Year of the Cage

Greetings fellow Cage fans. 

So, odds are you’re wondering what’s been going on around here. How come, you say, there aren’t any new posts lately? What happened to the weekly updates? Where in the hell have you been?

All good questions, and deserving of a good answer. Sadly, I don’t have one. I wish I could say I got supremely busy and just had to put this by the wayside, but that’s only half true. I have been busy at times, but there have been others where I probably should have been writing. Honestly, I just kind of suck at managing my time.

Which brings me to the current state of this project. No, I haven’t come to say no more. Just that things are changing a bit.

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Film: Leaving Las Vegas
Demeanor: Academy Award Winning Drunk.
Hair Quality: Frazzled, thinning. A precursor to Adaptation-level hair weirdness. 
Performance Quality: 9 Cages Out of 10.

Many of those I’ve discussed this year-long project with tend to immediately call out a few films in Our Greatest Living Actor’s catalog of film. Usually, it’s the wackier stuff, of the Con Air, or Vampire’s Kiss, or yes, The Wicker Man fame. Strangely, only a handful of people I’ve talked to even mentioned, or even seemed to recall much about Leaving Las Vegas. Perhaps this is due in no small part to the film not being nearly as ubiquitous in pop culture lore as stuff like The Rock and Deadfall, but still, this bothers me. How can anyone with an affinity for Nicolas Cage not be interested in the role that won the man his only Oscar to date?

Perhaps some are scared off by the notion that Leaving Las Vegas is some kind of prestige picture, a movie weighted down by the kind of emotional seriousness that so often appeals to the aged, seemingly perpetually dour Academy voters. Certainly Leaving Las Vegas has some of the tenets of the kind of ultraserious dramas that typically take home Oscar gold, including: the tortured protagonist, the tragic female lead, a greater focus on characters over plot, and a fair amount of indie cred for its small budget and off-kilter style.

But on the other hand, Leaving Las Vegas is also kind of an insane movie.

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Film: Kiss of Death
Demeanor: Bug-eyed fits of rage broken up by periodic moments of oddball lucidity.
Hair Quality: Largely overshadowed by the quality of Cage’s goatee, which is magnificent.
Performance Quality: Seven Cages Out of Ten. 

Little Junior Brown is a very strange character.

I mean this both in the colloquial “Man, what a character!” sense, as well as on a conceptual level. As a construct created by a writer to inflict menace and/or comedy relief on a protagonist, Brown is only effective in fits and starts. This is not necessarily the fault of Our Greatest Living Actor, who portrayed brown in the 1995 crime thriller Kiss of Death. However, given the sheer volume of peculiar ticks and inexplicable character traits stuffed into Brown’s dialogue, I do have an inkling that he was involved in shaping some of this character’s tone and demeanor.

Perhaps it was director Barbet Schroeder’s will that Brown, the heir apparent to a New York crime family of indeterminate national origin (I think they might all be Irish?), have an affinity for bench-pressing strippers in his family-owned nightclub. Maybe Cage had nothing to do with Brown’s penchant for crafting acronyms, asking tactless philosophical questions, nor his anxiety over the thought of anything metal being in his mouth. Maybe his pile of character quirks came from other sources. But knowing Cage as well as I think I do by this point in our series, I highly doubt it.

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Film: Trapped In Paradise
Demeanor: Perpetually frazzled.
Hair Quality: Often covered by hats.
Performance Quality: Five Cages Out of Ten.

Trapped In Paradise is a horrible movie. Awful. Wretched. Deplorable. Idiotic. Ill-conceived. Functionally retarded. Nothing about it works. It’s not especially funny, nor is it especially sweet, or romantic, or thrilling, or any of the other way-too-many things it tries to be. It’s a disaster from top to bottom.

And yet, no matter how blisteringly horrendous Trapped In Paradise was during its nearly two-hour runtime (!!!), one thing kept me in the fight. One solitary element of this movie captured my attention and reminded me that there could still be joy to be wrung from even the most atrocious entertainments.

That one thing? A man named Richard Jenkins.

