Year of the Cage

How About a Quick Update on the Site?

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 17:27:30 -0400

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.

Originally, I had planned this to take place over the course of a single year, but frankly, I don’t do so well with self-imposed deadlines. I rarely meet them, and when I do, I usually hate whatever it was I was doing. I don’t want to hate Year of the Cage. I’ve had a lot of fun doing this, but I think the weekly deadline has sucked a lot of the fun out of the process.

So, from here on out, Year of the Cage is no longer a weekly, year-long series. It’s a hopefully-close-to-weekly-series-that-will-go-on-for-an-indeterminate-amount-of-time. Basically, I want to be writing about Nicolas Cage until he’s dead, I’m dead, or we’re both dead at the same time for some reason. This is a filmography I’m more than happy to dedicate the vast unknown future to. Basically, I’m going to end up breaking down every movie the man makes. I’d like to take a bit more time with it.

Hopefully this hasn’t been too discouraging. I hate that it took me this long to get around to this. I think some part of me still romanticized the idea of the year-long thing. Except the thing is, I conceived that when this was going to be a paid gig. I was going to write this series for the film website I used to work for, and therefore would have more concrete motivation to finish the stunt. But once that dried up and I moved on, I had to push myself to get things done.

Which isn’t to say you haven’t deserved more regular updates, and that’s something I’m going to try to do from here on out. It might not be every week on the spot, but I don’t want to go more than two without an update. I think I can stick to that schedule.

If I don’t, feel free to call me out on twitter, in the comments here, facebook, wherever. I need berating sometimes to kick my ass into gear. Hopefully you can forgive my indiscretions, and we can just move on from here.

Look for that entry on The Rock real soon.

Cage Examination #23: Leaving Las Vegas

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:41:00 -0400

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.

Which isn’t to say that Cage is especially over-the-top in this film, at least not compared with his many other bouts of insanity on film. As Ben, an alcoholic former film executive whose problem has brought him to a state of near inability to function, Cage is a hot mess pretty much from the opening scene. But it’s as restrained a hot mess as you’ll ever see Cage portray. His pain, his outbursts, they have a purpose. They establish this character as a pitiable figure, and Cage manages to keep this feeling alive throughout the film. You don’t laugh at Cage’s antics in Leaving Las Vegas. Unless you get your jollies from watching a man self-destruct before your eyes. Then it’s a laugh riot.

Ben begins his suicidal bender in Los Angeles, hitting up a couple of former colleagues (one played by late-Wings-era Steven Weber) for cash at a fancy restaurant. Ben’s disheveled appearance notwithstanding, he wanders through the restaurant, over to their table and tries to make small talk before ultimately getting pulled aside. One of the friends pays him off to get rid of him. Not just then, but forever. Ben, mostly unfazed, takes the money, and proceeds to wander to the nearest bar.

There he meets a woman (Valleria Gollino), and begins to make pathetic passes at her. I mean that in the most literal sense of the word. He at points alternates between brutish attempts at suaveness and sobbing, desperate pleas to sleep with her. She does not oblige him, leaving Ben to drown his sorrows alone.

It’s clear from Cage’s face that it’s loneliness that’s killing Ben. Well, the booze is doing its yeoman’s work as well, but the loneliness has driven him to it. He says his family is gone, but we don’t know whether that means they’re alive or dead. All we know is that they’re not coming back, and in the absence of any other meaningful relationships to help him, he turned to the bottle. And the can. And those little minibar shot bottles. And whatever else he can imbibe to numb himself to the pain of living.

Ben goes to Las Vegas, where he holes up in a cheap hotel with as much booze as he can get his hands on. There he meets a prostitute named Sera, played by Elisabeth Shue. For all the Oscar acclaim that Cage got for his role in this film, Shue is an equally transformed actor. This was her post-’80s coming out party, the “tough” role that was going to turn her into a serious mainstream actress. That never quite panned out, obviously, but it wasn’t from lack of effort on her part. It’s not a physical transformation so much as a personal one. Personality wise, Shue is nigh on unrecognizable in Leaving Las Vegas. She’s curt, moody, damaged…almost a bit like Ben.

It’s no surprise that they strike up a friendship after Ben propositions her, albeit unsuccessfully. Ben’s alcoholic state has left him impotent, so instead of trying to sleep with her, he talks to her. They talk, and talk, and talk, until suddenly, it’s the next day. In real life, the odds that these two would ever meet again are rather poor. But in Mike Figgis’ film, which adheres more to a twisted fairy tale kind of logic, they continue to spend time together, with Shue even eventually inviting him to stay at her apartment. I don’t know if you’d call what they have a romance, since Shue continues to work, and Ben continues to drink. He even tells her at one point, “You can never, never ask me to stop drinking. Do you understand?” And she does.

Their flirtations, disasters, and reconciliations are the crux of Leaving Las Vegas. Plot is secondary to watching these two broken people actively try NOT to fix one another, but rather enjoy each other for whatever time they have. Figgis toys with more elaborate plot points, including Sera’s shady ex-pimp (Julian Sands) and one of the more out-of-nowhere rape scenes I’ve ever encountered in a movie. But by and large, these points are dismissed as quickly as they’re introduced. Sands, in particular, has maybe three scenes, and is dead before the halfway mark.

I don’t mind that one bit, though the way Figgis lazily, dreamily shoots the interactions between the two, with healthy globs of obnoxious lounge jazz (songs on which Figgis apparently plays trumpet…) slathered on as a soundtrack, is a bit hard to swallow. It’s obvious that Figgis has some music connections—both Lou Rawls and Julian Lennon make bizarre cameo appearances—but the soundtrack is oppressive in a way that overshadows anything else going on in the scene. Sometimes it’s best when directors leave the music duties up to music supervisors.

Fortunately, the performances still shine through, dark as they may be. Shue successfully remade herself as a talented, serious actress here, and it’s a shame that her career never took the trajectory of, say, a post-Monster Charlize Theron.

As for Cage, his Oscar was won over the likes of Anthony Hopkins’ Nixon, Richard Dreyfuss’ Mr. Holland, and Sean Penn’s Dead Man Walking. It was deserved. The Greatest Living Actor title moniker I toss around here may be done in a half-joking way, but his performance in Leaving Las Vegas is proof that there is at least some truth underneath the humor.

Random Thoughts:

Other goofily random cameos in this movie include Danny Huston, Richard Lewis, R. Lee Ermey, Laurie Metcalf, Shawnee Smith, Mariska Hargitay (as a rival hooker), and French Stewart, who plays maybe the creepiest creep I’ve ever seen creep in a 15 second appearance.
Apparently Mike Figgis also played keyboards on the soundtrack, in addition to the trumpet. Multi-talented people are the worst.
I don’t really have any other random bits for this, so instead I’m going to post, verbatim, Cage’s incredibly uncomfortable monologue when describing his sexual dysfunction.

Are you desirable? Are you irresistible? Maybe if you drank bourbon with me, it would help. Maybe if you kissed me and I could taste the sting in your mouth it would help. If you drank bourbon with me naked. If you smelled of bourbon as you fucked me, it would help. It would increase my esteem for you. If you poured bourbon onto your naked body and said to me “drink this”. If you spread your legs and you had bourbon dripping from your breasts and your pussy and said “drink here” then I could fall in love with you. Because then I would have a purpose. To clean you up and that, that would prove that I’m worth something. I’d lick you clean so that you could go away and fuck someone else.

Next Time: The Rock

Cage Examination #22: Kiss of Death

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 12:01:00 -0400

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.

It seems especially suspect given how generally straightforward and dull much of the rest of Kiss of Death is. Theoretically a remake of a 1947 film of the same name, Schroeder’s Kiss of Death is at once a deathly serious “one last job” crime movie and a tale of a man “pushed to the brink” by nefarious forces. The brink-pushed man doing the one last job, in this case, is an old Irish mob thug who has gotten out of the life of crime. But when a cousin of his bangs down his door one night pleading for his help driving a truck full of stolen cars, he finds himself unable to resist the temptation. And then everything goes terribly, horribly wrong.

Before I get into documenting exactly how everything goes pear-shaped, I think a timeout must be taken to explain that the aforementioned reformed thug is played by David Caruso. Fresh off his time on NYPD Blue and angling to make a legit run at a film career, Kiss of Death marked the actor’s first starring role in a movie. And watching Kiss of Death, it’s pretty easy to see why Caruso’s film career tanked nearly as quickly as it began.

Caruso is pretty much only capable of playing some variation of David Caruso. That’s fine for some actors like Christopher Walken or Dennis Hopper, because playing themselves usually results in some insanely memorable piece of weirdness that sticks with the audience. Caruso is not these actors. He’s not even close. He’s a fiery-headed bore, better at giving steely glares and the occasional goofy one-liner than actually…you know…acting. In some ways, he is very much the anti-Nicolas Cage. Where Cage is often accused of overreaching, Caruso is a chronic under-reacher.

There are times and places for a David Caruso performance. NYPD Blue suited him just fine, and CSI: Miami managed to wring a couple of memes out of him, at least. But in Kiss of Death, Caruso is too mannered, too visibly tough to actually be tough. He’s just pretending, while others around him actually act.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in his scenes with Cage. Cage, for all his mannerisms and excitable energy, acts. He buries himself into whatever ludicrous human being he is trying to portray. It doesn’t matter how stupid it looks, he believes in it, dammit. And Cage is in stupid overdrive here.

Junior Brown’s thick Queens accent, his desperately weird conversation etiquette, his…everything, it’s all ridiculous. Nothing about it feels authentic, and yet you can’t quite take your eyes off Cage because if nothing else, he’s bought in. Caruso doesn’t even look bought in to his middle-of-the-road ex-con character. He doesn’t seem to be bought in either to his marriage to Helen Hunt (before she’s brutally murdered—not a complaint) nor Katherine Erbe, who you may remember from that second-tier Sixth Sense knockoff starring Kevin Bacon, and that one Law & Order series you think you might have seen that one time it came on after an SVU marathon, but can’t really remember anything about.

He’s just a dead stare with snarling fits of vengeance. He looks weak even when confronting Michael Rapaport (who plays his cousin). If Michael Rapaport looks more authentically tough than you in a movie, you’ve lost the battle.

Kiss of Death is largely dull, unimaginative, and, like its first-billed star’s film career, is doomed from the beginning. Only Cage, and a brief but memorably coked-out appearance from a post-Marsellus Wallace Ving Rhames, stand out in any meaningful way. When Nicolas Cage isn’t pouring his heart out about his aversion to metal objects in his mouth to a dumbstruck Caruso, he’s literally bench-pressing Hope Davis. It’s an over-the-top gem of a performance in a movie that’s often suffocatingly dull. As to whether it’s worth braving the dull bits in favor of seeing what Cage does, nah. There are better examples of this type of behavior in his back catalog, and there’s better to come still.

Yes, better even than this.

Random Thoughts:

I suppose I can’t say nothing else in Kiss of Death stood out to me, since I did remember how bad Helen Hunt was. Helen, I’m afraid “blue collar crime wife” isn’t a look nor a personality that suits you. Twister didn’t really work for you, either.
I’ve been extremely hard on David Caruso, so I don’t want you to think I outright hate the guy. He’s just our generation’s William Shatner, except without all the spoken word craziness. There are places where he fits as an actor. Leading man isn’t one of them.
I somehow never managed to mention Samuel L. Jackson’s role in all of this as a cop who gets shot in the face early on, and spends the rest of the movie wiping involuntary tears from his eye. That’s right. He took a bullet to the face, and now he can’t stop crying. And he is PISSED about it.
Sorry for the ridiculously long delay between entries. I needed a break. I was burned out. However, since you’ve been so patient with me, you’ll be getting two entries a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, until I’m caught up. Glad to be back.

Next Time: Leaving Las Vegas

Cage Examination #21: Trapped In Paradise

Thu, 24 May 2012 11:43:00 -0400

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.

Richard Jenkins is one of the greatest character actors of our time. He plays villains, lovable side characters, and even manages to eek out the occasional starring role, and he’s almost never anything but brilliant. If you need proof, go watch his supporting work in movies like Burn After Reading, Let Me In, and most recently, The Cabin In the Woods. Or take in his work on the HBO series Six Feet Under. Or better yet, check out the great starring performance he gives in The Visitor.

Why am I talking so much about Richard Jenkins in a feature called Year of the Cage? Because Richard Jenkins single-handedly saved this movie from becoming the outright worst movie of this series so far. In a largely insincere and laugh-free movie, he somehow injects both of those things into his handful of scenes.

Nicolas Cage is of no help here. Cage is on autopilot mostly, playing the reformed former criminal brother to a couple of nitwit still-criminals. Those nitwit still-criminals are played by Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey, by the way. Hold up. Let’s record scratch this thing to a halt for a moment. Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz don’t especially look like one another. As for Nicolas Cage? You could pick three multiracial people from a random bus stop and probably find closer family resemblance than these three.

Never mind the automatic indignity of being in a movie with both Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey. Both are actors I’ve found funny over the years in scattered projects, but seeing the pair of them trying desperately to out-wacky one another in the same general space is something close to comedy torture.

Lovitz essentially plays a spin on Jon Lovitz, as he often tends to do. He’s cocky, dumb, and generally in over his head at all times. Carvey has decided to affect a mumbly, high-pitched affect to his voice that makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront and Butters from South Park. It is an exceedingly annoying voice from the second Carvey first opens his mouth during a parole hearing, and things do not improve from there.

Lovitz and Carvey are in prison because they’re crooks, and they aren’t particularly good at it. Lovitz is the idea man, while Carvey is a kleptomaniac. Cage’s brother character has changed his ways, to the point where he has to go to confession at his local parish every time he even thinks about stealing.

Through wacky antics and hilarious misunderstandings, Lovitz and Carvey immediately dupe Cage into doing another job with them. Lovitz has concocted a scheme to rob a poorly-guarded bank in the rural town of Paradise, Pennsylvania. Lovitz does this by convincing Cage that he has to go there to visit the daughter of a sick former cellmate. He obliges, and within ten minutes of arriving in the town, Cage is scoping the bank out and rearing to go.

In most movies, the writers try to at least make the sympathetic character struggle against his less admirable urges for some brief period of time. Trapped In Paradise does not bother with this step. He goes from reformed criminal to thievery junkie in a matter of seconds.

That seems to happen a lot in this movie. Moments of supposed change in emotions, feelings, or attitudes come entirely at random. Cage’s moods are particularly whimsical. There is, at the very least, a bit of volume and energy to Cage’s performance, but it often feels like his moods changed depending on what day they were shooting. One second he’s furious at his brothers, the next he’s holding up a bank right alongside them. Then suddenly he’s changing his ways again. Then he’s angry. And so on and so forth.

It’s not just him. Everybody does it. Every big character turn in this movie is completely unearned. All the supposed moments of emotional growth just happen, with no build-up. This is all the more baffling when you consider that this movie is 110 minutes. Nearly two hours, and yet every potential character-building moment is rushed through in order to get to Dana Carvey’s next hilarious stealing of random objects gag.

The basic arc of this thing is that these guys are supposed to be royal douche bags, realize they’re royal douche bags, and then proceed to cease being royal douche bags in an unrealistically neat and tidy ending where nobody with billing on the poster has to suffer too much for their crimes. Yet it does this in the most herky jerky form imaginable, with fits and starts instead of a halfway natural progression.

So what goes on during those long stretches of movie in-between the random character personality shifts? Car chases, foot chases, car accidents, more car chases, and a horse-driven sled being chased by cars.

I don’t know why chases are such a predominant element in Trapped In Paradise. It’s not The Blues Brothers or anything, but there are at least three major scenes involving cars hilariously crashing into one another after a chase sequence. I can usually handle one of those per comedy, but Trapped In Paradise way overdoes it, while also being exceptionally mediocre at delivering on the promised chase-oriented thrills.

So yes, everything about Trapped In Paradise is pretty much awful. Apart from a few choice bouts of inappropriate shouting, Cage has nothing to do here. The rest of the cast, which also includes Donald Moffat and Twin Peaks regular Madchen Amick, aren’t given much to do outside of act very sweet or very surprised at any given moment. And Lovitz and Carvey? Let’s just say this qualifies as a career low point for two careers with a lot of low points.

And yet, there is the x-factor that is Richard Jenkins. Jenkins plays an FBI agent sent to the town to track down the bank robbers, and he could not be more put upon by this task. It’s Christmas Eve, and the last thing he wants to be doing is hanging out in this Podunk town tracking down miscreant thieves.

