several times this film wavers between the light-hearted (wild punk dancing beside the highway) and supreme darkness, almost as if he couldn’t decide himself how serious this. In this regard, Lynch failed to capture the essence of the Barry Gilford novel, which was definitely lighter than this film.

Eventually the road trip ends in hell on earth: Greater Tuna, Texas. There we run into an assortment of trash at a motor court, headed by Willem Dafoe, with the ugliest teeth outside of Austin Powers. We also are introduced to a unibrowed Isabella Rossellini, almost hard to recognize in her blonde wig, but the unibrow gave it away. Several times in the film we are almost introduced to the song "Blue Velvet", which of course Isabella sang in that film, but each time Lynch changes at the last instant and we never get the velvet. The characters, especially Laura Dern, are also referencing Oz quite often, but we never get that either, all we get is Greater Tuna.

In Greater Tuna we have a more botched bank robbery than the Coen Bros put into Raising Arizona even, a guard’s hand gets shot off and before he can retrieve it ("they sew it back on, it’ll work almost good as new") a dog is carrying it away; Dafoe meets with the wrong end of his shotgun, and Sailor is being held to the ground by law enforcement. Aw, shucks… boys, "treat me right", it’s off to the can again. The epilogue is five years later when Lula, with little Sailor Jr. in tow, picks him up at the railroad "yard". Guess Lynch couldn’t find a real depot. A "real nuclear family unit", from hell or Greater Tuna, or now South Carolina, wherever trash is allowed outside.

Lynch got lost somewhere on Route 66, and ended up in limbo, and we ended up there with him. Not a comedy, not a drama either, just a road film with Nicholas Cage sleep-walk.. er, sleep-driving through a nightmarish landscape we are forced to share with him. Unfortunately we don’t also get to share a naked Laura Dern, but at least Lynch got her naked onscreen as much as he could, otherwise this film would be very hard to look at.

As Lula said, "This whole world is wild at heart, and weird on top." Wisdom for the ages, you bet…

And then...

CAGEFEST: The Nic Cage Film Festival - Con Air

CAGEFEST cannot be stopped. For previous entries, click here.

You know how sometimes when an actor wins an award, they say that they have to thank that one casting director that found them waiting tables in Sheboygan or Tuscaloosa and put them on the path to becoming the star they are today? Well, when I win a Blogscar or something like that, the man I'll be thanking is NFL Adam, also known as the proprietor of The Hater Nation. Aside from writing a damn funny site (complete with a number of great "characters" that reside in the comments sections), he's the guy that took a chance on an unproven kid (aka me), giving me more link love than I deserved, especially that early in BC history. You've seen him pop up here on occassion to write about his first love in life and in the comments (now going by THN), and now he's dropped by to give us a hilarious love letter to Con Air. Enjoy.

PRO
Define irony: No, Garland Green, it is not a bunch of idiots dancing on a plane to a song made famous by a band who died in a plane crash. Instead, it is Fletch finally recognizing the genius of Nicolas Cage.

I am proud to be a part of Cagefest.

Perhaps no movie in Cage’s entire catalog – which I thoroughly enjoy – receives as much praise and scorn as Con Air. For the record, I really love this film. Con Air ranks very high on the “remote control scale.” As in, you no longer need a remote control when you find this film on television. There is no more channel surfing, instead you are swept away in the precarious predicament of Cameron Poe – a man wrongfully incarcerated for defending his wife and unborn child, who finds himself on an airplane with every creep and freak in the universe.

I can hear the haters now, though. All you wannabe Gene Siskels out there, what about Cage’s Southern accent? To borrow a phrase from Jeremy Piven, he’s an actor. Actors pretend.

Was the accent a little over the top? Ask yourself this. In a movie with so many implausible plot holes, is it really Cage’s accent that bothers you that much? Did you watch the scene where the plane is dragging a corvette and think to yourself, “The accent is killing me here?”

If so, what’s your problem? Mother hold you too much or not enough? Last picked at kickball? Late night sneaky uncle? I find the haters somewhere between a cockroach and that white stuff that accumulates at the corner of your mouth when you're really thirsty.