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Film: It Could Happen To You
Demeanor: An almost zen-like calmness, with periodic bouts of foolish idealism.
Hair Quality: Blonde. And brown. Almost as if it can’t decide what color it is.
Performance Quality: Three Cages Out of Ten

There is no genre of film more thread-worn than the romantic comedy. You can cite the noisy, predictable rhythms of modern action films or decry the desperate lack of creativity in the current horror genre all you want, but they still pale in comparison to the total lack of creative forward progress made in romantic comedies since the genre’s inception. 

Presumably, this is because the people going to see romantic comedies don’t care. Every one of these plots is purely designed to get a man and a woman who initially aren’t supposed to be together to eventually be together by the end of the film. How the screenwriters go about this is entirely irrelevant. The game of Mouse Trap the writers come up with to eventually get these two kids to the cheese is ultimately ancillary to the payoff of this lovely couple coming together in celebrated union. Perhaps that’s not the case for those of us who are dragged to these movies and aren’t just there to make googly eyes at Ryan Reynolds or James Marsden or whoever the fuck, but we don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.

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Film: Guarding Tess
Demeanor: Unusually stiff and stodgy, with just a hint of boiling rage.
Hair Quality: Very professional.
Peformance Quality: Five Cages Out of Ten.

One of the things that’s actually helped me quite a bit when working on this Year of the Cage project is the unwavering support I’ve gotten from my surprisingly game girlfriend. She’s sat and watched nearly all of the movies in this series with me, despite the fact that she is nowhere near the Nicolas Cage fan I am, nor is she even especially interested in mainstream film. I’m amazed she’s stuck with me since she clearly hasn’t liked many of the movies in the series thus far. In fact, for the last ten or so films in a row, she’s ended the screening with a now familiar question.

“Why did they make that movie?”

Usually I have some intellectualized answer for her about the meanings of this and that or whatever, or sometimes I just joke that a movie is just a movie, and people who make movies often are crazy people. In the case of Guarding Tess, the same question was posed, and for once, I was a bit at a loss. I didn’t have a joke or a quip to explain away its existence. In truth, I couldn’t explain the movie away because I barely felt like I’d even watched a movie. It was more like 90 or so minutes of my life had just been redacted, a black line drawn through whatever section of my brain housed whatever it was I was supposed to have seen. A minute after finishing Guarding Tess, I could barely remember what I’d even watched.

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Film: Red Rock West
Demeanor: Surprisingly calm and charming, if a bit egregiously honest.
Hair Quality: It’s just…hair. 
Performance Quality: Six Cages Out of Ten.

I think I missed the boat on Red Rock West. There was apparently a time when this movie was revered. Judging by its 90+ Rotten Tomatoes rating and insanely enthusiastic written reviews of the time, Red Rock West was something close to the No Country For Old Men of its time, a slick, darkly thrilling noir story set in America’s back country. The critics speak of brilliant performances, clever dialogue from writer/director John Dahl, and themes previously unexplored/uncombined in the history of film. 

I’d like to actually see that movie, if it existed. Unfortunately, Red Rock West isn’t really that movie. At least, not anymore.

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Film: Deadfall
Demeanor: A cross between Tony Montana and Jim Carrey as The Mask.
Hair Quality: Wig-tastic!
Performance Quality: Infinite Cages.

Deadfall has simultaneously been my most looked forward to and dreaded film on this schedule. The reason to look forward to it is perhaps obvious to any serious Cage fan, but for those less well-versed in obscure Cage-ian lore, Deadfall is, without question, the single greatest example of insane overacting ever captured on film. Cage’s performance in this movie is the stuff of performance art legend. He’s less a character in Deadfall than some demonic presence that wandered in from a completely different movie. His existence is inexplicable and incredible.

The reason I dreaded writing about Deadfall is not because it’s a terrible movie (it is, but so are lots of movies in this feature), but rather because I found the idea of trying to dissect what Nicolas Cage is doing in this movie altogether daunting. Trying to in some way analyze, criticize, or even draw base-level conclusions about Cage’s performance is, at once, terrifying and seemingly pointless, because straight up, I don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t understand it. I have no idea where these line deliveries, all that hysterical shouting, and that purposely awkward wig-and-sunglasses combo came from. Without a real understanding of how these things came to be, I am simply left to sit in awe of them. There is no wrapping my head around Nicolas Cage in Deadfall in much the way there’s no way to really take in the little details of a nuclear explosion. By the time you’ve realized what’s happening in front of you, you’re already toast.