Most actors would just act kind of crusty and pissed off in this role. Jenkins adds a petulance and comical disinterest that I have to imagine wasn’t originally in the script. Half of his stuff feels like ad-libbing, and it’s great. It’s total off-the-cuff randomness that is altogether absent from the rest of the movie. I don’t know if he was just the only actor who realized how stupid this movie was and he made the conscious decision to just have some fun with the lousy material he’d been handed, but what he does in Trapped In Paradise made me laugh. That’s more than I can say for the rest of the movie.

Random Thoughts:

Dana Carvey’s horrible voice was apparently loosely based on young Mickey Rourke’s method of speaking. I can sort of see what he was going for, but again, he sounds a lot more like Butters to me.
According to Jon Lovitz, the cast hated the process of making the movie so much that they took to referring to it as “Trapped In Bullshit.” Jon Lovitz said this. That should give you an idea of how completely fucking horrid this movie is.
Trapped In Paradise writer/director George Gallo is the writer of Midnight Run, one of my favorite movies of all time. What the fuck happened, George?
Apologies for the lateness of this entry. Work stuff and travel has conspired to keep me very busy of late, and that will continue for the next couple of weeks. Rest assured, new entries will continue to be posted every week. They just might not get up on Mondays, as per usual. This humble Cage fan thanks you for your patience.

Next Week: Kiss of Death

Cage Examination #20: It Could Happen To You

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:34:00 -0400

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.

With this in mind, understand that It Could Happen To You was never going to rank very highly on my list of Nicolas Cage films. I’d seen it many, many years ago, probably not long after it went to the home video market, but what I remembered wasn’t terribly positive. Upon re-watching it for this series, I realized that most of the issues I had with it back in the ’90s—namely, that it was totally boring and gay and stuff (I was 14, don’t judge me)—wasn’t really the issue. In truth, the problem is that It Could Happen To You is something close to the most rom-commy rom-com to ever rom-com in the history of rom-coms.

Yes, okay, perhaps a tad hyperbolic, but I was genuinely amazed at how liberally this sort-of-based-on-a-true-story tale trotted out the hoary rom-com tropes. Given the pedigree of those behind it, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. Once again we are visited by the auteur known as Andrew Bergman, the man you may recall who previously directed Nicolas Cage in another high-larious rom-com called Honeymoon In Vegas. But whereas Honeymoon In Vegas was full of wacky hijinks and flying Elvises, It Could Happen To You slathers itself in such a thick coat of sticky sentimentality that by the end of it, I wanted to bathe myself in paint thinner.

Extremely loosely based on the true story of a real life cop and waitress, It Could Happen To You features Nicolas Cage as Charlie, a Queens-born NYC cop who doesn’t make a lot of money, but is generally pretty happy with his station in life. He’s got a job he likes, loves playing stickball with the neighborhood kids (no, seriously), and has a wife (Rosie Perez) who he seems to love, despite the fact that she’s a conniving, greedy bitch, pretty much from the opening moments.

Elsewhere, we meet Yvonne (a frighteningly thin Bridget Fonda), a severely down on her luck waitress in the midst of going bankrupt thanks to a louse of an ex-husband. She can’t afford to divorce him, she works at a cafe with a mean-spirited, draconian boss, and is in desperate need of some good luck. That good luck comes in the form of Charlie, who one day stops for coffee in her little shop and just-so-happens to not quite have enough money to give her a tip. Instead, he makes her an offer: he’s just bought a lottery ticket, and he makes the offer to split his prize with her if he wins. She is understandably incredulous about this offer, as is Charlie, frankly. But then, it happens.

Charlie wins $4 million dollars. In 1994 money, that’s quite a bit, but of course Rosie Perez is more upset than thrilled. The main jackpot was much bigger, and because there were other winners, their prize has been whittled down. Now she’s worried they won’t be able to survive on $4 million. So you can imagine how she reacts when Charlie tells her about the deal he made at the coffee shop.

This seems like as good a time as any to address the shrill, Puerto Rican elephant in the room. I have never enjoyed Rosie Perez’s presence in anything. It’s not that she’s an awful actress. In fact, quite the contrary. She’s very good at doing the one thing that she does. Unfortunately, that thing is to be a shrill, unbearable Latina stereotype. She has made movies where she’s played more fleshed out characters than here, but even then, she relies so heavily on her high-pitched squeal of a voice and the sheer volume of it that it’s impossible to like her, even when she’s playing a sympathetic character.

She’s not a sympathetic character here. This movie has her hovering somewhere between Wicked Stepmother and Crazed, Histrionical Harpy on the villainous female character scale. She’s awful from the outset, which in turn makes you wonder why you should sympathize with Cage, who made the decision to marry to this wretch. Eventually that information comes to light (they were dumb kids who got married out of high school) but even then, I found myself constantly whispering under my breath something to the effect of “you fucking idiot” every time Cage was in the same scene with her. I was muttering this to no one, mind you. No one else was in the room with me.

Still, the real problem is the character. Perez is an enervating presence, but she’s doing exactly what she was paid to do. Unfortunately, she was paid to be horrible. The possibility of even maybe liking her a little was squashed the second she opened her mouth. Bergman has no interest in nuance. He paints this film in the broadest of broad strokes, ensuring that the heroes are always heroic, and the villains are cackling, scheming goblins slinking around in the background.

The fact that Charlie makes good on his promise to Yvonne is the story of the century, according to this movie. Granted, the scene where Charlie gives Yvonne the good news is actually legitimately sweet, mostly because of Fonda’s elated response (she goes around dishing out free scoops of ice cream to everyone in the cafe), but then, of course, everything explodes. Charlie and Yvonne (and, to a lesser degree, Charlie’s wife) are now celebrities and the subject of much press interest. Initially it all seems relatively harmless, and afterward the two start to go about their lives. Yvonne buys the cafe she worked at, while Charlie mostly just stands around watching his wife spend, spend, spend.

And yet, there is some kind of gravity pulling Charlie and Yvonne together. There is an unspoken connection between these two unbelievably kind and honest kids that makes you think they just might get together somehow.

But first, there must be the inevitable fall from grace. This is always my least favorite part of these movies. I know these scenes in which the really nice protagonists suffer some terrible tragedy, either at the behest of the movie’s villains or just out of sheer awful luck, are designed to make the third act return to love and happiness all that much sweeter. The problem is that screenwriters often go to such lengths to beat these good-natured characters down that it just becomes painful to sit through.

This film is such a case. Because the news media is always an easy villain in movies, the tabloids begin deriving some kind of relationship out of Charlie and Yvonne’s friendship, long before they actually have one. Rosie Perez uses this as her excuse to divorce Charlie and take him for everything he’s worth, and then goes that extra step further to take Yvonne for everything she’s worth. And this just keeps going, and going, and going, until finally we get to a conclusion tooth-rotting in its sweetness.

It’s not that I hate sweet movies. I can melt at a good love story, just like anyone else who isn’t a sociopath. But the line between sweet and schmaltzy was crossed long before It Could Happen To You got to its hilariously optimistic ending. You see, this movie takes place in that fictional version of New York City where all the citizens are just one sob story away from banding together for the sake of a common good. I’m talking the pre-9/11 version of this, the one that only exists in Garry Marshall movies and the imaginations of people who do not live in New York. So when the movie wraps itself up with a New York Post cover story describing their tragedy and then having a major portion of NYC’s population mail Charlie and Yvonne small denominations of money that eventually add up to $600,000, I just kind of had to laugh in disbelief. I know this is a fairy tale, and thus required a fairy tale ending, but man. MAN.

100 minutes later, Charlie and Yvonne were together, Rosie Perez had been vanquished to The Bronx or something, and I had not one memorable Nicolas Cage moment to point to. Not a one. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

The role of Charlie doesn’t require much more of an actor than an ability to alternate between earnest and forlorn facial expressions. Any actor could have played this character. In fact, early in its production, the producers had apparently considered Arnold Schwarzenegger for the part. What?

There is nothing even remotely Cage-ian about Nicolas Cage in It Could Happen To You. He’s bland, boring, and inessential. He is competent enough at being the nice guy, but I don’t watch Nicolas Cage movies to just see him be a nice guy for 100 minutes. Even Guarding Tess had at least a few good shouty, wide-eyed moments for someone like myself to latch onto. I can’t reconcile a movie that features Nicolas Cage and then proceeds to restrain every instinct and acting trademark that makes Nicolas Cage Nicolas Cage.

Therefore, I’m going to call it here and say It Could Happen To You is officially the most unnecessary movie I’ve watched thus far in this feature. There are way, way worse movies in the actor’s catalog, many of which I’ve already covered. But for those who love Cage for being Cage, It Could Happen To You is a barren wasteland, infertile and toxic to a Cage fan’s health.

And did I mention Rosie Perez is in it?

Random Thoughts:

There are a few amusing cameos in this movie from actors we’d go on to recognize many years later. Most notably, Cage’s partner is played by Bunk from The Wire. I mean, I guess Stanley Tucci as Yvonne’s ex-husband is a way more obvious example, but fuck that. I love Bunk.
Red Buttons as Cage’s lawyer is probably the weirdest of all the aforementioned cameos.
However, the strangest role in the whole movie definitely goes to Issac Hayes as the movie’s angelic(?) narrator. The casting in this movie is just bonkers from top to bottom.
I feel like it’s worth pointing out that among the various other Cage-related marathon blogs I’ve been pointed to since starting this feature, many of them topped out either just before, or right around this period in Cage’s career. I can’t say as I blame them, as this has been a rough couple of weeks, and it’s not exactly getting better in the immediate future. However, I am dedicated to this project, and will not quit. I will die before I give up on Year of the Cage. Consider my loins girded for the terrors that await.

Next Week: Trapped In Paradise

Cage Examination #19: Guarding Tess

Tue, 08 May 2012 16:43:00 -0400

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.

To be honest, when conceiving Year of the Cage, I hadn’t taken movies like Guarding Tess into account. I envisioned this feature as a celebration of all things Nicolas Cage, but the truth of the matter is that in saying that, I was really only considering the very best, and the very worst of what Cage’s catalog had to offer. I hadn’t paid appropriate consideration to that dense, unattractive middle ground of mediocrity in which Guarding Tess resides. Guarding Tess is neither a great movie nor an awful one. Nicolas Cage is neither at the height of his game, nor a screaming, fitting mess. He’s just a dull leading man in a dull movie. I’d almost forgotten that could even happen.

There is certainly an importance to taking movies like Guarding Tess into account when judging the entire oeuvre of Our Greatest Living Actor. This isn’t an isolated incident of dullness, as we’ll come to learn as the year goes on. There was a whole period of Cage’s career—one that reared its head again in fairly recent years—where Cage was little more than just a typical lead actor. He did quirky comedies, romantic comedies, romantic dramas, and all sorts of other middling Hollywood tripe that barely registered as halfway memorable. It’s a darker period for fans like myself, but it’s also unarguably one of the most successful periods of his career.

Not that Guarding Tess was some huge box office success (it only made $7 million more than its modest $20 million budget), but in terms of exposure, it couldn’t have done anything but help Cage, now emerging from a time of strange independent ventures and ill-advised career moves. To have the opportunity to act alongside Shirley MacLaine in a mainstream comedy must have seemed like a tremendous thing to Our Greatest Living Actor. And, to be fair, there are moments in Guarding Tess where you can almost see a genuinely charming and funny movie peek through the clouds of abject mediocrity that obscure much of the rest of the film.

The early goings of Guarding Tess suggest a lighthearted political comedy assured to be barely political, perhaps in the vein of Dave or My Fellow Americans, but in truth it’s more of a barely political spin on the cranky-yet-lovable old person comedy/drama, like a Driving Miss Daisy, but way less racist.

We first find Cage, as Secret Service agent Doug Chesnic, saying goodbye to his previous post as the head of security for a former First Lady. Initially we don’t know why Doug is so giddy to be leaving this job, but when he gleefully strolls into his boss’ office, only to be told his former charge wants him back, he flips. He’s incensed, desperately trying to wriggle his way out of the predicament he’s been presented with. He really, really doesn’t want to go back to Ohio. But why?

It might have something to do with that former First Lady being an insufferable, bitchy monster. Okay, maybe that’s overselling it a tad, but MacLaine is definitely playing up the meanness as Tess Carlisle, the widow of the last President and a woman deemed a “National Treasure” by pretty much everyone in this movie who doesn’t actually have to work with her. She’s sarcastic, irritable, and seemingly above showing the smallest hint of empathy to her beleaguered staff.

It’s no wonder Doug doesn’t want to go back. On top of being an out-of-the-way posting (the Secret Service equivalent of manning a radio tower in Alaska) with no discernible room for upward growth, he has to deal with a woman who seemingly delights in tormenting him.

This is all done in that very cheerful early ’90s comedy way, with lots of classical music underscoring the various mild antics that go on as they poke and prod at one another. Cage’s mopeyness upon returning doesn’t last long, as he essentially decides that he’s not taking her shit anymore. As she is well-known for her subversion of Secret Service rules and regulations, he then decides to tighten the ship, going toe-to-toe with Tess any time she tries to go against regulations.

This is exactly as insufferably wacky as it sounds. When Tess won’t sit on the correct side of a car (she has to be seated so both the agent and the driver can see her), Cage stands his ground, refusing to let the driver move until she caves. In retaliation, Tess will sometimes order her driver to take off without the Secret Service agents, forcing Doug to call the local highway patrol to try and track her down, which is clearly a great source of embarrassment for him.

Ultimately, it’s more the consequences of those actions that stick in the mind than anything that actually happens in Guarding Tess. The movie’s sole great, running gag is that Doug is constantly getting phone calls from the President, who very passive-aggressively chides him every time Tess calls to complain about him. First this starts off more faux-friendly, but when Doug pushes her into a place where she’s willing to waive her right to having Secret Service protection at all, a call from the President sends Doug into a panic, forcing him to gather his troops and keep unofficial watch on Tess until one day, she just decides to invite Doug inside and make peace.

This is the main problem I have with Guarding Tess. While it alludes to Tess being sort of an awful person underneath her public persona, the script can’t quite seem to decide whether or not she’s actually an awful person. Later sections of the film create the allusion that maybe she’s so cranky because she’s terrified of no longer being useful now that her husband is dead, and then there’s a whole brain tumor subplot that actually gets forgotten right as the third act kicks into gear. Yes, she has a brain tumor, but apparently she’s not going to die? No one really explains that one.

Instead, the movie relies on MacLaine to sell this schizophrenic character through sheer charm and wit. And she almost pulls it off. I mean, this is Shirley MacLaine we’re talking about. She’s one of those actresses that can bring dignity and warmth to even the dumbest of roles. She imbues Tess with all of those things, but even she can’t quite overcome a script that has absolutely no idea exactly where it wants to go. A fact made all the more evident by its third act, which tosses in a kidnapping plot pretty much out of nowhere.

I can’t emphasize enough exactly how stupid and cloying the end of this movie is. By this point, Doug and Tess have made their peace with one another, but now Doug is in hot water after Tess’ driver takes off with her, but not on another joyride. This time he’s part of a plot to kidnap the woman for a $15 million ransom, engineered by his sister and her husband. Characters we have never heard of, let alone seen ANYWHERE in this movie. All of the sudden, the movie shifts to Doug having to prove himself by investigating the kidnapping on his own, while the rest of the Secret Service belittles him for not being able to keep his eye on a little old woman.

Here’s the thing: normally when this happens, you’re supposed to feel really bad for the protagonist and really hate those nasty higher-up types that clearly don’t understand that Doug’s really a good guy. Except in this case, they’re right. Sure, maybe they’re a tad overly mean about it, but this guy just let one of America’s most important living figures get taken by an idiot chauffeur and his yokel family. He is an idiot, and he deserves to be chastised.

Still, if it weren’t for this sudden change in direction, we wouldn’t have gotten the sole worthwhile Cage moment anywhere in this idiotic 96 minute endeavor. In order to coerce a confession and the location of Tess out of the chauffeur (played by ubiquitous “weird guy” actor Austin Pendleton), he flips out exactly the way we want Nicolas Cage to flip out. He pulls a gun, and threatens to start shooting off the man’s toes unless he tells where she is. AND THEN HE DOES EXACTLY THAT.