This is a send-up of action flicks and Cage’s accent illustrates this. Cage is allowed to have a little fun, even if it does piss off Sean Penn. (Suck on that haters, if you hate this film, you are siding with the biggest douche nozzle in the movie industry.)

Not every movie has to be Casablanca. Do you believe that John Cusack and John Malkovich thought they were signing up for a Citizen Kane when they read the script? These guys want to be in shoot-em-up, blow-em-up action thrillers, too. They deserve to have a little bit of fun, too.

That is why you have an all-star class that also includes the new FF-UN Hall of Fame inductee Steve Buscemi, Dave Chappelle, Danny Trejo and Nick Chinlund, amongst others. Actors are little boys inside who dreamed of being heroes and saving the day. And in kind, the audience should loosen up and have a little fun, too in this popcorn flick.

Although selling it as a mindless action flick almost sells this a little short. The actors do a pretty good job of making you care, while landing planes on the strip, throwing guys from planes and some of the other lunacy that goes on. How else can you explain a theater full of people squealing in delight when Green is shooting craps at the Hard Rock Hotel in the film’s final scene?

Imagine, cheering for an escaped mass murderer.

Con Air still lives on as an adrenaline-charged popcorn flick that surprisingly still holds up to this day. If you disagree, I have only two words for you:

Cy – onara!


Caitlin started her blog having seen approximately 1,416 films and counting. She's currently up to 1,466, but that number doesn't reflect all the work and passion that goes into her site, as she's prone to writing letters to Quentin Tarantino or doing events like this week's retrospective on the Nightmare on Elm Street series. As a bonus, she's not only a member of the LAMB, but a contributor as well, heading up the LAMB Chops (best of) feature there. But all of that is kind of irrelevant; you just gotta love anyone that appreciates Van Damme as much as she (and I) does.

CON
If you plan on suffering the indignity of viewing this masterpiece by Nicolas Cage, then I'd advise you remove all sharp and pointy objects from your presence before you begin watching. It's not so much the details of the movie itself that make Con Air horrible; Con Air is typical 90's action fare. Nicolas Cage is really what causes Con Air to massively fail.

And where to start? Cage's character in the movie is a drawling good old boy who does the right thing, gets sent to prison, and then does the right thing when evil convicts hijack a prisoner transport plane for their own criminal uses. The problem is that Nic Cage has never been very good with an accent, and so what should be a slow Southern accent sounds like an awful parody of Forrest Gump. Cage doesn't feel very reliable as a good guy, mainly because he doesn't get to freak out all the time and think up crazy tics for himself to make him look even crazier. He just never mentally shows up. I think someone could make the argument that Nic Cage isn't mentally all there in the first place, but he seems to coast on wearing a wifebeater, a (fake) hairstyle that would make a hobo cringe and an accent that will make your ears bleed.

When you eventually get to the overused contrivance of The Bunny, it's not worth going any farther. Cage's character is obsessed with making sure his daughter (who he's never met) gets a toy bunny he bought her in prison. He even kills for it. He makes numerous references to The Bunny. By the end of the movie, I hated the damn thing. It's really a fault in the script, but Cage's delivery and facial expressions make it so, so much worse.

The very predictable end is neither sympathetic nor endearing, and Cage's many missteps and faults will make you ignore parts of the movie that can be perceived as "good". I should never leave a movie feeling as though I need a hot shower first and then to FedEx someone a bottle of hot oil treatment, but Con Air left me that way. Clearly Cage has no shame, dignity...or real hair.

And then...

Poll results; new (CAGEFEST) polls

Last time out, I wanted your brutal honesty: what are your favorite and least favorite features here? Due to either placement, as a compliment, or just as a coincidence, the "least favorite" poll had much lower participation, with only 17 votes compared to 26 for the "most favorite." Either way, thanks for that. Here are the results:

























What have I learned? Shockingly, that more of you like my reviews than anything else - not fishing here, but in nearly two years of doing this, I've come to think of my reviews as one of the weaker points of this site; it's nice to hear that others disagree. On the other hand, I was a bit saddened to see FF-UN finish tied for the top spot in the "least favorite" side; though I admit that there's not a ton of content to it, I rather like that feature. Perhaps familiarity breeds contempt.