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Film/Show: The Best of Times
Demeanor: Surfer jock x 1000
Hair Quality: Surfer jock circa 1981 x 10,000,000,000
Performance Quality: Not Applicable

We’re now more than a quarter of the way through Year of the Cage. I said to myself initially that I’d be lucky to make it a month, but here I am, and here you are. As a small thank you to those who actually bother to read these essays, I’m going to do a few Bonus Cage entries on slightly more specific, off-kilter aspects of Our Greatest Living Actor’s career.

Through this point in the series, we’ve learned much about Cage’s early career. We know his breakthrough role was in Valley Girl, and we know his first real film role came in a small role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. But one thing we haven’t covered at all is Cage’s first appearance in anything filmed. In fact, Cage’s first real acting job came a couple of years before either of those films, in a little-seen, barely remembered failed TV pilot called The Best of Times.

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Film: Amos & Andrew
Demeanor: That of a delightfully charming transient.
Hair Quality: If Peter Loew had bitchin’ sideburns.
Performance Quality: Six Cages Out of Ten.

The early ’90s are like a decade unto themselves. So much happened over the course of the years between 1990 and 1994 that you almost have to split the decade in half due to the wild cultural shifts that took place at the midway point. In the early ’90s, there was still something of an ’80s hangover permeating every element of popular culture. That specific era of culture can almost be tied beat-for-beat with the first Bush presidency, as the years between his 1988 election win and his exit in 1992 are so culturally hyperspecific that you almost want to blame him outright for the existence of Hammer pants and Spike Lee’s career.

Not that Spike Lee’s career is entirely worth dismissing, mind you. While I maintain that the director has made exactly one movie worth watching in the last decade and a half (the fantastic 25th Hour), his early works were incredible, searing portraits of race relations in the era. Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever helped galvanize a new brand of forthright conversation about how different ethnic cultures interact with one another during the post-’80s sorting out period. 

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Film: Honeymoon In Vegas
Demeanor: Scared, angry, scared, angry, scared, angry, angry, angry, angry, and then maybe happy?
Hair Quality: Long and often sideways.
Performance Quality: Seven Cages Out of Ten

Prior to rewatching Honeymoon in Vegas for this feature, I remembered exactly two scenes from my earlier viewings as a kid. Specifically, I remembered the image of a then still somewhat appealing Sarah Jessica Parker emerging from a swimming pool (in a bikini that offered a generous helping of “underboob”) to a sweaty, nervous Nicolas Cage, and her face going from one of happiness to immediate concern as Cage prepared to tell her that he had essentially just lost her in a poker game. The other scene involved the great Burton Gilliam as a Flying Elvis, explaining to Nicolas Cage that he is, in fact, a Flying Elvis. I didn’t even remember the actual scene of the Flying Elvi flying. I just remembered the words “We’re the Flyin’ Elvises!”

Okay, forgotten is maybe overstating it, but I now understand why Honeymoon In Vegas remained in my brain as little more than a pair of scenes for so long. Most of this movie is little more than a fevered blur of idiotic Hollywood romantic comedy tropes laid out across hacky covers of Elvis songs by artists who were old even by 1991 standards. Sorry Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp, but I never needed to hear your best Elvis interpretations.

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Film: Zandalee
Demeanor: The most slithery, scumfucky, pre-hipster artist asshole humanity has ever known. 
Hair Quality: Lengthy, greasy, largely overshadowed by his pirate goatee. 
Performance Quality: Eight Cages Out of Ten 

It pains me to realize how little of my life as a writer on subjects regarding film has been dedicated to analyzing the erotic thriller genre. Is there any film genre more hilariously era specific than this one? My memory has always been a fuzzy one, but I’m fairly certain that the years between 1984 and 1995 were what would be referred to as the Halcyon Days of erotic thrilling via film. It was a glorious time to go through puberty, I must admit. Movies like Body Double, Basic Instinct and the Poison Ivy series easily made up for their lack of plot and acting by being completely acceptable masturbation material for the pre-Internet male population. And even when these movies failed at being particularly erotic, they usually did it in such remarkably bonkers ways that they became legendary in their own, hyper-specific right.