Good. I’m glad we got one worthwhile moment out of this oppressively pleasant slog. But I am still blown away that a movie that seemed like such fertile ground for Cage-brand chicanery only managed one good moment out of the entire ordeal. The rest of the movie, Cage is either just kind of a dull, lifeless presence, periodically peppered with moments of panic. He turns Doug into a very bored-looking Nicolas Cage, and not much more.

Unfortunately, this is far from the end of this side of Nicolas Cage’s acting personality. While we’ve become super accustomed to Cage livening up even the dumbest, shittiest movies, the ’90s and 2000s are stuffed to the brim with movies where Cage seems totally out of his element, or at least utterly not invested in what’s going on. Guarding Tess is far from the worst example of this, but coming from where we’ve been, it’s a jarring shift. It makes Red Rock West look like Deadfall. I realize they can’t all be winners, but I’ll be honest when I say that I’m battening down the hatches for a rough ride in the near future. June, and the deluge of great Cage action movies can’t come soon enough.

Random Thoughts:

Apart from Pendleton, Guarding Tess is actually brimming with great character actors of the era, including James Rebhorn, Richard Griffiths, and Susan Bommaert. It also does next to nothing with any of them, though Rebhorn does get to continue his streak of being one of film’s greatest assholes.
This is a question I may be asking a bunch from here on out, but really, who in Hollywood was looking at these low-key mainstream pictures they were about to produce, and saying “Hey, what about Nicolas Cage?” Like, what in Cage’s history says “Yeah, this guy can totally be the mild comic actor we need for this cranky-but-lovable old people comedy!” I will never understand how casting directors and producers think.
Guarding Tess writer/director Hugh Wilson went on to write and direct the Brendan Fraser vehicle Blast from the Past, as well as the Dudley Do-Right live action movie starring, yes, Brendan Fraser. So I guess now I actually do know why this movie is so mediocre.

Next Week: It Could Happen to You

Cage Examination #18: Red Rock West

Tue, 01 May 2012 16:32:00 -0400

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.

Maybe it was in 1993, but upon viewing it in 2012, I was struck mostly by how ordinary it all seemed. Granted, in the years that have followed, melding the spartan atmosphere of the western countryside with devious criminal elements working just under the surface of small town life is a concept that’s been explored countless times. No part of Red Rock West feels particularly special, or unique anymore. Now, it’s just another movie featuring a back country bumpkin getting in way over his head.

Granted, that back country bumpkin is played by Nicolas Cage, so you know at the very least there will be a bit of an unusual spin on the “Noir Hero Who Stumbles Into Criminal Dealings and Continues to Dig the Hole Ever-Deeper Until He Has Sex With a Mysterious Woman and Eventually Pretty Much Everyone Ends Up Dead” character. However, it’s not unusual in the manner we’ve come to expect from Cage.

Which presents an interesting question: is something still “unusual” if it’s expected? You never quite know what you’re going to get with a Nicolas Cage performance, of course. But based on the five years of work he produced in the time between Moonstruck and here, there is a certain manic, outsized quality that remains consistent. It’s predictable unpredictability, if such a thing can exist.

There isn’t much of that in Red Rock West. Instead, Cage plays down-on-his-luck former Marine Michael Williams as a legitimate Normal. He’s just a guy looking for work on an oil rig in Wyoming who finds himself stranded without a job, without any money, and no clear direction in life. So it’s no wonder that, upon wandering into the tiny town of Red Rock and meeting the owner of the local watering hole (the great J.T. Walsh, in top form), he sees an opportunity when asked if he’s the man “here for the job.”

The job, of course, is some rather unseemly business. As it turns out, Walsh is a man with the means and the desire to see his wife (Lara Flynn Boyle, who I will speak much of momentarily) dead. He had hired a man from Dallas to come and do the job, but as he has not shown up, and Cage has a Texas license plate on his car, Walsh naturally assumes he’s the guy here to do “the job.”

Nicolas Cage gets a lot of shit for being a notorious over-actor, relying more on histrionics and shouting in place of actual, honest-to-God acting. If you ever want a perfect piece of refuting evidence to such a claim, watch the scene in Red Rock West where Cage is presented with this horrible task. The entire time Walsh is talking, he’s a sweaty, yet silent mess. His eyes are wide with non-belief at what he’s wandered into, and you can see the gears turning in the back of his skull as he quickly tries to figure out what to do with himself. The conclusion he comes to is surprisingly clever, and the way he handles Walsh is as deft as it is insane.

Not only does he take $5,000 in up-front payment, he then proceeds to take a little trip down to Walsh’s ranch to scope out his proposed target. He there finds Boyle, riding horseback and perhaps getting a tad too friendly with her circa-1993 studly (tanned, tanktop, tight wrangler jeans, looks a bit like a Stetson model) ranch hand. When she returns to her home, she finds Cage there, waiting for her. But he does not shoot her (even though he inexplicably already has a pistol in his glovebox), but instead tells her that her husband wants her dead. Simultaneously shocked and dismayed, Boyle then ups the ante. She offers double to reverse the situation. Cage agrees.

With $10,000 now in-hand and no particular desire to murder anybody, Cage then plans his escape from town—an escape tragically interrupted when he discovers the aforementioned ranch hand hanging out by a broken down truck and stumbling around in the road. Upon hitting the poor fellow with his car, he is stricken with guilt. So much so, that he makes the good-hearted, if utterly ludicrous decision to return to town and bring the poor man to the hospital. Would you like to hazard a guess as to how well that goes?

Those who chose “poorly” are the winners this time. Unsurprisingly, the cops are brought into the fray, and you’ll never guess who the sheriff is. Unless you guessed J.T. Walsh, in which case you’d be correct, and also shut up.

Somehow, this ends up with Cage cuffed in Walsh’s truck, Cage and Walsh fighting over a gun, and then Walsh chasing Cage through a dark forest, which eventually ends up with Cage falling down a very long hill onto a road, where a car comes to a screeching halt right in front of his face. Who should be driving this car, but Dennis Hopper, clearly not there to be a menacing presence for the remainder of the film. Hopper is angry and concerned in equal measure, but eventually agrees to take Cage back to town. Which is all well and good, until Hopper repeatedly invites, and eventually demands that Cage drink with him at the bar. You know, that bar owned by J.T. Walsh. The only thing that could make this worse is if Hopper were actually the original hitman hired by Walsh in the first place.

As it turns out, Hopper is the original hitman hired by Walsh in the first place. Now there are two murderous scoundrels after Cage, and his only friend (seemingly) is Boyle, who he now has to alert to future attempted murder, but actually protect from all these crazy people who want her dead.

Red Rock West just keeps piling on the ludicrous circumstances—as any noir worth its salt would—eventually culminating in one of those great late-movie showdowns where every character is out for themselves, nobody trusts anyone, and pretty much everyone ends up dead or in jail. The last third of Red Rock West almost lives up to the potential that every critic described so breathlessly in their 1993 reviews. In these late game power plays over a sizable chunk of money—oh, did I forget to mention there’s also a big chunk of money everybody suddenly starts competing for?—Red Rock West almost plays a bit like a precursor to Fargo, minus the dark comic sensibility. A bunch of disparate, desperate people come together for the sake of getting rich, and it all goes horribly sideways.

It’s in the getting there part that Red Rock West proves a bit lackluster. The writing just isn’t that sharp. It’s full of timely coincidences and totally idiotic character choices that ring deeply false. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Cage’s sudden falling for Boyle’s character. These two do not exactly radiate sexual chemistry with one another, and the suddenness with which they begin boinking is obviously meant to be an alarm bell that she might have her own agenda, but Cage’s going along with it hardly seems reasonable. I mean, she’s cute and all, but she’s less a character than a living, breathing noir archetype.

Casting Boyle probably wasn’t the best idea, either. She’s an okay enough actress, though even back in the mid-’90s I saw her as more of a slight improvement on Linda Fiorentino than anything else. She’s not given much to do here save but plot, plead, and make awkward attempts at being alluring while inexplicably being shoved into outfits that I would totally show to you if every image of her in this movie on the Internet weren’t a shot of her in her bra. Yeesh.

Her attempts at deviousness are only slightly more subtle than J.T. Walsh, who, as Roger Ebert correctly points out in his review, seems to be the only guy who doesn’t understand how everything has gotten so completely, irrevocably fucked. Walsh is fantastic because he plays at a confidence that his character only pretends to have. Once things start getting out of hand, he seems as freaked out as Cage, though he’s in a better position to do something about it than Cage is.

Hopper is, as Hopper often is in films of this era, more or less just a psychotic charmer. He’s clearly insane from almost the get-go, nursing an inferiority complex and without any particular issue with killing people for money. But Hopper does more with the character than most actors—with perhaps the exception of a Christopher Walken, or Eric Roberts—would ever think to do. Like in Speed, he’s essentially unchecked, murderous id. A smiling, cackling killer who you almost sort of like, until you really, really don’t.

I suppose I might not have minded if Hopper turned out to be the victor in all of this, but alas, that honor goes to Cage’s thoroughly beaten-down Michael, now forever scarred by the experience of dealing with these crazy fucking people. He’s the movie’s moral center, so it’s no surprise he’s the only one who escapes clean. The problem is that as a moral center, Michael is such a passive, borderline dumb character that it’s hard to really feel too much for him. Cage is just fine in the role, mixing a few unexpectedly-timed outbursts with a genuinely low-key charm that works. This is not melodramatic Cage, but the role doesn’t really need that. What it did need was a bit more substance beyond a hard-luck back story and a general predilection toward honesty.

I realize that perhaps I am being a tad harsh on Red Rock West. After all, I’ve just come out of a long, dark tunnel filled with Cage roles that alternated between unbelievable and unbearable. Such a laid back turn in such a laid back movie almost feels like I’ve just wandered into another actor’s career on accident. But no, this is Our Greatest Living Actor on the cusp of a new chapter in his career. He’s about to graduate from occasional Hollywood lead and frequent direct-to-video crazy person to full-time leading man. I recognize that this is the beginning of a new path, and that I must brace myself for it. After all, if Red Rock West spooked me, how am I going to react during Guarding Tess?

I guess we’ll find out next week.

Random Thoughts:

Apparently Red Rock West originally debuted as an HBO film, due to the fact that the producers couldn’t find a studio to release it theatrically. It made a brief art house run in 1993, almost two years after it was filmed, and was apparently a wild success. I still have a hard time grasping that.
Seriously, what the fuck is going on with Lara Flynn Boyle’s costumes in this movie? Did she bring this shit from home?
One of my favorite small touches of the script is that Cage’s character is forced to return to Red Rock over and over again, like a Sisyphean torment. The constant return to the “Welcome to Red Rock” sign reminds me a bit of Groundhog Day, or In the Mouth of Madness.
Dwight Yoakam’s random cameo as a gun-toting truck driver is fantastic, but mostly because I love Dwight Yoakam in everything. Supposedly he brought his own gun for the scene, which is the best thing I’ve ever heard.
The early film sequence involving a shirtless Cage standing on the side of a lonely highway looking perfectly rugged reminded me just how many movies of the ’90s featured rugged-looking men standing on lonely highways as a metaphor for something or other. I blame Tom Cochran.
Thus far in this feature, Red Rock West represents the least amount of movement Cage’s hair has experienced for the duration of a film. It’s almost alarming how staid it is.
“FUCK MEXICO.”

Next Week: Guarding Tess

Cage Examination #17: Deadfall

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:07:00 -0400

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.

What’s even crazier is that Nicolas Cage is in maybe half of this movie. Probably not even that. Ostensibly, Michael Biehn is the star of Deadfall. Both comically awful actress Sarah Trigger and tragically present actor James Coburn have a good deal more screen time than Cage does. And yet there is a near-universal understanding that Deadfall is Nicolas Cage’s movie. If the cast of Deadfall is the continent of Asia, then Cage is North Korea. While the rest of the continent is off minding its business, every five minutes Cage shows up to launch off a rocket of incoherent expletives and coke-addled mania that forces everyone to pay attention to him for as long as he’s around. Sadly, nobody from the Kim family ever met their end by getting their skull dunked in a boiling grease trap, but hey, never say never.

The fact that Cage is allowed to run roughshod over this movie more or less unchecked probably has something to do with the fact that Deadfall was written and directed by his brother, Christopher Coppola. Chris Coppola’s directorial career is…well, it’s something. With the exception of this movie, most of it involves direct-to-video B-movie schlock like Dracula’s Widow and G-Men from Hell (these are actual, non-made-up movie titles). Deadfall appears to be the movie that Chris cashed all his Hollywood favor chips in on. The cast, which also includes Peter Fonda and Charlie Goddamn Sheen (who I will say more about later), is baffling in its strength, especially given the absolute trainwreck of a script they’ve been handed.

I assume that Coppola intended Deadfall to be a kind of slick, noir-ish heist movie in a kind of mixture of Raymond Chandler and David Mamet. Unfortunately, Coppola’s dialogue seems largely culled from the works of Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Jade), and his idea of a twisty, thrilling heist is laughably preposterous.

Biehn plays Joe, a slickster con-artist who, alongside his father (Coburn) and a number of bit player con-men (the fantastically weird combo of Clarence Williams III and former Monkee Mickey Dolenz) early on try to take down a mob heavy in an elaborate sting that involves fake bullets, pretend cops, and multiple people feigning death. Unfortunately, one of those people isn’t pretending. Through some terrible happenstance, Joe’s father is actually shot, and he dies mumbling words about Joe’s mother and a mysterious uncle that Joe never knew.

Joe is, of course, destroyed by guilt. I know this because the heavy-handed narration Biehn is forced to deliver never fails to point out how totally guilt-stricken he is. And when it isn’t specifically pointing that out, we get shots of Biehn sweaty and upset, while haunting images of his heist gone wrong remind us of a scene that happened maybe 15 minutes ago. Just to be absolutely clear about this, JOE FEELS GUILTY.

Now that we understand Joe’s guilt, we can understand why he seeks out this mysterious uncle, who Joe’s dad rarely spoke of. Turns out, they’re twins! Coburn plays both dad and uncle, though the uncle character is a bit more typically Coburn-like—the dad is basically the evil, alternate Star Trek universe version of James Coburn. He’s a con-man and crime boss in his own right, though the only guy he seems to employ is a strange, sneering little man named Eddie, who spends most of their first conversation huddled in a corner making peculiar faces. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is Nicolas Cage.

From this point forward, Deadfall proceeds to tell two completely different stories. For a while, it’s the Joe and Eddie story. Joe’s trying to get in his uncle’s good graces, and Eddie sees Joe as a threat. This is especially true of Eddie’s girl (Trigger), a manipulative little harlot who plays things innocent early on, but very heavily telegraphs an alternate agenda. It takes about five seconds of Biehn and Trigger being in the same room together to know that some really awkward early ’90s movie sex will be happening between them at some point down the road. And it does. Oh boy, does it ever.

What Cage does in his oh-so-brief time spent stewing over Biehn’s presence is pretty much the only reason anyone should ever watch Deadfall. In fact, scratch that. There is actually no reason to watch Deadfall. Why? Because this video exists.

Even entirely divorced from story context, these moments are all you ever need to see of Deadfall. The story it tells after Cage’s demise (which pretty much just revolves around a series of elaborate double-crosses as Joe sets up a new version of the same sting that got his father killed) isn’t interesting nor terribly amusing. You aren’t going to enjoy its labored attempt at a crafty crime thriller plot, you aren’t going to enjoy the rest of the cast’s enfeebled attempts at acting, and you sure as shit aren’t going to want to sit through the last 40 minutes of the movie that feature exactly zero Nicolas Cage scenes. Once he gets that greasy face wash, that’s it for Cage. His body is unceremoniously dumped in the ocean, and we’re left with a the-rest-of-the-movie that is as dull and unremarkable as it is unbearably stupid.

Well, okay, perhaps I’m slightly overstating things. There IS Charlie Sheen, after all. Sheen shows up as a sort of bizarre go-between for Biehn and a crime impresario with a mechanical claw for a hand. No, seriously. He has a mechanical claw hand.

Anyway, Sheen’s entire purpose is to be really good at pool and wear a bitchin’ smoking jacket. His character has no real raison d’etre save but to school Biehn at billiards and say cryptic, Sheen-ian things. Like this!

There you go. Now you truly have no reason to ever watch Deadfall, because you’ve seen every worthwhile moment this movie has to offer. And no, I’m not going to embed the sex scene.