Anyway, two polls again this time, as CAGEFEST has infected even the voting here. I've given some limited choices (due to space issues), but I think I've chosen the majority consensus of Cage's best and worst films. Got one not on the list? Let's hear it here.

And then...

CAGEFEST: The Nic Cage Film Festival - National Treasure

CAGEFEST just keeps on truckin'. For previous entries, click here.

Daniel Getahun of Getafilm has established himself as one of the shining stars of the movie blogging community in just over a year's time. Reporting from the Twin Cities, where it seems as though every film goes before they go anywhere else, Daniel sees just about all of them, from the hits to indies to docs to foreign language flicks. I'm proud to call him a blogging friend and owner of one of my favorite sites. Here, he swallows his distaste for Nic Cage (he's just not quite as vocal about it as I) and gives us some reasons why National Treasure might not be so bad.

PRO
"Finding a National Treasure or: How I Learned to Stop Hating and Love Ben Gates"

Forgive me if this seems a bit strained. It's just that Nicolas Cage has been my least favorite actor - by a country mile - for going on about a decade now. The tics, the accents, the shouting - utterly unbearable for me. So when Fletch asked me to defend the indefensible and write a positive argument for a movie starring Cage, well it was simply a challenge that I had to take on and a fear that I had finally had to face.

Actually, it wasn't that hard. I love National Treasure. Moreover, I love Nicolas Cage as treasure hunter Ben Gates. Somehow, someway, a little action adventure that I didn't see in the theater slowly grew on me over a solid year of every-other-day showings on one of the Encore movie channels. The end result: me sitting in the theater at an opening weekend showing of National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets.

Between the witty, strong-willed woman (Diane Kruger), the sarcastically hilarious sidekick (Justin Bartha), and the deliciously deviant villain (Sean Bean), National Treasure almost plays like a second generation version of an Indiana Jones movie. And although Ben Gates is no Indy, he has his own charming personality quirks, like knowing archaic colonial ciphers and codes, and playing a brilliant game of show-and-tell with the original Declaration of Independence. Best of all, Cage attempts no accent and only has a couple of spaz attacks. The fact is, Indy is the spoiled, handsome action star while Gates is the nerdy underdog hero with the superstitious father (Jon Voight). Who would you rather root for?

If the stereotypical characters and the cheesy dialogue don't satisfy your need for a guilty pleasure, watch National Treasure for some decent action sequences and an insanely elaborate conspiracy theory. Who can't appreciate the entertainment value in that? Also, I've haven't even mentioned yet that the National Treasure franchise is one of the few action adventure series being produced these days that's appropriate for the whole family: no language, sex, gory violence, or otherwise inappropriate content, and no dark themes that can misinterpreted as subliminally evil. It's just honest-to-goodness silliness that you can watch with your kids on movie night.

There you go: Nicolas Cage, against all odds, as a provider of fun, wholesome cinematic entertainment.

Now don't anyone dare use that sentence out of the context of this movie.


Aside from owning one of the best blog names around (Careful With That Blog, Eugene - a play on an old Pink Floyd song), Paul Arrand Rogers is also the owner of an acerbic wit, a Muppet fetish and an all-Lebowski influenced rating system. It's no wonder I've become a fan of this relatively new LAMB (#116). Paul originally wrote a much lengthier piece here (nearly 2,000 words), and should he post it on his site, I will update here with a link to it. Though good, I'd wanted to keep these relatively short; much of what was cut was a synopsis of the plot.

CON
It was 2004. Steven Spielberg was making The Terminal, George Lucas was making Star Wars Episode III, and Harrison Ford was playing Jethro the Bus Driver in Water into Wine. To make matters worse, Brendan Fraser had seemingly given up swashbuckling and mummy bashing in favor of more serious pursuits (Crash) and Angelina Jolie had just raided her last tomb.

For über-producer and explosion maestro Jerry Bruckheimer, the timing couldn’t be riper. After the smashing success of Pirates of the Caribbean and Bad Boys II, America was not only willing to forget King Arthur (minus Keira Knightley in blue paint), but fully embrace whatever he could cook up next.

Luckily for Nic Cage, it involved him.