Zandalee is a film that definitely fails to be erotic. It’s also not much of a thriller. But it is completely fucking bonkers.

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Film: Wild at Heart
Demeanor: Pretty much just like Elvis, except way more manslaughtery.
Hair Quality: Your typical Nicolas Cage poof, dyed darker than usual.
Performance Quality: Eight Cages Out of Ten.

I should have known exactly what I was getting myself into with this feature. I looked down the list of films I’d be watching countless times while preparing my schedule. I knew the movies I’d have to watch, and even with the movies I’d never seen, I had a reasonable expectation of what would be coming my way in most cases. When I came to March 26, and put it together with the David Lynch/Nicolas Cage collaboration Wild At Heart, I remember thinking to myself, “Huh, I totally forgot Nic Cage was ever in a David Lynch movie. That should be good and weird.”

I had no idea.

It’s not that I’ve never seen a David Lynch movie. In fact, I’ve seen most David Lynch movies, as well as most of the Twin Peaks series run (that second season is a bit tough to get through.) It’s not that knowing Lynch’s catalog is somehow an easy preparation for what you might be in store for, mind you. David Lynch’s brand of weirdness is so distinctly and uniquely unpredictable that it’s even been branded “Lynchian,” for lack of a better descriptor. By all accounts, I should have known that I’d have no idea what I was in store for with Wild At Heart. And yet, I was nonetheless dumbfounded by what I saw.

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Film: Fire Birds
Demeanor: That of a brash, cocky, jockish poon-hound who also flies helicopters real good.
Hair Quality: The same haircut every jock asshole I went to high school with sported through most of the ’90s.
Performance Quality: Six Cages out of Ten

When we think of Nicolas Cage: The Action Star, it’s not difficult to quickly conjure up images of him Rocket Man-ing his way through Alcatraz alongside Sean Connery in The Rock, doing both his best John Travolta impersonation and also a fairly ridiculous Nicolas Cage impersonation in Face/Off, and drawling his way through Con Air as a long-haired, peace-loving former Army Ranger on a plane full of mass murderers. These are the iconic Nic Cage action roles, the movies that made him a real, honest-to-god action star, very much flying in the face of his supposed “Oscar Prestige,” earned for his dramatic turn in Leaving Las Vegas.

But it’s not as though Nicolas Cage had never done a big, dumb action movie prior to Leaving Las Vegas. In fact, his first foray into cocky action heroism and running away from random explosions came years prior to his 1996 Oscar win, in the little-seen and understandably ignored 1990 boondoggle Fire Birds.

Easily summed up as Top Gun with helicopters, Fire Birds is an unsurprisingly awful movie. It’s little more than a mummified relic of the kind of brain-free action horseshit that was so popular during the jingoistic Reagan years; one that doesn’t seem quite aware that the world was then two years deep into the original Bush years, and that dudes with fancy military weaponry spouting cut-rate one-liners while killing bargain-basement bad guys wasn’t quite enough to grab an audience’s attention anymore—especially after Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise, and Chuck Norris had done it so many times before, and so much better. By the time 1990 rolled around and Fire Birds released, it had to go directly up against movies like Back to the Future Part III, Total Recall, and The Hunt for Red October. Unsurprisingly, it failed. It’s probably telling that I was shocked to learn Fire Birds came out in theaters at all, let alone made $14 million in ticket sales. Watching it now, you’d easily expect it to have been a direct-to-video affair.

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Film: Tempo di uccidere (Time to Kill)
Demeanor: I sincerely have no idea how to describe this succinctly.
Hair Quality: Angry.
Performance Quality: Three Cages Out of Ten.