Going back to Cage for a minute—that is why we’re here, right?—I said before I have no idea what the dude was thinking when crafting this character, though in rewatching the above scenes, I realize there is at least one point of potential inspiration that shows itself. From his obsession with card tricks (especially the Joker’s card), his tumultuous relationship with his elder crime boss, his wildly unpredictable behavior, and eventual face-melting disaster, it seems to me that Cage might be drawing upon Batman’s most famous villain. He’s not wearing clown makeup, but he has plastered himself with fake hair, what looks like it could be a fake mustache, and more caked-on face powder than is likely healthy for a single human being. Also, he’s out of his goddamn mind.

I’m not suggesting Cage is actually doing his version of the Joker, but the signs are there, and frankly it’s the only thing I can think of to get some bearing on what the hell he’s even attempting here. I suppose if I were doing my brother a favor and starring in his hackneyed heist movie as a low-level bad guy with a serious temper problem, I might go out of my way to have some fun with the character too. And I’ll say this much: it does look like he’s having a lot of fun.

Cage in Deadfall is all the more jarring when you consider the last couple of films in his catalog were relatively safe mainstream Hollywood ventures like Honeymoon In Vegas and Amos & Andrew. How one goes from being Sarah Jessica Parker’s love interest to delivering the acting equivalent of an Extinction Level Event is perhaps the greatest testament there is to why Nicolas Cage is Our Greatest Living Actor. Who else could do what this man does? Who else could rescue a movie as dire as Deadfall from the pit of unwatchability by turning a relatively marginal character into a psychotic, coke-snorting imp who shouts everything for no reason? No one. For better or for worse, no other actor is capable of doing what Nicolas Cage does—or, at the very least, no other actor will actually attempt to do what he does. And that’s why we love him.

Random Thoughts:

Talia Shire is also in this movie, though like Peter Fonda, her presence barely registers.
Sarah Trigger’s career never did quite take off, really. A fact perhaps best evidenced by her sole piece of noteworthy IMDB trivia being that she was briefly married to Jon Cryer.
I just noticed the guy wearing the “FUCK” t-shirt in the strip club standing next to Cage right before he belts out that epic “FUUUUUUUUUUUCK.” This is kind of a chicken and the egg thing for me. Was the line always there and the guy in the shirt added at the last minute for effect? Or was the shirt just there as a piece of improv inspiration for Cage? I NEED TO KNOW THE ANSWER TO THIS.
There are no less than three movies called Deadfall. They are all about con-artists, and none of them have anything to do with each other outside of title and character profession. That’s kind of weird, right?
Did I mention that the end of movie bad guy has A FUCKING METAL CLAW FOR A HAND?!? Clearly I need to do a lot more cocaine before writing, because fuck, man. FUCK.
This is probably the last truly batshit Nicolas Cage performance to talk about for a while. For those who are just on board with this feature for the crazypants roles, check back in June when we begin the action movie binge of The Rock, Face/Off, and Con Air. For the rest of you, don’t worry. There’s still plenty of weirdness coming up in the immediate future. Just not quite as much shouting.

Next Week: Red Rock West

Bonus Cage #1: The Best of Times

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 15:56:39 -0400

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.

The Best of Times, as you’ll gauge from the embedded video above, is a Laugh-In style, teen-focused sketch comedy show. The idea, according to whatever accountings happen to exist on the Internet, is that the idea was to turn The Best of Times into a weekly prime time series. It seems an odd choice, given the kid-oriented comedy. The pilot feels more appropriate—assuming an appropriate outlet for this thing ever truly existed—to Saturday or Sunday morning programming. Evidently networks agreed, as the pilot was supposedly never picked up properly.

Instead, the makers of the show released the hour-long pilot episode as a TV movie, of sorts. It only aired once on ABC, and was never released to home video in any official capacity. It is by the grace of God or the Internet or whatever that someone found a copy and uploaded it to YouTube, so that we may all bask in its incredibly hackneyed glory.

The first thing that strikes about this show is obviously the presence of an extremely young, eminently punchable Crispin Glover. Both he and Cage made their official acting debuts in this show. Glover is ostensibly the show’s star, the sort-of-narrator of this bizarre collection of shitty one-liners, surprisingly dark monologues, and soul-searing musical numbers.

If you thought Glover was the picture of awkward in Back to the Future, you should see him before his voice changed.

Cage, on the other hand, is more of a supporting player. His character, “Nicholas,” is an odd combination of surfer dudeness, jockish bruteness, and a pair of cut-off jean shorts that made me ask a few questions about myself. Most of Cage’s sketches involve him out on some Los Angeles muscle beach with his best bud Kevin (Kevin Cortes), a nerd of the utmost pedigree who Cage has to try to help become more socially comfortable. He attempts to instruct this poor boy in everything from acting more confidently, to the art of talking to women. Hilarity was then presumably intended to ensue.

The funniest thing about The Best of Times is what a wonderful time capsule it is into the daftly mediocre entertainments of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Jokes are paced out in seconds-long chunks, with scenes immediately cutting away almost as soon as they began, with a synthesized guitar “wah-wah,” or tasty “squibbeldy-flabbedy-doo” (to use Patton Oswalt’s guitar solo parlance) transitioning each scene. You couldn’t make a parody of the era’s terrible comedy better than what The Best of Times already is.

And of course there are the myriad fashion choices, slang terms, and other antiquated things (the inexplicable presence of Jackie Mason, for instance) to pick through, like the contents of an unopened storage locker from 1981. But above all those other things, the really striking thing about The Best of Times is how bizarrely dark it gets. Toward the end of the show, there’s a particularly insane monologue delivered by Cage, in which he expresses his paranoia about the United States Army Draft being reinstated because of the conflict in El Salvador.

It’s a shockingly earnest statement of teenage fear that becomes all the more bewildering when you juxtapose that against a sketch earlier in the same show that features Cage shirtless in overalls singing a choral rendition of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” while wackily washing cars. Seriously, try to put those images together in your mind, and do your best not to have a fatal aneurysm.

So, yes, The Best of Times is terrible. For me, hilariously so. It’s that kind of earnest, yet utterly manufactured entertainment of the time that looks so patently ridiculous in retrospect that you can’t help but kind of love it. The Best of Times should be kept in a museum alongside shows like Pink Lady and Jeff, and The Ropers under a banner that just reads “WHERE IT ALL WENT WRONG.” These are shows that should be preserved, studied, and learned from. After all, without a lasting record, I’d have never, ever seen this.

Hope you enjoyed that. Look for another one of these roundabout the halfway point in the series. And don’t miss Monday’s piece on Deadfall. Oh sweet, sweet Deadfall.

Cage Examination #16: Amos & Andrew

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:27:00 -0400

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.

If pre-1992 was the time for earnest discussion of race relations via film, then post 1992 is when Hollywood decided it okay to start making fun of it again. How else do you explain the existence of Amos & Andrew, a slapstick buddy comedy that might as well be a giant “But see, black guys are like this! And white dudes, they’re like this” joke from some hack comedian’s stand-up routine on Evening at the Improv. Amos & Andrew is practically to Spike Lee’s filmography what Hot Shots is to Top Gun. It’s a movie in which idiotic white people harass a semi-militant, but generally well-meaning black man (Samuel L. Jackson), and no less than two actors, including Nicolas Cage, put on accidental blackface. It’s a parody of racial tensions of the era, and the very definition of “too soon.”

I’m saying this even in 2012, long past Amos & Andrew’s 1993 release date. It’s not that a perfectly timely comedy sending up the same politics that Amos & Andrew does couldn’t have existed, but this film is neither satirical enough, nor funny enough to really justify the fact that it’s basically 90 minutes of stump-dumb white folk accidentally being super racist with occasional buddy comedy tropes tossed in for good measure.

There are moments of almost-cleverness peppered throughout Amos & Andrew, most the result of the interaction between Jackson’s apparently super-famous playwright Andrew Sterling and Nicolas Cage’s drifter-for-hire Amos Odell. These two are legitimately kind of great together, even if the dialogue they’re given doesn’t amount to much more than Jackson spouting muted rage about society’s preconceptions of him, and Cage making cracks about him probably having a white wife.

Before they get together, however, they’re miles apart (not in literal distance, mind you). The movie opens with Jackson arriving on a small New England island community, where he’s evidently just purchased a new summer home. Within five minutes, his well-meaning but also supremely racist neighbors wander up to his new home, expecting to find the previous white residents. Instead they see Jackson hooking up his stereo, and immediately run home to call the police. Because black guys be stealin’ stereos, ya’ll.

A quick aside on this accidentally racist couple: this is more or less where the movie tries to shove all its satirical ideas about affluent white liberals who pretend to be totally socially aware. The couple, played by Michael Lerner and Margaret Colin (the mayor from the Godzilla remake and the ex-wife from Independence Day, respectively), are pot-smoking progressives who nonetheless freak out at the very sight of a black dude in someone’s house. They’re not really interesting characters, so much as they are self-serving assholes who are there to be comically dumped upon. That said, these actors do what they can with the material, and are aided by the presence of their white dog. Yes, they have a white dog. A white dog that looks eerily similar to the white dog from the movie White Dog. You know, the one about the white dog that was trained to hate black people? This dog doesn’t really hate black people, though. He’s actually a very good dog. Yes he is.

Elsewhere, Cage is incarcerated in the island’s jail, presumably because of his intense five o’clock shadow. Nobody with that much five o’clock shadow is every anything but a miscreant, or roustabout, or brigand, you see. He’s being questioned by the local Buford T. Justice, played almost inexplicably by Dabney Coleman. His rendition of a hard-ass, politically obsessed small-town sheriff is essentially an amalgam of every asshole Dabney Coleman role ever smooshed together into a single nefarious mustache. I don’t even know if I could call his performance funny, exactly. There are jokes, but he chews through them with such dagger-eyed menace that you don’t so much laugh as actively count the minutes until his eventual comeuppance.

If Dabney Coleman is an altogether unlikely Buford T. Justice surrogate, then Brad Douriff has to be the most unlikely Junior Justice of all time. Douriff is the zanily inept right-hand man to Coleman’s sheriff. Yes, creepy ass character actor Brad Douriff, who looks more like a serial killer transient on his best day than Nicolas Cage could on his worst. He’s also the first actor in the movie to kick off the blackface gag. Brad Douriff bumbling around in blackface as wacky comic relief. That happened.

He dons the blackface when Coleman is alerted to the sudden black man situation at the house. He immediately assumes what the nice white couple assumes, and sends in his men to surround the place. It’s only after Douriff goes rogue and starts shooting at the poor man (who has come outside just to turn off his car alarm) that the sheriff begins to realize that hilarious misunderstandings have taken place. Now, all of the sudden, he’s got a situation on his hands where people will view this tiny island community as a bunch of backwood racists, and totally ruin his reelection campaign. What to do, what to do?

How about make a deal with the drifter you’ve got rotting in a cell to pretend to be a hostage taking crazy man in blackface, so the sheriff can pretend arrest him and be the one who saves the day? That should go swimmingly, right?

Intriguingly, this insipid sitcom plot masquerading as a movie is arguably the best thing Amos & Andrew could have done. The early goings with the racist white couple and all the people shooting at Jackson aren’t funny. They’re excruciating. The idiocy of the people involved is beyond insulting to any audience of any color, and there are barely any jokes contained within to try and offset the unpleasantness of it all. However, once Cage gets involved and sets off on the wacky hostage taking misunderstanding plot, things improve dramatically.

This is, again, because Cage and Jackson are very good together. Jackson’s character is barely written to the point where you wonder if writer/director E. Max Frye’s entire character description began and ended at “BLACK GUY WHO IS SORT OF LIKE WHITE GUYS.” Cage has a bit more backstory and motivation going on, which is why he’s kind of fun to watch. As soon as he’s double-crossed by the sheriff (because of course he is), the way he rolls with the punches is something damn near charming. The honest racial discussions that happen between them aren’t much more insightful than your average after-school special (don’t assume things about people based on their race, okay?), but the actors have chemistry and have some fun with what little they’re given to do.

This was Jackson’s first meaningful role after his brilliant supporting turn in Jungle Fever—unless, of course, you count Loaded Weapon 1 as a meaningful role. Things were going nowhere but up for him, what with Menace II Society, Jurassic Park, and the movie that launched him into the pop culture coolness stratosphere, Pulp Fiction, all coming within the next year of his career. Cage, on the other hand, had been mired in such a funk of weird, barely acknowledged films that his starring in back-to-back mainstream comedies like Honeymoon In Vegas and Amos & Andrew almost seemed more like a distress call to Hollywood to let everyone know that hey, Nicolas Cage is totally still alive and accepting acting work.

It’s what he makes out of these dull mainstream roles that I think helped solidify Cage as an actor worth paying attention to in the decades that followed. In Honeymoon, on paper he looked like little more than a sad-sack idiot beset by oedipal anxieties. Here, he’s just another not-so-bad criminal character, a guy who is totally scum, but the kind of likable scum that really only exists in movies. In practice, Cage turned his Honeymoon character into a screaming, facial-expressing crazy person who became the sole reason to endure the film’s atrociously hokey plot. In Amos & Andrew, his sullen charm and constantly blown-out haircut turns Amos Odell into a character almost worth actually liking, and he and Jackson combine to wring a few laughs out of a mostly moribund script.

E. Max Frye never directed another movie after Amos & Andrew, though his screenwriting career continued. The movie tanked at the box office, earning less than $10 million during its theatrical run. Evidently its skewering of racial stereotyping just wasn’t what 1993 audiences were looking for, though it’s not like it’s done much better since. It’s not a movie much talked about when discussing either the careers of Cage nor Jackson. Hell, it’s not even generally brought up when you talk about Dabney Coleman.

In this regard, perhaps “too soon” for Amos & Andrew is a misnomer. “Never” might be more reasonable.

Random Thoughts:

This movie has one of the worst titular lines of any movie ever. Jackson acknowledging that their names sound a little too close to Amos ‘n Andy is a little bit funny, though the dialogue itself is pretty forced.
The throwaway gag of the old racist white couple turning out to be BDSM enthusiasts feels very much of this movie’s time. Wasn’t this right around the same time Basic Instinct sort of introduced mainstream America to tying people up during sex (and then stabbing them, which is very optional)? It’s also around the same time Exit to Eden and the image of Rosie O’Donnell in domanatrix gear all but killed whatever boner America might have had for deviant sex for the better part of a decade.
Giancarlo Esposito plays a Jesse Jackson type character for absolutely no reason. None. Literally, all he does is show up on the island and begin shouting about how he wants to save Brother Sterling from his white captors, or something. Then he burns down Samuel L. Jackson’s house.
Loretta Divine plays Esposito’s wife. I swear that woman has not aged in 20 years.

Next Week: Deadfall

Cage Examination #15: Honeymoon In Vegas

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:44:00 -0400

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!”

In rewatching Honeymoon In Vegas last night, those two scenes have been joined by the image of Nicolas Cage shouting angrily in an airport at a clueless Ben Stein, and coining the term “airport jail” in the process. The rest of the movie? Pretty much forgotten it already.

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.

And yet, the one remarkable takeaway from seeing Honeymoon In Vegas for the purposes of this feature was that very realization. I say this in the context of the films that have recently come before it. In the early ’90s, my knowledge of all things Cage was pretty minimal. As far as I knew he’d just dropped out of sight for a few years between Moonstruck and Honeymoon, and more or less resumed the mainstream career trajectory he’d previously begun. Little did I know that for years, Cage had been ducking and weaving his way through movies like Vampire’s Kiss, Time to Kill, and Zandalee, establishing a foundation of abject insanity that made his return to relatively tame mainstream filmmaking almost inexplicable in retrospect. Lots of actors have taken strange detours and odd left turns over the course of their careers, but the through line of Cage’s career between Moonstruck and Honeymoon is jagged enough to cut glass.

So maybe I just wasn’t exactly in the right mindset upon sitting down to watch Honeymoon In Vegas again. After the general batshittery of the last five or six weeks of this feature, I’ve been almost trained at this point to expect to not understand a fucking lick of what’s happening in a Nic Cage movie. By comparison, I almost understood too much of what was happening in Honeymoon. Its script is so dully, blandly normal, that I found myself shifting in discomfort, waiting for some out-of-left-field freakout that never came.