In a post Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade world, numerous heroes attempted to wrest the fedora and bullwhip from Indy’s hands. Pitfall Harry had a son, Jack T. Colton romanced a stone, Lara Croft carried two guns but couldn’t sustain a franchise, and Rick O’Connell killed the same mummy…twice. Clearly, nobody could out-adventure the man in the hat. Bruckheimer had a different plan: Out-lecturing him.

See, the other part to the Indiana Jones mythos is that Jones was one hell of a professor. His lectures were interesting, he had his pick of college girls, and he was always getting called off on assignment to pick up one relic or another – lots of time off.

National Treasure has Ben Gates, who, like Indiana Jones, rescues treasure from the clutches of devious foreigners, but, unlike Indiana Jones, isn’t very fun. He’s a bookworm, you see, and not like Indy where he pulls a book off a shelf or flips to a random page in a random book and finds what he’s looking for before jetting off to India, Egypt, and Parts Unknown. Gates lectures. Gates reads. Gates searches. Gates solves puzzles. But by Jove, Indy, he doesn’t do anything!

All this would be fine, if Gates had the charisma to pull this off. Sadly, Harrison Ford isn’t playing him. It’s Nic Cage, and boy is he hungry for a payday.

This movie? It’s bad. I knew that walking out of the movie theater as a 16 year old, impressionable idiot, and I know that now. It was successful, for the most part, due to America’s hunger for Indiana Jones-style movies. It’s true. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, lackluster as it may have been, out grossed the National Treasure franchise (and Tomb Raider, and, while it’s $141 million away from The Mummy franchise’s mark, we’re comparing one movie to three).

There’s a lure to Indiana Jones, as Roger Ebert said, because “it's the kind of movie where the hero gets out of bed wondering what daring exploits and astonishing, cliff-hanging, death-defying threats he will have to survive in the next ten seconds.” By contrast, Benjamin Gates gets out of bed and geeks out about Freemason symbols and invisible ink. He does not swashbuckle, isn’t dashing, and certainly doesn’t have the same droll wit as Indy (though Cage really tries to get him there). He’s boring.

This is CAGEFEST though, so what of Nic? Well, truth be told, it isn’t his fault that the movie acts less like a thriller and more like the cure for insomnia. He tries really hard to put some life into the movie, he’s really excited about the twists, the turns, and his inexplicable ability to solve complex and inane riddles, but the script just isn’t there for him.

The script tries to be there for instead for his sidekick, Justin Bartha, who makes you pine for Indy 4’s Mutt Williams. Any attempt at suspense or drama with this film is needlessly smashed to bits by Bartha’s “funny” dialog. I don’t think it would have been better with a different actor, but not being stuck thinking about the retard who “wanted to go to the Baywatch” probably would have helped.

Otherwise, the movie suffers from the same thing that many Bruckheimer produced action movies suffer – overproduction. The movie has all the gloss of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (the 2005 movie was worse than this one), and suffers for it. Count the number of cuts from Nic Cage to Dianne Kruger to both to a different shot of both etc. in a scene where the two are merely changing. It’s unnecessary and distracting.

Cage does his all to drag this movie out of the library it’s rooted in, but such a task is nigh impossible when the script insists on showing you how everything is possible and connecting most of the clues to documents and artifacts that most Americans haven’t heard about to not give a damn about them. Cage is dealing with the unexplainable, much like Harrison Ford, but nothing in National Treasure begs to be explained.

It’s a genuine effort from Nic, but I believe that most of his movies are. He has a Christopher Walken-like tendency to accept any role thrown his way, and here, it’s a blessing and a curse. Cage made a lot of money, but he looked like a fool. As Riley Poole says, at least he gets the girl.

And then...

CAGEFEST: The Nic Cage Film Festival - Ghost Rider

CAGEFEST rolls on. For previous entries, click here.

Taking the unenviable PRO position for Ghost Rider is Graham from Movies et al. He's most "famous" for his Film Ignorance series, in which he tackles classics from yesteryear and evaluates just how classic they really are (he even lets others get in on the game, too). But he has much more to offer, and has been doing it in spades for a few months now, with his site having taking off in June. As a bonus, he and I share similar cinematic tastes...well, that is, until this Ghost Rider thing came along. Or not. Read on and see what I mean...