When researching this feature, I initially came across the title Tempo di uccidere and dismissed it, simply assuming that it was some kind of cameo appearance in some random Italian movie that I wouldn’t have to address. Maybe Nicolas Cage had simply made an appearance in the film to placate a friend of the Coppola family, or just happened to be in Italy at the time. So you’ll imagine my amazement whereupon I discovered that Nicolas Cage was, in fact, the star of this English language Italian production. This fact became all the more bewildering as I attempted to do some cursory research on the movie ahead of watching it, and came up mostly empty. Listings for the movie certainly exist, as do a few scattered images and brief, often unintelligible user reviews. There is also a full stream of the movie available on Hulu at this very moment, should you suddenly have the desire to go watch it. However, I cannot recommend enough against this.

Suffice it to say, with no significant DVD release that I can point to (the DVD I bought looks like it was produced out of some dude’s basement) and zero mentions of the movie anywhere in Cage’s interview history, I had little to nothing to go on here beyond this bizarre, and frankly amazing IMDB plot summary as written by someone who clearly does not speak English as their first language. From IMDB user 1felco:

1936, Italian army is invading Ethiopia. Lieutenant Silvestri suffering toothache decides to reach the nearest camp hospital. But the lorry has an accident and stop near a rock, so Silvestri continues by walk. On his way he meets and rapes a wonderful young Ethiopian. He also wound her when he shot to a wild animal, and later kills her to avoid further pain. When he finally reaches the hospital, he realizes he gets probably leprosy. Trying to escape from Ethiopia Silvestri will kill again. But surprises aren’t still over.

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Film: Vampire’s Kiss
Demeanor: Falsely affluent and ill-tempered, eventually snowballing into something that closely resembles a schizophrenic as envisioned by Brian Cosgrove.
Hair Quality: The Patrick Bateman yuppie cut, which becomes progressively more disheveled as the movie wears on.
Performance Quality: Something like a billion Cages out of Ten. All of the fucking Cages, okay? All of them.

There is a name that, when uttered among fans of Our Greatest Living Actor, brings a hushed sense of awe over those in the room. It’s a name that is synonymous with all things Nicolas Cage. It is a name that brings with it an overwhelming volume of exasperatingly delivered lines of memorable dialogue, more bug-eyed facial expressions than one ever assumed a single man to be capable of, and more patented Nicolas Cage freakouts than any other movie before it, and any other movie since. That name is Peter Loew.

As the despicable, crumbling shell of a man at the center of Vampire’s Kiss, Peter Loew is as loathsome a character as Cage had played to date. He’s a horrific man, prone to gross displays of shameless narcissism, insane bursts of abject rage (often directed at his poor secretary, who we’ll discuss more later), and crazed hallucinations that make him believe that, yes, he is a vampire. It is, in my assessment, one of the most exaggeratedly crazed deconstructions of a man ever put to film. It’s the role that solidified Cage’s raison d’etre as a vessel through which pure, uncut insanity flows with no identifiable hindrance. It is the movie that made Nicolas Cage into Nicolas Cage.

And to think, the role of Peter Loew almost went to Judd Nelson.

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Film: Moonstruck
Demeanor: Operatically lovelorn. Sometimes less so.
Hair Quality: The bedraggled muss of a man who lost both his hand and his bride. Except when he bothers to comb it. Then it looks okay!
Performance Quality: Seven Cages out of Ten.

If it weren’t for Cher, Nicolas Cage would never have been a part of Moonstruck.

Think about those words for a second. Think about them in the context of Nicolas Cage’s career up to this point. Eight films deep, Cage’s reputation is still something not yet fully formed, and yet there is a distinct aura around what a Nicolas Cage performance looks like at this point in history. He’s officially graduated from his days playing teens and developmentally arrested early 20-somethings. Raising Arizona solidified his transition from full-on teen-ish heartthrob to a grown ass adult—albeit a very strange one. Nicolas Cage is something damn close to a movie star at this juncture, and his persona, as we know it, is nothing short of operatically crazy. If a filmmaker in 1987 were looking for a man to portray a comically tortured soul, especially one of Italian descent, who else but Nicolas Cage would sound correct for the part?