That’s not necessarily writer/director Andrew Bergman’s fault. Bergman is a guy who has made his Hollywood career out of pulling low-key zaniness out of generally unremarkable plotlines. As a writer, Bergman has had some success with this, penning the superlative adapted script for Fletch, and co-writing the brilliant Blazing Saddles. As a writer and director, however, his success has been far more limited, with movies like the warmed-over Marlon Brando comedy The Freshman, the relatively dull future Year of the Cage entry It Could Happen to You, and the widely hated vehicle for Demi Moore’s grossly overpaid tits, Striptease, under his belt.

With this in mind, I am only willing to take a small portion of the blame for my utter disdain for watching the ill-conceived garbage that is Honeymoon In Vegas. I might not have been in the right mindset for Andrew Bergman’s brand of blandness, but the right mindset for a movie this aggressively vapid simply doesn’t exist.

Honeymoon In Vegas pretty much falls apart within the opening minutes. It opens four years prior to the events forthcoming, with Nicolas Cage coming to the hospital bedside of his dying mother (Anne Bancroft, slumming it). Rather than a simply weepy moment of sentiment, Bergman goes for something a bit darker. Cage’s mother is something of a kook, demanding that her son promise that he’ll never get married, because no woman could “love you like I do.” Before Cage can explain why he can’t agree to that, she keels over. As Cage screams to his now-dead mother that he promises never to marry, a cartoon opening credits sequence depicts Cage’s character eternally trying to climb up a wedding cake to meet the beautiful woman of his dreams, only to be repeatedly knocked back by fate, a curse, or whatever you want to call it.

This shows the promise of a movie that might have had some fun with the idea of fate/nature/God or whatever you believe in actively fucking with our hero’s love life. The idea of his unluckiness in love being the result of some kind of divine action would be infinitely more interesting than the half-assed guy fucks up/guy loses girl to other guy/guy has to win girl back scenario that plays out following those credits. That opening promise doesn’t just fail to reach it potential, it doesn’t even jive with the rest of the movie.

Instead, we’re introduced to four-years-later Cage is now working as a private detective, hunting husbands who cheat and essentially compiling a list of more reasons not to get married. This, despite being in a long-term relationship with a loving, caring, generous teacher (Parker) who is also fairly attractive and lets him play poker. Cage’s terrible experience with his mother’s death has evolved into little more than a sweaty neurosis. Marriage is something Cage hems and haws over, owing to terrible dreams he has about his mother vacuuming naked.

Parker wants a commitment. Cage is turrrrrified. Then, suddenly, he makes the spontaneous decision to go to Vegas and get married right away. Then Cage gets to Vegas and is very nervous again, making up all manner of excuses not to get married the second they set foot on Nevada soil. Instead, he delays. And because of that, his girlfriend catches the eye of another.

This another is James Caan’s Tommy Korman, a professional gambler and terribly crafted New York stereotype who just happens to be walking through the Bally’s lobby when Cage and Parker arrive. Within two minutes of Caan’s entrance, we understand that he’s a raging dick (thanks to a decent straight man performance from Tony Shaloub) and that his dead wife looks a lot like Sarah Jessica Parker. Suddenly, overwhelmingly obsessed with this woman, he hatches an absolutely cockamamie scheme to lure his new love’s boyfriend into an elaborately staged poker game.

Cage, of course, has no idea that he’s about to go up against a pro poker player, and gets in the hole deep early on. But then he gets a treasured straight flush, a nearly unbeatable hand. He drops $65,000 on this hand, assuming he’s got the nuts. Instead, he finds that his opponent also has a straight flush, and a better one at that. Because of course he does.

Now completely, irreparably borked, Cage is willing to do just about anything to fix this. This is where Caan drops his bombshell. He wants his girlfriend for the weekend. Now, bear in mind, Indecent Proposal wouldn’t be out for another year or so after Honeymoon In Vegas, so this can’t really be considered a parody of that premise. And yet, the way James Caan delivers this unseemly proposition with such cartoonishly evil flair, you’d think he was riffing on an existing concept.

Cage doesn’t wanna, but tells Parker about it anyway. Parker doesn’t wanna, but then decides she’s so pissed off at Cage that she’s going to do it, half out of spite, and half to save his dumb ass. Five minutes of screen time later, Parker and Caan are off to picturesque Hawaii, and Cage is looking around like he’s just been punched in the dick by some unseen force.

I can’t even properly verbalize how insanely quickly Parker’s character flip flops in this movie. It takes roughly an hour of conversation and Elvis impersonator watching for her to decide to jet off to Hawaii with this dude. There’s proving a point, and then there is treating your relationship with capricious disregard. Now both characters have done this, and I am racking my brain trying to grasp why it is I’m supposed to root for these two crazy kids to get together. If one will trade his lady in for a weekend for the basic equivalent of $65,000, and one is totally down to head off to a beautiful tropical island with a stinking rich old guy that wants to turn you into a dead wife sex doll, then what the hell is the point of continuing?

Oh, but continue it does. Wacky hijinks ensue when Cage comes barreling into Hawaii looking for his girl, only to be outsmarted by a vaguely racist Asian caricature (played by actual Asian Pat Morita), who drives him off to the shanty owned by a local lunatic (Peter Boyle). Then, after Rogers & Hammerstein songs are sung, Cage steals a car and goes looking for his lady. Then Caan proposes marriage, and because she’s seen all his fly houses and limos and country club memberships and whatever the fuck else, all it takes is 15 minutes of staring out at the sea longingly to decide yeah, what the hell, I’ll just go marry this other dude now.

By this point I had checked out entirely. I knew the epic, sweeping display of romance would be coming sometime after Nicolas Cage got through screaming at Ben Stein’s Slow Airport Guy in a deeply cathartic way, but I didn’t want to see it anymore. I knew what it was going to be when Cage found himself introduced to the Flying Elvises, and I didn’t care. Not even the promise of Nicolas Cage parachuting onto the strip in full Elvis regalia could get me to care about these two wretched people falling back in love. Hell, I didn’t even react to seeing Sarah Jessica Parker in a showgirl costume for whatever reason.

I hated Honeymoon In Vegas for the same reasons I hate most other generic romantic comedies. It’s insipidly written, directed in painfully broad strokes, and features no characters actually falling in love with. It’s the very definition of a bad romantic comedy, and that’s what makes it so damn fascinating at this point in Cage’s career. After multiple years of doing the weirdest shit imaginable, suddenly, he’s back on Hollywood’s beaten path. What happened? What sent the dude into such a deep, dark hole for those Vampire’s Kiss years? And how did he end up back in the mainstream, his career seemingly still intact?

It demonstrates a resilience that we’re going to be seeing a lot more as this feature going on. It’s perhaps the first true proof we can point to showing that no number of bizarre career choices and poorly received films can destroy Nicolas Cage’s brand. He can bebop his way through years, literally years, of Kafka-esque vampire comedies, grotesque overseas productions and bargain basement action schlock, and then when he does decide to go mainstream again, Hollywood welcomes him back with open arms. This is something to keep in mind, especially as we get into the later years of his career.

Ultimately, yes, Honeymoon In Vegas is a terrible movie, but it earns its place in the worthy Cage canon simply by virtue of being something of a return to form, and the first one, at that. For this reason, it’s worth seeing for true Cage fans at least once, if only to see him scream the words “AIRPORT JAIL.”

Random Thoughts:

I haven’t really discussed Cage’s individual performance a ton here, and it deserves some attention. There’s nothing particularly traditional about his portrayal of the distressed boyfriend. He’s hysterically angry and flustered at every turn, prone to typically Cage-ian outbursts of rage. As you can see from the shots I’ve included above, this movie is like a Nicolas Cage facial expression smorgasbord.
I still can’t believe this movie is being turned into a Broadway musical. However, I can totally believe that Tony Danza is taking over the Jimmy Caan role, because Caan really is Tony Danza terrible in this movie.
This movie is super racist to Asian people. From the constant mockery of the “Oriental Elvis” characters (that’s from the credits) to Pat Morita’s entire tenure during this film, it’s pretty clear that Andrew Bergman thinks Asian people are hiiiilaaaaaarious.
There is a five year old boy who plays an Elvis impersonator in this movie, and that boy Elvis was Bruno Mars. The more you know, you know?
Honeymoon In Vegas displays the wispiest example of Nicolas Cage’s hair evolution yet. Get ready for a lot of that going forward.

Next Week: Amos & Andrew

Cage Examination #14: Zandalee

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:20:00 -0400

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.

The closest association I can draw for Zandalee to any other movie, contemporary or otherwise, is Color of Night, the barely-remembered Bruce Willis-fronted erotic disaster from noted ’60s schlock-peddler Richard Rush. I watched Color of Night several times throughout my adolescence, though I honestly couldn’t remember much of anything about it except that it had a severely convoluted serial killer plot, featured lead actress Jane March in various states of undress for roughly 120 of its 121 minutes, and also gave the world its first, all-too-brief look at Bruce Willis’ dong.

Color of Night is a bizarre, inexplicable blip on Bruce Willis’ career radar, remembered only for its breathlessly melodramatic and astonishingly inept attempts at eroticism than anything else. Zandalee is essentially the same deal for Nicolas Cage, though considering the last few entries in this series, perhaps his involvement is less inexplicable.

Zandalee is the last major piece to the puzzle of Nicolas Cage’s post-Moonstruck weirdness. Not that there aren’t other weird movies coming down the pipes, but Zandalee is the last entry for a while that left me to ponder whether Nicolas Cage really wanted to be an actor any longer, or was actively going through a brutal streak of self-sabotage designed to end his career.

He certainly would have gone out with a bang. As Johnny Collins, the scumbag childhood friend of Judge Reinhold’s Thierry Martin—oh, did I forget to mention that Judge fucking Reinhold is in this erotic thriller?—Cage is something altogether grotesque. He’s an artist in the most vain sense of the word. He’s really just a guy who paints, does cocaine, and is an insatiable, borderline psychotic poon hound.

Before we meet Johnny, however, we’re introduced to the city of New Orleans, where all this debauchery takes place. In New Orleans resides Thierry and his hot (trophy?) wife, Zandalee, played by former minor radio personality and Nightmare on Elm Street blade-fodder Erika Andersen. Sporting a great early ’90s perm and a bush you could hide a Buick in, Zandalee is an object to be ogled from the movie’s opening minutes. She literally spends the earliest portions of the film dancing around naked for no particularly good reason. The implication, perhaps, is that she’s trying to entice her husband, a former poet (yes, really) turned cable company executive (yes, really) who’s head hasn’t been, erm, shall we say, in the game of late.

Ah, but Thierry is not to be enticed this evening. He’s off to some kind of stag party/lodge-meeting/sex club—wearing a goddamned fez, no less—and has no time for his wife’s sexual come-hitherings. At said party, where men liberally indulge in whipped-cream-on-boob lappings the way children dive head-first for the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese, Cage’s Johnny mysteriously appears, and immediately makes a beeline for a woman’s vagina. Not even kidding. The second Nicolas Cage walks in the door, his face goes straight to a stripper’s lady bits. Somewhere in there, it is established that Thierry and Johnny grew up together, but to be honest I may have missed this, as I was still reeling from the deftness with which Cage’s face found its way into some random lady’s presumably damp trim.

Naturally, given Johnny’s obvious reputability, Thierry brings this notorious pussy magnet home to meet his sexually frustrated wife. The small-talk they make is the kind of stuff that would make a first-year Red Shoe Diaries writer blush in embarrassment. All Johnny seems capable of is tactless description of he and Thierry’s former sexual exploits, laid out in terminology most befitting a deeply frustrated longshoreman. Zandalee is, of course, repulsed by this. Or, at least, I assume she is. Anderson’s face is so frozen throughout the movie—an expression that mixes equal measures of desperate fear and that face women in late ’80s softcore porn movies would make when they wanted to look “classy” sexy—that it’s hard to get an exact read on what her character is feeling. You generally have to parse it out by the subtle shifts in tone in her voice, which range between “sarcastic disgust” and “disgusted arousal.”

It’s not long after that Johnny is suddenly around all the time. He’s painting Thierry’s portrait, he’s working for Thierry’s cable company, and he’s hanging around the house at pretty much all times that don’t involve Thierry and Zandalee making futile attempts at sex. I can scarcely describe the visual of Judge Reinhold, decked out in a hair and mustache combo that seems more appropriate for a WWF mid-carder from 1985, feigning frustration with his inability to have sex with a woman who is portrayed as little more than a sex doll with dialogue. That one of those scenes ends with said sex doll masturbating in front of her husband while crying is probably the best summation of Zandalee on a whole—it’s maybe sort of hot, until it’s really, really not.

Unsurprisingly, all that pent up sexual frustration leads to a sexual awakening, of sorts, once Johnny decides the time has come to force himself on her. No, this isn’t a rape situation, like in Time to Kill. It starts out that way, maybe, but suddenly Zandalee is very, very into it. Apparently the sexual appeal of Nicolas Cage wearing a greasy wig and sporting Captain Morgan’s facial hair, coupled with grotesque come-ons like “I wanna shake you naked and eat you alive,” was all Zandalee needed to drop her shields, and suddenly they’re banging in that wonderfully melodramatic way that only sex scenes from the early ’90s could be. It’s thrusty, poundy, angry looking sex made all the more ridiculous by the abundance of Nicolas Cage’s ass on screen. Nicolas Cage’s ass is the Bruce Willis’ dong of Zandalee. It’s not even that it’s there all that often, but when it is, it’s so jarring and in your face that it essentially becomes a part of you for eternity.

All of this scuzzy, behind-Thierry’s-back humpery naturally doesn’t sit well with Zandalee, who seems to genuinely love her husband, despite the fact that he’s a failed poet who looks like Judge Reinhold and sounds like Tennessee Williams by way of Foghorn Leghorn. She moans about her frustrations mostly to her boss at the consignment store she periodically decides to do work at, a cross-dresser played by Joe Pantoliano.

Wait, let me back up a second. Did I forget to mention earlier that Joe Pantoliano is in this movie? As a cross-dresser? Not a transsexual, mind you. Just Joe Pantoliano in a dress. So, yeah, there’s that.

All of this comes to a head during a dinner party in which Thierry’s mother (grandmother?) shows up and introduces her longtime lover, who is hilariously played by the actor who would go on to star as Mr. Pitt on Seinfeld. That’s the really odd thing about Zandalee. I mean, wait, okay, that’s completely inaccurate. What I should say is that this is the most bizarre thing among Zandalee’s many bizarre things. Most torrid affairs in films are designed to be guilt-ridden episodes, aimed at making you hate the cheater and empathize with the cheated-on. Zandalee, either on purpose or not, flips this convention on its head.

Its only intentional aspect of this is the (grand)mother, who goes out of her way to tell Zandalee that it’s okay that she’s taken a lover and is cheating on her own (grand)son. She confesses to having been in an affair for decades with this man, and seems totally fine with Zandalee getting hers wherever she can. The unintentional side of this is that Judge Reinhold as Thierry is so cartoonishly dumb and unremarkable in every way, that you can totally understand why this woman would seek her sexual kicks elsewhere.

It’s that she seeks those kicks with Johnny that ultimately makes her just as unpleasant and unsympathetic as everyone else in the movie. There is nothing alluring about Cage’s performance. No ounce of him exudes sex, at least in the traditional sense. His cringe-worthy gyrations and hissing dialogue put him squarely in that realm almost exclusively occupied by “pick-up artists” like that Mystery dude, and maybe with a little Criss Angel sprinkled on top. Yes, he even does magic tricks during one scene, just to hammer that whole thing home.

From that dinner party, in which Johnny decides to make decidedly painful looking love to Zandalee in the laundry room while everybody else is eating, Thierry somehow deduces that his best friend and his wife are banging. It’s not long after this that Johnny decides he wants Zandalee to leave her husband and come away with him to live his cocaine-addled artist’s lifestyle, or whatever. Zandalee is not fond of this idea, instead deciding to go away with her husband to try and make things work. Their idea of a romantic getaway? A trip out to the swamp to go boating, of course!

And naturally, Johnny follows after them, once again explaining his desire for Zandalee to come with him, without actually saying that in front of Thierry. What comes after this involves any number of incredibly hokey major character deaths, and yet compared to what happens immediately after Thierry and Johnny meet again on the docks of a swamp-side restaurant, pretty much anything and everything that follows is ultimately negated by comparison. The movie might as well have ended with this scene I’ve embedded below. It comes exactly as out of nowhere as this YouTube clip implies, and ends just as abruptly.