PRO
Look, I’ll be the first to admit that Nicolas Cage’s recent career has been an unmitigated disaster. Well, since this piece is appearing on Fletch’s blog, and it’s not the first of the Nic Cage entries, I guess I’m not the first to admit it. But allow me to say it again: the last few years (decades?) of Nicolas Cage’s career have been an unmitigated disaster. I even like the guy, and yet seeing that he’s in a movie gives me reason to pre-vomit. Besides Adaptation (which I enjoyed but was a bit overrated) and the National Treasure series (which are terrible movies but which make money for some reason) there’s very little good to say about Nic this millennium. Hell, that’s not much good to say since the peak of his career, which unfortunately came in 1987.

But now we have Ghost Rider. Admittedly, I haven’t seen Ghost Rider. And I don’t really intend to see Ghost Rider. And I probably wouldn’t enjoy it if I did see it, seeing as it probably sucks. And yet, Ghost Rider has got one glorious thing going for it: it features a skeleton, riding a motorcycle, on fire.

I can hardly understand how jaded we are as a culture a movie can come out that features a skeleton, on fire, riding a motorcycle, and no one cares. Luckily, an alien among us has realized the uniquely American achievement that is Ghost Rider, and set out to give it its due. That’s right, Craig Ferguson, the Scottish late night comedian who recently became an American citizen, recognizes that there’s something wrong when a country wildly praises pretentious British crap like Atonement and ignores movies where A SKELETON, ON FIRE, RIDES A MOTORCYCLE! Mr. Ferguson makes this case far more eloquently than I; you should watch him compare Atonement, quite unfavorably, to Ghost Rider. I promise, it’s hilarious: http://lateshow.cbs.com/latenight/latelate/comedy/video/20080225.shtml

Now that you’ve heard from Craig, I’m sure you don’t need to hear anything further in defense of Ghost Rider. The argument is over. And sure, there’s no doubt that the anti-Ghost Rider poster has lots of ammunition; Ghost Rider is clearly a horrible movie, with Nicolas “Snake Eyes” Cage and Eva “Wooden Line Readings” Mendes barely surviving a fourth-rate script detailing the uninteresting adventures of a sixth-rate superhero.

But there’s a skeleton, on a motorcycle, with its head on fire. What else could you possible want?


Joseph Demme of Cinexcellence has what would seem to be an easy job in taking the CON position here. However, as you'll quickly see, he has a tolerance for pain that few can rival. He recently wrapped up the Unseen DVD Blog-a-thon, in which he invited his readers to pick up a movie that they would normally take a pass on. Interesting results followed, including a viewing of Surf Nazis Must Die. What will Joseph think of next?

CON
I originally saw Ghost Rider last year during an airplane flight, and immediately hated it. After signing up to review it for Fletch’s Cagefest, I was curious if I would find myself enjoying it more the second time around. I believe that many initial reactions for films come from the viewer’s mood at the time and the overall timing of the viewing. The DVD of Ghost Rider was also a director’s cut, so maybe there was something new that I would like more.

I was mistaken. I hate Ghost Rider just as much now as when I first watched it.

Judging from the opening and closing credits, which reminded me of “The Grindhouse Experience”, I wonder what it would have been like Quentin Tarantino had gotten his hands on the project.

In my opinion, Ghost Rider struggled from trying to be two different films: A corny, over-the-top flick and a somewhat realistic approach to the superhero genre. I would have rather seen one or the other, instead of the mismatch that it sadly is.

Nicolas Cage, while not bringing anything new in terms of his acting, played the role fairly well. There were a few scenes in his more ‘demonic’ state that were convincing, though. It seemed to be a glimpse into his earlier acting, which I’m now more interested in seeing.

The main detriment to the film was the villains, sans Peter Fonda as The Devil. Not only were they cliché and lacking in development, but they were just too easily defeated. They could have been killed by a baby using a hammer that he couldn’t lift. For all intents and purposes, they were just there as minor hurdles for our hero to leap over with ease.

Along those same lines, the story was melodramatic and bland to this viewer. The romantic scenes between our main characters at a young age were giggle-worthy. Age didn’t improve it all that much.

That said, the overall themes of the film are worthy brain-food. Too bad the rest of the film doesn’t live up to it.


Rating: 2 out of 5 Death-Defying Stunts

And then...