And yet, if it weren’t for Cher, Nicolas Cage would not have been in Moonstruck.

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Film: Raising Arizona
Demeanor: A mixture of suave, Southernly charm, and enough manic facial tics to make you wonder if he’s having a stroke every other scene.
Hair Quality: Tall, and often sideways.
Performance Quality: Ten Cages out of Ten.

A hundred years from now, when film students and scholars of the post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland discuss the sublimely weird cinema of the past, three names will invariably come up again and again in their discussions: Joel and Ethan Coen, and Nicolas Cage.

Think of the respective catalogs of both these entities. The Coen Brothers, often seen as one singular creature of cinematic weirdness, have somehow built a legitimately successful career out of making movies that most indie filmmakers would have nightmares about trying to get produced. Certainly they started out as struggling filmmakers initially, but in the years since films like The Big Lebowski, Fargo, and yes, Raising Arizona have gone on to become cult classics, the brothers have repeatedly avoided any possible aspersions of going soft on their inherently odd tendencies. Their entire catalog is as easily definable as being “Coensian” as it is utterly undefinable otherwise. These guys don’t just shirk genre classification; they defeat genre classification.

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Film: The Boy In Blue
Demeanor: The 19th century equivalent of Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughn.
Hair Quality: Very blonde, and very carefully combed. Even when he’s drunk!
Performance Quality: Six Cages out of Ten.

Chances are that, unless you’re one of those 19th century enthusiast types ordering mustache wax off the Internet, or perhaps one of the Winklevoss twins, you don’t have a clue what sculling even is. It’s rowing. Specifically, the rowing of a boat in competitive form. According to the preamble of text that opens The Boy In Blue, “Before baseball, football, or soccer, one sport alone captured the imagination of both rich and poor—sculling. The masses turned out by the thousands to cheer their heroes as they battled on the water, while gamblers won and lost fortunes on the outcome.”

So you see, sculling is very important. Long before you got way into gambling on fantasy football and lost all your kid’s college savings betting on the local soccer match, robber barons and wealthy political types were gambling away their fortunes on dudes in boats.

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Film: Peggy Sue Got Married
Demeanor: A kind of squirmy, high-voiced innocence mixed with high school alpha male bravado, and just a dash of creepy old man behavior.
Hair Quality: Magnificently poofy, even when he’s 25 years older.
Performance Quality: Nine Cages out of 10.

If one had to pick just two tropes favored by 1980s filmmakers as the most overused/significant of the decade, inexplicable time travel and 1950s/early ’60s nostalgia would probably win by a country mile. Time travel had, of course, been a staple of all things science fiction for many decades prior to the ’80s, and continues to be so. Still, there was something about the time travel methodologies employed in ’80s film that demonstrated a certain frivolity not often seen since. I’m not talking about hyperserious stuff like Trancers and The Terminator. I’m talking about the likes of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Time Bandits, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and of course, the Back to the Future films. These are movies that, at various expository points, make a minimal effort to explain the science and purpose of their time travel methodologies, and yet half the fun comes from just how utterly frivolous the time travel element actually is. 88 miles-per-hour in a garbage powered DeLorean? A slingshot maneuver around the sun in your junked out Klingon Bird of Prey? A time travelling phone booth just because? Sure, why not?

And then there is that ’50s/’60s nostalgia. That pining for the simpler times of pompadours and poodle skirts and rampant racism and communist paranoia and…uh, you know what? Maybe things weren’t so simple then. Still, the way the filmmakers of the ’80s often portrayed the era prior to the rebellious uprising of the hippy culture was often with deep reverence and love. Specifically, they really seemed to dig it as a launching point for coming-of-age comedy/drama. Whether it was Back to the Future’s long, lingering looks at Hill Valley high school life circa 1955, the intense, formative events experienced by the boyhood friends in Stand By Me, the greaser gang rumbling of The Outsiders, or the deeply dirty dancing of, well, Dirty Dancing, the period between 1955 and 1965 was the go-to ten year period for backward looking filmmakers in the ’80s.

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