I mean, what?

I don’t know that there is any context for this, or anything else that happens in Zandalee. Its writer is a woman whose credits don’t extend much beyond this movie and a single episode of Treme (which I can only assume has to be the most insane episode of Treme ever conceived), and its director, Sam Pillsbury, took a sharp left turn in his following films, mostly sticking to direct-to-video family fare like the third Free Willy movie and the remake of Where the Red Fern Grows that starred Dave Matthews. Knowing so little about these people gives me no understanding of where any of these ideas spawned from. It certainly isn’t from genuine New Orleans life. Compared to the reality of New Orelans, even back in 1991, Zandalee’s representation looks like a crude, animatronic realization designed exclusively for orgy enthusiasts.

Of course, for as godawful as Zandalee is, it’s also hysterical. It belongs in that echelon of Nicolas Cage films that includes Vampire’s Kiss, Deadfall, and The Wicker Man. Cage’s sliminess and frequent nakedness from this movie is stuff of legends, the kind of histrionic-laden ludicrousness that makes the character’s smarmy undercurrent all the more skin-crawling. Cage’s Johnny Collins isn’t just unpleasant; he’s sociopathic.

On this merit, and this merit alone, Zandalee demands to be seen. It’s movies like Zandalee that warped the sexual desires of millions of pre-teens from my generation, as they sat, glued to their TVs late at night, illicitly watching HBO or Cinemax and drinking in the gloriously bizarre portrayals of desire and betrayal that barely masked the pornographic raison d’etre underneath. Cage as Johnny Collins is, simply put, one of the most memorably wretched characters to come from a genre largely predicated on wretched characters fucking each other for 90-or-so minutes. And even if you have no particular desire to watch Nicolas Cage have sex with anything, let alone a bony former Freddy Kruger victim with a fondness for exhibitionism, it’s hard to argue with any movie that offers up delectable Cage-ian treats like this.

Random Thoughts:

In a bizarre twist that my girlfriend has still been reeling over since we watched the movie this past weekend, Judge Reinhold not only stars in Zandalee, but produced it. The guy who played Billy Rosewood believed so much in Zandalee that he helped finance it. That’s…well, I don’t know what that is.
Erika Anderson eventually went on to fulfill the destiny of the many other nude actresses of the era, eventually starring in episodes of Red Shoe Diaries and Silk Stockings. As I have not followed her subsequent roles too closely, I sadly cannot say whether her gigantic plume of pubic hair survived beyond Zandalee.
Steve Buscemi has an altogether random role as a soothsaying convict who periodically shows up to impart wisdom on Zandalee, and Marissa Tomei plays Johnny’s high-voiced girlfriend, which is maybe a little bit of a pre-cursor to her My Cousin Vinny performance. I’m pretty sure Patricia Arquette has an uncredited role as a bar patron as well.
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a movie more hostile toward men suffering from impotence than Zandalee. The fact that Thierry’s own motherladyperson endorses Zandalee getting her dick fix elsewhere shows you exactly how unsympathetic the writer was toward those who can’t get it up. It’s brutal.
If you’re looking for further reading, Nathan Rabin’s My Year of Flops series covered Zandalee a couple of years back. His introduction of “The Great Gazoo Theory” to explain away the trajectory of Cage’s career for these last several entries is intriguing, and deserves further study.
If you’re interested in further listening, the We Hate Movies podcast did Zandalee earlier this year. They leave no stone unturned, including the ones you’d really wish they’d leave unturned. Good for them.

Next Week: Honeymoon In Vegas

Cage Examination #13: Wild At Heart

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 16:37:00 -0400

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.

It’s not just those Lynchian touches—the weird tangents and asides that seem completely ancillary to what’s actually happening in the movie, the strangely earnest dialogue, the uncomfortable moments of uncensored sexuality—that make Wild At Heart so bizarre. The source material, a novel by Barry Gifford, is odd enough in its own right, but ultimately is a fairly straightforward tale of young people in love, young people who can’t be tamed by the rigid horrors of society’s rigidness, people who are, “wild at heart.” It’s the filtering of that somewhat strange, yet ultimately straightforward material through the lens of Lynchian batshittery that turns this riff on the usual Bonnie and Clyde tale into something transcendentally memorable.

I say memorable, though that does not translate into “good,” necessarily. I’ll admit I am not David Lynch’s biggest fan. I find his films exhausting to sit through, even in their most mundane moments. I appreciate a director who can challenge me as I watch their films, but Lynch goes beyond merely challenging. His movies exist in a realm impenetrable to anyone that isn’t David Lynch and his closest collaborators. I’ve had plenty of people tell me that they “get” Lynch’s movies—usually they’re film school folk, I might add—but I contend that no matter how much you might think you “get” a David Lynch movie, you’re probably nowhere near whatever this crazy man intended.

In this regard, I will at least give Wild At Heart credit for being one of the more parsable of Lynch’s catalog, perhaps only behind the director’s most parsable film, the shockingly un-weird Straight Story. It’s probably due in no small part to Lynch’s general sticking-to of the source material, which again tells a not altogether strange tale of two young 20-somethings named Sailor (Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern) who are oh so very in love, despite Sailor’s periodic incarcerations, and Lula’s overbearingly psychotic mother (Dunn’s real life mother, Diane Ladd).

The recklessness and passion of Sailor and Lula’s love seems immediately capable of defeating all obstacles that might come before it. Early on, Sailor finds himself in prison after a strange man tries to kill him in a crowded dance hall, and Sailor reacts by killing him with his bare hands. Literally. He caves in his skull on a marble floor. It’s kind of gross.

A little thing like manslaughter charges might break up less committed couples. In the case of Sailor and Lula, it only strengthens their resolve. It similarly strengthens the resolve of Lula’s mother, whose hatred of Sailor is so absolute, so skull-bakingly heated, that every time the guy’s name comes up, you half expect steam to start literally shooting out of her ears.

Knowing all of this, it is perhaps unsurprising that upon Sailor’s release, the pair decide to run away to California together, a fact that does not exactly leave Lula’s mother feeling particularly calm. Not only does she entice her boyfriend (new husband?) Johnnie (Harry Dean Stanton) to chase after the pair, she even goes to a dangerous mobster, whose alliance with her is never quite explained, save for a few allusions to a bigger mobster they’re all involved with named Mr. Reindeer. Yeah, it’s one of those movies.

For a long time, Sailor and Lula aren’t aware that there are bad guys hot on their trail. Instead, they take in the scenery around them, moving from a brief stop in New Orleans to the rural hinterland of Texas. During this time, they spend minutes upon minutes of screen time musing about their past lives, commenting on the brutal, dystopic world around them, and engaging in bout after bout of particularly rough sex. I am not overselling this element of the movie by any stretch. There is a lot of sex, much of it featuring topless Laura Dern. Tragically, there is no equivalent nudity for the Nicolas Cage faithful out there. Sorry.

To go any further into recap territory would just make this piece stretch on for something like a billion more words. There is too much going on in Wild At Heart to properly capture via text write-up. To actually explain such things as Willem Dafoe’s comically disturbing thug character Bobby Peru, the purpose of Harry Dean Stanton’s character (or the voodoo priestess and her crew who end up murdering him in particularly orgasmic fashion), why exactly Lula’s mother is so Mommy Dearest-level insane, or why elements of The Wizard of Oz so thoroughly permeate every element of Wild At Heart’s plot would simply take too much time to do proper justice. There is probably an entire essay series just to be written about this film alone.

But that’s not what Year of the Cage is. The goal of this series—assuming there really is one—is to look at each film in the context of Nicolas Cage’s career. Bearing this in mind, Wild At Heart is not an especially surprising choice for Cage given what’s come previous, but it certainly comes with its own set of peculiarities.

By the time Wild At Heart came out in 1990, you would have been forgiven for thinking that Cage’s career was on the verge of fizzling out. Since his time in the Oscar-nominated Moonstruck, he seemingly went so far out of his way to play characters that were the antithesis of that well-meaning, romantically appealing fellow, that his career had all but wandered off the grid altogether. While it’s no doubt amusing to look back at movies like Vampire’s Kiss, Time to Kill, and Fire Birds now, knowing what we do of the actor’s career some 20+ years later, at the time, it must have looked like Cage was mired in some suicidal act of career sabotage.

In all of those films, Cage played rather awful men. Some, like Fire Birds’ Jake Preston, were perhaps initially meant to be sympathetic characters, but through some combination of terrible screenwriting and Cage’s rather deliberately smug performance, became unbearable in execution. Others, like Vampire’s Kiss’ Peter Loew, are grotesque from the word go, and clearly not meant to be liked in any way, shape, or form.

For three straight years, Cage indulged in roles that were utterly unlikable. Sailor marks his return to being a likable guy on film. Flawed, certainly, what with his criminal history and somewhat regrettable temper. But seeing him and Lula together, any misgivings you may have about him totally dissolve. They are of the rare breed of seemingly doomed movie couple that are not designed to be disliked for one reason or another. Their love is absolutely, idyllically perfect.

In the making-of feature included on the Wild At Heart DVD, someone mentions that this is because the two characters treat each other as equals. At no point does Sailor talk down to Lula like he’s somehow got a better grip on things than she does, or vice versa. They’re a team from the outset, and save for a few wrinkles in the plot, their partnership is never really in question.

I attribute the selling of this more to Dern than I do Cage, though Cage is certainly quite good here. Dern takes a character that initially seems vacant and unsure of herself and slowly but surely shows us layer upon layer of how confident and assured she truly is. Cage’s Sailor is not nearly as multifaceted. His performance is meant to directly mimic the vocal inflection and overall style of Elvis Presley, and he never quite breaks out of that mold he wraps himself in. You learn a bit more about Sailor as the movie goes on, but you never really understand him beyond the notion that he’s a good guy with a few significant character issues.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t plenty of good Cage-ian moments spread throughout Wild At Heart. He shouts nonsense for no reason several times, bursts into renditions of Elvis songs on a couple of different occasions (once by stopping a death metal band mid-song and having them play backup on “Love Me”) and even finds a good opportunity to do a front flip out of a convertible to join Dern in the middle of a field and slam dance to even more metal music. Those moments are plenty great, but when you’re surrounded by things like Willem Dafoe with gruesome fake teeth sneeringly repeating the words “Fuck me…” over and over in a skin-crawling whisper, Diane Ladd smearing her face entirely with red lipstick, and Glenda the Good Witch literally floating down from the fucking sky, everything Cage does in this movie seems rather tame by comparison.

Regardless, Wild At Heart is required viewing for any true Cage fan. As completely ludicrous as it may be, it nonetheless represents Cage’s return to the path of Hollywood stardom, acting in a film from a major director that received much acclaim from various award bodies, including the Palm D’or at Cannes. For the next several entries, we’ll be entering one of the most tumultuous and bizarre periods of Cage’s career, one marked by as many mainstream Hollywood successes as it is by colossal and bizarre failures. And it all begins with Wild At Heart.

Buckle up folks. It’s going to be a bumpy ride from here on out.

Random Thoughts:

Maybe someone else has already written an essay about this very subject, but I was struck immediately by how much Wild At Heart feels like a precursor to films like Natural Born Killers, True Romance, and even certain elements of Pulp Fiction. I have no idea if directors like Quentin Tarantino or Oliver Stone would ever cite Wild At Heart as any kind of influence, nor would I presume to say that Wild At Heart is in some way a genre-definer, as it pretty much just does an especially weird take on the archetypal Bonnie and Clyde story. But the whole time I was watching Wild At Heart, I couldn’t help but think that with a few changed details here and there, I could just as easily be watching Mickey and Mallory, or Clarence and Alabama.
It’s perhaps a testament to how truly out-there Wild At Heart actually is that I never even got around to mentioning the performances of Isabella Rossellini nor Crispin Glover. When the amount of weirdness you have to describe precludes you from mentioning performances by such preternaturally weird actors as those, you know you’re in for one seriously bonkers ride.
The snakeskin jacket that Cage wears through most of Wild At Heart was from his own wardrobe. I cannot tell you how much I truly love that fact.
It was also Cage’s idea to go “full Elvis” for the role of Sailor. Lynch had suggested Elvis as a character influence, but it was Cage who went bananas with the idea.
Laura Dern in Wild At Heart so closely resembles an ex-girlfriend of mine that it made the multiple sex scenes roughly a gajilliondy times more uncomfortable for me than was likely even intended. I imagine it was even more so for my current girlfriend as she watched alongside me, as I kind of wouldn’t shut up about it. I couldn’t help it! It’s fucking uncanny!

Next Week: Zandalee

Cage Examination #12: Fire Birds

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:09:00 -0400

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.

Then again, some of that likely has to do with the fact that Fire Birds is very much of the ilk that encompassed the entire direct-to-video market that blossomed during the ‘90s. Cheapy action flicks with, at best, moderate star power and scripts culled from the dumpster behind a decrepit cliche factory were what fueled the home video market for ages. So knowing this going in, it was tough to reconcile that a movie this shitty actually came out in theaters.

But it did, with Nicolas Cage, a young (yet still fairly old-looking) Tommy Lee Jones, and a just about used-up Sean Young headlining the thing. The director? David Green, a man who you likely have never heard of, given that the most noteworthy projects of his career were this movie, and the 1988 British comedy Buster, which starred Phil Collins. Yes, that Phil Collins.

All this great talent found itself working with a premise that felt a little bit like a bizarre precursor to Tom Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger. Opening with a brief text preamble featuring George Bush’s proclamation that we, the United States, would militarily aid any country looking to rid of itself of drug cartels and their giant armies of dudes in helicopters. Okay, so I added that last bit. George Bush never mentioned helicopters, specifically. That was apparently a liberty taken by the screenwriters.

With that opening premise established, we find ourselves almost immediately greeted by asshole helicopter pilot Jake Preston (Cage). Preston is a cocky dick. There’s no other way to put it. He’s Maverick from Top Gun, Doug Masters from Iron Eagle, and Topper Harley from Hot Shots all rolled into one bubble-gum chewing assbag. The one key difference here being that Preston is a helicopter pilot, not a fighter pilot. I think on the military scale of bad-assness, Preston is the equivalent of that kid who got really good at rollerblading, while everyone else picked up BMX biking and skateboarding. He’s good at what he does, but also, who cares?

I say this not to demean our many talented helicopter pilots in the modern military, but look, let’s just talk about this cinematically. Fire Birds is a movie in which low-flying attack helicopters are meant to perform action sequences that at least rival the high-flying craziness of Top Gun’s jet fights. This is an impossibility. No matter how rad the Apache attack helicopter might be, it still looks like a big, lumbering doof compared to, well, just about any other machine that flies. Sequences that are supposed to be thrilling and full of expert piloting just kind of look like dudes randomly circling around each other and sometimes doing flips. These scenes are also edited in a way that makes you realize that shitty, fast-cut editing in action movies is not a recent development. David Green apparently can’t stand to see a static shot of a helicopter that goes for more than two seconds, because holy shit is the editing insanely jumpy in like every action scene.

That said, there is perhaps at least an argument to be made in favor of all the helicopter action stuff; somebody has to dig watching helicopters clumsily fight each other, right? It’s pretty much the whole rest of the movie that is inarguably terrible, from the writing to the acting to the direction to the cinematography to the…well, yeah, like I said: the rest of the movie. The plot is as hacked together as you might imagine, with a vague threat of a cartel “invasion” occurring in some unnamed South American country. The nameless, faceless cartel keeps killing off helicopters loaded with DEA agents, who are meant to help shore up the government’s forces and keep the cartel from running roughshod over everything. Because that keeps getting screwed up, a hilariously overserious General (played by frequent overserious General player Dale Dye) decides to put together a task force of Apache pilots to help take down the cartel’s lead bad guy.

That bad guy? A hysterically gruff-looking mercenary who flies a customized attack helicopter and is really good at killing people with it. Yes, he’s a helicopter murderer. He murders people with a helicopter.

It’s ludicrous stuff, the kind of thing you’d expect to see as a throwaway boss fight from some 16-bit action video game, but Fire Birds runs buck wild with this premise—or, at least, it does a couple of times in the movie. The rest of the film’s run time is spent pushing through a wall of military movie cliches meant to get Nicolas Cage from a highly talented asshole to a more highly talented slightly less asshole who can also fly Apache helicopters. Because he apparently has a lot of moxy or something, the general assigns the Apache-untrained Cage to the task force, and has the no-shit-taking Captain Brad Little (Jones) get the man up to speed on the new-fangled technology. While this is all going on, we also meet scout pilot Billie Lee Guthrie (Young), a woman with whom Preston apparently has some history with, though we never get a particularly clear picture of what, exactly, that history was. One is left to assume they were probably boning at some previous juncture.

It’s all a hacky enough premise on its own, but it becomes even more unbearably stupid when you realize that this is pretty much all Fire Birds is. There are maybe two or three honest-to-god helicopter battles in the movie. The rest of the time? We see Cage both fumbling with learning how to fly using the Apache’s specialized eye targeting computer system things (he has an eye-dominance problem!) and fumbling miserably through pseudo-romantic dialogue with Young that sounds like it was written by a prison rapist. Practically every single thing Cage says to Young throughout the course of Fire Birds is slathered in so much innuendo you’d think he’d moonlighted as a strip club DJ at some point in his life.

I’ve talked a lot about shitty dialogue in movies over the years, but Fire Birds may actually contain the shittiest dialogue of any mainstream movie I’ve ever seen. Granted, it doesn’t help that neither Cage nor Young seem particularly game to deliver these god awful lines with the kind of enthusiasm the writers seemingly intended. Cage is downright morose through most of this movie, apparently unaware that cockiness and flat-out disinterest are not the same thing. He’s unbearably dickish from start to finish, and never, ever finds a way to make you care about a single thing Jake Preston does.

Young fares even worse. Granted, by the time 1990 rolled around, the world had pretty much gotten what it needed from Young as an actress, leaving her to flounder for a few years until Ace Ventura almost accidentally rebooted her career. In Fire Birds, Young is just atrocious all around. She speaks robotically, never alters her facial expression, and sports a look that seems directly modeled after Sigourney Weaver in much of Aliens, right down to the poofy, curly hair and distinct lack of a bra underneath her tank-tops. Let’s just say it’s not a look she pulls off. It’s as if the filmmakers went as far out of their way as humanly possibly to make a fairly attractive woman look as homely and unappealing as could be.

Hilariously, it’s Tommy Lee Jones that manages to skate by looking relatively favorably after all of this. Jones is rather notorious for kind of not giving a shit about bad movies he’s in, but considering that all he has to do is play Tommy Lee Jones in most movies, he usually squeaks by purely on the merit of being Tommy Lee Jones. Fire Birds is probably the earliest example of this. As Brad Little, he’s almost an exact predecessor to his iconic role in The Fugitive. It’s the same drawling sarcasm that made Samuel Gerard so completely endearing—just in a way less interesting movie.

So yes, Fire Birds is pretty much a disaster from top to bottom. The action is incompetently directed, the actors seem relatively irritated to even be there, and the script is little more than a lazy excuse to get some helicopters shooting each other on screen, yet can’t even manage to get enough of that going to justify the movie’s existence. Instead we spend an aching amount of time following Cage as he tries to overcome his eye-dominance issue (it’s actually insane how much screen time is dedicated to this process) and having really awkward movie sex with a Sean Young who might as well be doped up on quaaludes.

Of all the ways to kick off a career as an action movie star, Fire Birds seems particularly inauspicious. Granted, a great deal of that feeling comes from knowing how Cage’s career progressed from here. With that gift of foreknowledge, Fire Birds is little more than a strange introduction to Nicolas Cage: Action Superstar. Had I seen Fire Birds back in 1990, I’d have all but written off any potential at a career in action flicks. Yes, this is a career-killingly bad movie. Shockingly, it didn’t actually kill any careers that I’m aware of (though David Green never really did go on to direct much of anything worth mentioning). Cage’s stock only rose from this point on, as did Jones’. As for Sean Young? Well, you can’t kill that which is already dead, right?

Random Thoughts:

I’m sure I’ll catch some flack from helicopter enthusiasts for bad-mouthing helicopter action stuff, but I assure you this movie does helicopters no favors. I’d rather have watched Nicolas Cage learn to pilot a military-grade hang glider.
I just can’t get over the idea of a dude who murders people with a helicopter. HE MURDERS PEOPLE WITH A HELICOPTER. That is the best/worst/best again idea for a bad guy in the history of ever.
I have no idea why, but someone on YouTube edited together a “Cage cut” of only Nicolas Cage dialogue bits from Fire Birds. God bless the Internet and its abundance of free time.

Next Week: Wild At Heart

Cage Examination #11: Tempo di uccidere (Time to Kill)

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400

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.

Crazy, right? What’s even crazier is that, syntax aside, this is an incredibly accurate description of what Tempo di uccidere—heretofore referred to as Time to Kill—actually is.

Every plot point in Time to Kill is delivered precisely as capriciously as that description makes it sound. Things in Time to Kill don’t so much happen on a natural timeline so much as they appear long enough to deliver whatever director Giuliano Montaldo thinks is the emotional point of the scene, before disappearing into the ether of incompetent editing. Nearly the entire hundred or so minute length of Time to Kill can be described as a long series of middles of scenes strung together, with the beginnings and endings either cut off and tossed away, or never filmed to begin with. It’s like a really long supercut of a presumably multiple times longer movie about the Italian war in Ethiopia, circa 1936—except they released the supercut instead of the actual movie.

Early on, this weirdness is tempered mostly by the movie’s overbearingly grim tone regarding that little-addressed war, in which Italy invaded the company of Ethiopia and found itself fighting rebel forces. Nicolas Cage plays Lieutenant Enrico Silvestri, a sour-faced, somewhat inscrutable man who initially, we only learn about from the heavy-handed, overly literary narration of his best friend, a sergeant played by Ricky Tognazzi. We meet both these characters in the barracks of a nameless Italian base somewhere near Ethiopia’s coast. Cage, apparently bothered by a horrendous tooth ache, is off at the crack of dawn to get to the nearby town and find a dentist. His buddy chides him for leaving so early, given that the whole unit is apparently heading to town several hours later, but Cage doesn’t even acknowledge it. He is a laser guided missile aimed squarely at a dentist’s office, apparently.

Somewhere along the way, Cage disappears for the entirety of the day. The bumbling soldier who had been tasked with driving him to town wrecked their truck in a moment of supposed-to-be-comedy, and Cage, completely unfazed by the whole thing, decided to hoof it to a nearby construction site to see if a military doctor might be hanging around. We only find out about this as the driver relays the story to Tognazzi, who is left to wait back at the base for his friend to return. After 24 hours or so, he shows back up, seemingly no worse for the wear. But as it turns out, he has a Very Dark Secret he immediately wants to tell Tognazzi about. But first they have to go to the barracks, where Cage can relay the story in a darkened room while smoking perpetually so as to affect the proper atmosphere for relaying a Very Dark Secret.

So, about that whole rape thing… As weird as it sounds in that IMDB description, it’s even more oddly placed within the context of the movie. Unable to find a doctor and aware that he needs to get back to base, Cage takes a rural path through a valley and after much hiking, stumbles upon a small waterfall, and a woman (Patrice-Flora Praxo) bathing in the river. This very nubile young Ethiopian woman is initially little more than someone who can maybe point Cage toward the correct path, but within what feels like seconds, Cage is tearing off her robe, pressing her to the ground, and making sweet, rapey love to her the way only Nicolas Cage can. Wait, that came out wrong. But you know what? So did this scene, so whatever. We’ll just go with it.

Apparently not well-versed in the heralded traditions surrounding the rape of a native person, Cage fumbles a bit for a way to appease the woman, who herself seems altogether bewildered by the experience, though not terribly angry. He offers her money, which she turns down, presumably because the Italian lira hasn’t become the official currency of the country yet. He then offers her his old, broken watch, which she is delighted to take. How, exactly, he gets from this moment to the next is somewhat unclear in my mind, but I do recall they have consensual sex at least once more outdoors, and then she takes him to some out-of-the-way cave, where they have consensual sex again, this time even more lovingly than the last.

And then he accidentally kills her while trying to shoot a hyena.

Look, I don’t know either, okay? It’s worth noting that all of this takes place probably within the opening half hour of the movie, over less than 24 hours of movie time. Within that narrow space, he managed to meet a woman, rape her, make her his lover, then accidentally shoot her in the stomach. None of this is handled with anything even resembling patience or care. Clearly the only stuff Montaldo took his time with was with the long, lustful shots of Cage eyeing the poor girl, both before and after the whole rape thing. From there, it’s like one of those binge drinking benders where you lose major chunks of time, and only remember the most horrible, awkward pieces.

And this isn’t even the height of Time to Kill’s ridiculousness. Once he’s buried her body (and retrieved his watch, because it would just be ridiculous for him to leave it behind) and returned home, minutes barely pass before suddenly, he’s gripped with the fear that he may have inadvertently boned a leper. Yes, leprosy was a problem back in those times, and those afflicted with the disease often dressed in robes and headwear similar to what the poor girl was wearing. Worse still, a cut on Cage’s hand was still fresh when he touched her bleeding stomach. And all this just as the Lieutenant is awarded his papers granting him furlough back to Italy. It’s like the darkest, most twisted sitcom plot in the history of man.

The exasperating nature of that plot is made even more so by the fact that the script never exactly feels it necessary to throw any actual roadblocks at Cage’s character. He’s terrified that he has leprosy and that he’ll be discovered by the military and sent to a leper colony, but the way he goes about dealing with that is the most absurd thing you have ever witnessed. When he wants to try and debunk the possibility of infection, he approaches a military doctor while keeping his hand shoved in his pocket like he’s very clearly hiding his wound. He proceeds to ask the doctor questions from the perspective of a protagonist in a novel he’s supposedly writing, and the doctor obliges, probably very well aware that he’s talking about himself. The doctor makes no offensive overtures toward him, nor does he appear that he’d be likely to turn himself in. And yet the second he turns his back, Cage draws his gun and gathers the nerve to shoot, only he misses him, and instead runs off.

Elsewhere, Cage is trying to get aboard his ship bound for Italy, but can’t get there without getting a stamp of approval from the guard working a nearby checkpoint. At no point does anyone do anything to make Cage assume that he is being tracked, or that the military is even demanding medical checks for those about to get on the boat. And yet he flips out and runs off into the night, sleeping in a nearby ditch and missing his boat. He then concocts an elaborate scheme meant to get him on board another ship as a stowaway, but that plan requires 30,000 lire to be paid to a smuggler. So, to do that, he has to rob a corrupt Major (Giancarlo Giannini), which he does via one of the more ludicrously overwrought stick-up scenes I’ve ever witnessed. And then he somehow ends up in the village of the girl he killed, being taken care of by her wise old father. No, I really don’t know how he got there, but sincerely, within maybe three minutes of screen time of having robbed a dude, he’s shoeless, bearded, and desperately trying to make things right with this poor father, who initially has no idea that Cage has killed his daughter.

That is the staple of Time to Kill as a movie. It is defined almost solely by its desperate grabs for wartime drama, and outright refusal to actually allow any of its characters to experience any of those dramatic moments without being shoved there forcefully by the writers. Whatever build-up a normal movie might go through in order to get a character from point A to B is excised in favor of all of the points all of the time. He’s angry! He’s raping! He’s mournful! He’s got leprosy, probably! He’s gonna rob a guy! He’s repentant! And suddenly, everything’s okay again.

Yes, somehow, some way, Time to Kill wraps up its deeply deranged tale with a nice, neat bow, in which Cage gets away scot-free. Both Cage and Tognazzi end up on a boat home, Cage apparently cured of his injuries and having learned that the girl actually didn’t have leprosy. For no reason I can fathom other than he needed it to match his stock footage of Italian troops getting on a boat, Montaldo shifts the movie’s final scenes into black and white, and proceeds to let Cage glibly state for the record that he’s feeling great and ready to get back to Italy and to his wife (oh, yeah, he’s married, by the way). And then we get a bit of pseudo-poetic narration from Tognazzi’s character about how he never saw Cage again, and something about the horrors of war, and then the movie just kind of ends.

I realize this week’s entry has read perhaps a bit more like a full-on recap of the movie than a proper essay, but I don’t really know what else to do with Time to Kill. The movie is such a minor blip on Cage’s career radar that to try and assess its overall value within that context is like trying to assign value to a smudge on a giant stained glass window. Cage hasn’t really spoken about the movie anywhere that I’ve been able to find, and seems perfectly happy to just forget he was ever a part of it.

And with good reason. Time to Kill is a dreadfully inept piece of filmmaking, the kind of thing that, had anyone been aware of it, probably would have become fodder for an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Yes, it’s Gene Hackman in Space Travelers bad. It’s Robert Vaughn in Hangar 18 bad. It’s Raul Julia in Overdrawn at the Memory Bank bad.

And no amount of Nicolas Cage shouting and gesticulating and raping can make that any less true. He’s completely indifferent to the movie he’s in, perhaps utterly aware that he has no good reason to be there. His fellow actors aren’t much better, with only Giannini bothering to have any fun with a completely idiotic role. His few bits of narration are spit out with all the enthusiasm of a man who actually has leprosy, reading less as the prose of a haunted man than the regurgitated leftovers of every other self-important war movie of the era. Time to Kill aims for a vibe that is perhaps something like a cross between Platoon and Out of Africa, but instead plays more like unenthusiastic parody. It’s atrocious from top to bottom, making it no wonder that nobody would ever go to the trouble of trying to dig this piece of shit up from the cinematic scrap heap. Everybody involved seems dead-set on forgetting that Time to Kill ever happened. I can only hope that, by some miracle of chance, I’ll have the opportunity to forget it too.

Random Thoughts:

One of the more bewildering aspects of Time to Kill is that it constantly changes narrators, with Cage narrating portions of his own story, and Tognazzi narrating other random swaths of the plot. The movie is based on a novel, so it’s obvious that the screenwriters just took random chunks of the book’s narration and just shoved them in wherever it seemed convenient.
The amount of time Montaldo spends pointing the camera at various parts of Plaxo’s slender, shining, nude frame makes the whole rape thing seem all the more uncomfortably pornographic. There isn’t even a sex scene, really, but even the allusion to everything happening during that chunk of the movie just makes me feel icky all over.
I own this movie now. I really don’t know how I feel about that.

Next Week: Fire Birds

Cage Examination #10: Vampire's Kiss

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

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.

As the story goes, Vampire’s Kiss was not a film that Cage’s agent saw as a fit follow-up to his successful turn as Ronny Cammareri in the Oscar winning Moonstruck. Cage, at the time, wasn’t overly thrilled with how that film turned out (though in retrospect has come to terms with what that movie aimed to be, and how his role played a part in it), and thus was on the prowl for a project that let him be a bit more…out-there. When he became acquainted with the script for Vampire’s Kiss, a deeply black comedy from a first-time feature director with little budget to speak of, he believed strongly in the power that Peter Loew emanated on the page. And yet, it almost fell apart.

After agreeing to do the film initially, Cage backed out, leaving the producers scrambling to find a replacement. That replacement was to be Judd Nelson. Can you picture it? Can you see the wide-eyed, jowely face of Nelson, still young but far beyond his high school heyday, bugging out with the same level of aplomb that Cage does throughout Vampire’s Kiss? Can you envision Nelson running through the streets, screaming “I’m a Vampire! I’m a Vampire! I’m a Vampire” with an energy even halfway to Cage’s? Can you see Judd Nelson eating a live cockroach? I certainly can’t.

Of course, that’s because eventually Cage came back around and retook the role of Peter Loew for himself. And in so doing, he forever fused the name Peter Loew with that of his own. He gave that character its only imaginable face, one of ludicrous, wide-eyed insanity that was as terrifying as it was outright hysterical.

Throughout this series, we’ve seen many a moment of Nicolas Cage craziness. Some movies, like Valley Girl and Racing With the Moon, gave us little more than fleeting glimpses of it, while films like Raising Arizona and Birdy were fairly rife with Cage brand nuttiness. But compared to Vampire’s Kiss, all previous Cage films seem remarkably dull by comparison. The Cage of Vampire’s Kiss would leap up on a desk and shout nonsense at any of the other Cages we’ve addressed thus far, then proceed to chase them into a bathroom before shouting “BOO HOO!” in the most awkward way possible. He is like a sports car dangerously redlining from the opening credits sequence to the pitiful end his deluded character meets.

Yes, deluded. For those unaware, Vampire’s Kiss is not really about vampires at all. It’s actually about unctuous literary agent Peter Loew, who thinks he’s a vampire. Eventually.

Before he believes himself to be a vampire, he’s just another snotty, mean-spirited yuppie womanizing his way through a fairly empty existence in late ’80s New York City. The immediate comparison one can draw is that of Patrick Bateman, the anti-hero of Bret Easton Ellis’ famous novel American Psycho. Both are egregiously awful men, devoid of redeeming qualities beyond a kind of hilarity that can only be taken in from afar. Up close, to even breath in their scent would make you wretch.

But whereas Bateman’s psychosis revolved very specifically around increasingly brutal acts of murder, rape, and torture, Loew’s dementia brings him to believe that he is, in fact, a vampire. Early on, the film is not terribly up front about whether or not Loew is crazy, or if he really is becoming a vampire. His early sexual encounters (and subsequent ignoring of those women) leads one to believe that, sure, maybe Peter really does encounter a voraciously sexy vampire (Jennifer Beals) in a bar one night, and maybe she really does start sucking his blood on a regular basis, progressively transforming him into a demon of the night. After all, that would be a perfectly fitting comeuppance for such a reprehensible shitbag, wouldn’t it?

But then things gets weird…as if they weren’t weird enough already. Loew begins having conversations with himself in his apartment. Is this vampire lady invisible? Or is he just losing his damn mind? The latter becomes much more likely when we see Peter at work, barking obscene orders at his tragically put-upon secretary (Maria Conchita Alonso), who has been tasked with the Kafka-esque task of finding a single, ancient literary contract amid a file choked with thousands upon thousands of them. Her reluctance to take on this Herculean task only serves to further enrage her boss, who seems to take special delight in tormenting this single employee again and again, going so far as to take a cab ride to her Bronx home just to bring her back to work after she called in sick.

To be clear, Vampire’s Kiss is a film that features Nicolas Cage literally chasing a poor South American woman around a nondescript office building not once, but twice. It is a film that features Nicolas Cage, shirt untucked and drenched in human blood, moaning like a shelling victim in some obscure war-torn country as he glides through the streets of NYC, carrying a wooden stake like it was his cross to bear. It is a movie in which Nicolas Cage literally eats a live cockroach, and is shown to have eaten a pigeon (Cage did not actually eat a pigeon for this role). It is a movie in which he tears through the streets screaming “I’m a Vampire!” over and over again, as if that were something that needed to be broadcast to the greater citizenry of New York. It is a movie in which he fashions a makeshift coffin out of a leather couch.

And yet, for all that absurdity, it is the previously mentioned scene, in which Cage innocently approaches the window of Alonso’s home, tapping on the window as she, standing in only her bra and sweatpants, unassumingly irons laundry and watches television, that sums up Peter Loew in whole. She is alarmed by his presence, but seems genuinely disarmed when he cheerfully exclaims “I brought soup!” while shaking a little dehydrated packet of soup. He calmly, knowingly apologizes for his previous bad behavior, waving the white flag of a truce to help lure Alonso back to work. As soon as she’s in the cab though, that calm, pleasant demeanor immediately gives way to more horrific antics. Not only is she now being dragged back to work to keep working on finding that one file, but she’s given in to the whims of this perpetually more unbalanced man.

It’s Cage’s effectiveness as an actor that makes the idea of him pleading with Alonso to come back to work even remotely believable. The way he slides in and out of his polite societal mask with almost unnerving ease makes it all the more troubling when that mask completely shatters. He does this throughout the movie in more subtle ways as well. For instance, you may note that Peter affects a more “continental” accent when at work and dealing with those around him. In Cage’s words (via the DVD’s commentary track, which is a must-listen for any fan of the movie, Cage, or just people talking about crazy filmmaking) the accent was a direct reference to his father, August, a film professor. He noted that when his father was speaking to a class or in any kind of professional capacity, his voice altered to sound more authoritative, and perhaps even a bit haughty. This is why Cage’s use of the phony continental accent slides in and out throughout the movie. When he’s talking to his therapist, he all but drops it. When he’s at work or trying to impress women, he’s laying it on as thick as molasses.

For as histrionically bonkers as Vampire’s Kiss is, it’s details like these that almost convince me to describe Cage’s performance as one of subtle wit. Almost.

There is subtlety in Cage’s portrayal of Peter Loew, but by the final third of the movie, it’s altogether disappeared in favor of complete derangement. When Loew finally transitions psychologically from a man having an affair with a vampiress to a man who is, in fact, a vampire, he pounces on his new-found immortality with the energy of a PCP-addled mental patient. He affects the hunched shoulders and bug-eyed, downward-glancing, expression of Max Schreck in Nosferatu, albeit with a cartoonish weirdness that more closely resembles Count Duckula.

By the time he’s shoved a pair of cheapie vampire teeth into his face and begun prowling on unsuspecting club goers, it’s frankly not even surprising anymore. By that point, the most ludicrous thing he could do is simultaneously the expected thing for him to do. He effectively renders the term “over-the-top” meaningless, for in Vampire’s Kiss, there simply is no ceiling to break through. For the entirety of Vampire’s Kiss, Nicolas Cage exists within the acting equivalent of that alternate dimension from Event Horizon that makes Sam Neill claw out his own eyes and Jack Noseworthy try to toss himself out an airlock. He operates exclusively inside of this previously unexplored space of pure energy, pure chaos, pure ludicrousness, and somehow harnesses it for the entire hundred minute duration of Vampire’s Kiss.

Coming back to watch Vampire’s Kiss for this feature, so many years after first tasting its myriad delights, was like revisiting an old friend that had spent the last couple of decades in a “special hospital” upstate. It is a film I love dearly, no matter how much its existence confounds me. As director Robert Bierman noted in the aforementioned commentary track, the whole production was a cheap, ramshackle mess. The budget was less than $2 million, producers and writers ended up playing small roles in the movie, only the director of photography had any previous feature film experience (and his experience wasn’t as a DP), and practically every shot came out of a seemingly improvisational space. Sure, the lines were on the page, but Bierman was just placing cameras in peculiar spots, unsure of what he might capture.

Cage, for his part, was rehearsing largely alone in his hotel room, pulling out random gestures cribbed from Mick Jagger and channeling German expressionism. It’s a small wonder that Vampire’s Kiss exists at all, but in bringing together this story, and this character of Peter Loew, with the burgeoning anarchic sensibilities of Our Greatest Living Actor, something truly miraculous formed, something that can only be explained either by providence, or by the polar opposite.

Whether it was divine intervention or just the randomness of the universe, the fact remains: Vampire’s Kiss is amazing, and Nicolas Cage is amazing in it. Is it the most amazing performance of his career? Quite possibly, but let us not forget that there is yet a very long way to go with the Year of the Cage. There are many scarcely explored corners of Cage’s career that must be examined before such a statement can be made.

Still, it’s going to be pretty tough to top any of this.

Random Thoughts:

Several scenes that have become inextricably linked with Cage’s craziness in the movie weren’t even in the theatrical cut. According to Bierman, the producers futzed a good bit with the progression of the film, and excised a number of Cage’s “best moments,” including the scene of him moaning through the streets with the wooden stake. Those scenes were restored for all subsequent home releases, apparently.
In the modern world, in which equality in the workplace and anti-harassment legislation is everywhere, it’s difficult to believe that Peter Loew would have any less than a dozen lawsuits pending against him at any given time. In this regard, Vampire’s Kiss is very much a product of its era…though I’m pretty sure he’d get sued in the ’80s too. Maybe just less frequently.
The movie never does quite resolve the notion as to whether or not his therapist actually exists at all, or if she was always another one of his delusions, does it? For my part, I believe she’s a real person that eventually just becomes another piece of his deluded state, much as Beals’ vampire lady did.
Speaking of Beals, Bierman reveals in the commentary that she was cast, quite literally, the day before shooting began. He doesn’t say who the original “hot young actress” he had cast was, but I’m just going to pretend it was Elisabeth Shue, just because I like thinking about Elisabeth Shue circa the late 1980s.
The bat that swoops through Cage’s apartment early in the movie was a radio controlled creature. Cage wanted a real bat, and was annoyed when he didn’t get one.
The cockroach scene took at least two takes, meaning Cage ate at least two real cockroaches. Apparently the producers got a lot of shit from PETA over that.
Cage’s delivery of the line “I never misfiled anything! Not once. Not one time!” may very well be my favorite delivery of any line by the actor ever. It’s funny enough on its own, but the childish, whiny tone he affects, and the Mick Jagger hand/hip positioning just takes it into the stratosphere of ridiculousness.
Cage ad-libbed jumping up on the desk right before the first time he chases Alva around the building. He also ad-libbed the “Am I getting through to you….ALVA!?!” line, basing it on the tone an old teacher of his would take with him.

Next Week: Tempo di uccidere (Time to Kill)

Cage Examination #9: Moonstruck

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

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.

The producers weren’t sold on him. They didn’t like his screen test. Were it not for the intervention of the film’s starring actress (who herself nearly turned down the leading role, due to exhaustion from other projects prior), Nicolas Cage would probably not have played Ronny Cammareri.

Ronny isn’t Nicolas Cage’s biggest role, nor is it his most famous. He didn’t win any awards for the part (though the film itself was nominated for six Oscars). And yet, when I think of Moonstruck, it is literally impossible for me to extricate the images of Nicolas Cage with a wooden hand screaming at Cher about his tragic life, Nicolas Cage tossing tables asunder so as to more easily pick up Cher’s narrow frame to take her “to the bedroom,” and Nicolas Cage sitting in Cher’s family’s kitchen, attentively munching away at a bowl of oatmeal while every single family issue surrounding the Castorini clan comes to a head one after the other. In short, I can’t even imagine this movie without Nicolas Cage there.

And to think, it never would have happened had Cher never seen Peggy Sue Got Married.

Admittedly, I find the connection here between fate, Cage, and Cher a bit fascinating. In some ways, Cher and Cage are very alike in terms of their appeal as actors. Their careers, of course, couldn’t be more different. Cher’s acting life has become something she only sparsely indulges in, while Cage basically can’t stop working until he somehow finds his way out of his current financial predicament. But as actors, they might as well be male and female versions of one another.

Sound insane? Think about it this way. Both are personalities well known for reinventing themselves as the years go by. Cher’s reinventions may have been more in the context of greater pop culture versus film, but both have transformed themselves repeatedly to best suit whatever career path they were after. In terms of style, both often seem more interested in dialing up the energy of a scene versus really working on anything particularly nuanced. Even in her most quiet moments, Cher is basically radiating Cher-ness whenever she appears on screen in any movie. The same can easily be said of Cage. In some other reality, some distant dimension where up is down, black is white, and hard is soft, the roles of these two are somehow reversed. Yes, I’m aware that this would entail Nicolas Cage being married to Sonny Bono and Cher somehow starring in The Rock, but come on. How great a visual is that?

Anyway, back to Cage’s intrinsic link to Moonstruck. A good deal of why I so thoroughly associate him with this movie is owed very specifically to that first scene I mentioned. By the time we meet Nicolas Cage’s Ronny Cammareri, we’ve already spent a good solid 25 minutes of screen time watching Cher’s Loretta Castorini go through the paces of her life. We know she’s a book keeper for a family friend’s business, and that she’s agreed to be married to Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello), a shlubby, but well-meaning man who also happens to have been the best friend of her former husband, who is dead. She makes much of a stink regarding the idea of getting married again, owing her previous misfortune to cursed luck, but nonetheless agrees.

But of course, there is a catch. Johnny is off to Sicily to see his dying mother, and before they can get married, he wants to make peace with his brother, Ronny, who he has not spoken with in years. He tasks Loretta with making contact with Ronny, which leads to this particularly memorable encounter. (Apologies for the two videos, but this was the only embeddable version of the full scene I could find.)

A.V. Club writer Mike D’Angelo wrote what is probably the closest thing we’ll ever have to a definitive breakdown of this scene right here (it even includes a non-embeddable clip of the full scene!). He breaks down the mechanics of this sequence in a way that certainly demystifies it—though to be fair, I didn’t necessarily mind the editing quite as much as he did. More importantly, he nails exactly what it is about Cage’s performance that makes this scene so utterly Nicolas Cage. It’s not an improvisational thing, because as D’Angelo notes, Cage’s read of the dialogue, right down to the “bread, bread, BREAD!” line, is completely true to John Patrick Shanley’s script. Instead, it’s purely the energy he infuses in the speech that makes it fly.

As written, Ronny Cammareri just sounds like any other sad sack asshole who’s lost something—in this case, his hand, and his bride. But when presented through the prism of Cage-ian weirdness, it becomes something far more than just a sad man bitching about his problems. It’s operatic in quality, something so overbearingly desperate and heartfelt that it almost borders on parody.

So why, then, do we buy into Ronny Cammareri instead of laugh at him? To be fair, I think we do a bit of both. Like all great Cage roles, Cammareri is at least a little bit risible. He’s so tortured and sullen and bitter that he might as well be a drinking buddy of the Count of Monte Cristo, and yet there is something almost authentic feeling underneath all that bluster. I think it’s due in no small part to how Cher’s character is written here. Loretta’s reaction is one of empathy, but only to a certain point. When she points out that him losing his hand isn’t really his brother’s fault, his reaction is so petulant and overblown that you realize he’s become this tragic caricature only because nobody’s ever bothered to call him on his bullshit before. It’s precisely this reaction that makes his sudden affection for Loretta seem believable, and not just like something engineered for the sake of the script.

This isn’t even Moonstruck’s most famous scene, of course. Their later exchange, in which Loretta smacks Ronny across the face and yells the famous “Snap out of it!” line right before he takes her to bed, is a far more quoted/referenced scene. But while that scene has more easily found its way into pop culture’s film reference lexicon, I think the scene in the bakery is the best summation of what Moonstruck means in the context of Cage’s career, and is easily the most interesting moment of the entire movie. It’s the moment in which you best see what Nicolas Cage as an actor has to offer a movie like Moonstruck. Which isn’t to say that he’s bad in the rest of the film, but nowhere is he allowed to wield so many different emotions at once.

In fact, for the rest of Moonstruck, Cage more or less follows Cher around like a lost puppy. He knows his brother is in love with this woman, and doesn’t care. She knows he’s in love with her, but mostly doesn’t care either. And yet they keep meeting up, and keep circling one another, periodically sleeping together while Johnny is in Sicily. Why? Because love, stupid.

That’s really all Moonstruck has to say about anything. The correlation with the moon, a loose concept of the moon making people crazy in love because I don’t know I guess that’s something old Italian people would totally say, is less a fully-formed concept and more just something for the old Italian people in the movie to talk about. When it dares to explore more interesting subject matter, such as Cher’s father having an affair, or Cher’s mother (the great Olympia Dukakis, who rightfully won an Oscar for her part in this movie) beginning to explore the male psyche through various conversations with men (including the repeatedly appearing John Mahoney as a college professor and ladies man), it never quite follows through on any of them.

Nowhere is this more true than the admittedly kind of great, if wholly ridiculous final scene, in which every single problem currently afflicting the Cammareri and Castorini clans comes to a head in nice, neat fashion at the breakfast table. Moonstruck doesn’t exist to comment on any of the complexities of the human condition. It’s there to basically say life is only as complicated as you make it, and the more you just rely on things like love and family and the moon I guess, the better off you’ll be. Now shut up and eat your oatmeal.

It’s a sweet message that perhaps falls a bit flat in our more cynical times. Moonstruck is nothing if not an entirely optimistic movie, and the tidiness with which that optimism cleans up what few messes the film’s characters make is perhaps the ultimate form of Hollywood escapism. But for its time, Moonstruck obviously struck a chord, what with its many Oscar nominations and wins, and strong box office success. And even though it might not be the biggest or most memorable of all Nicolas Cage roles, his work in Moonstruck left enough of a lasting impression on me to where the film and the man will always immediately associate. Even if that does mostly come from one single, fantastic scene.

Random Thoughts:

Nicolas Cage has previously said that it really was his role in Peggy Sue Got Married that caught Cher’s attention. She definitively wouldn’t agree to do the movie unless Cage played Ronny. The studio quickly acquiesced.
Cher was 41 when she filmed Moonstruck. Nicolas Cage was 23.
Apparently the studio originally wanted Sally Field for Cher’s role. How different of a movie would THAT have been?
I really do think it’s a product of seeing the movie again so many years after first watching it (last time I saw it I was a teenager), but the stuff with the old people muttering about the moon really is incredibly hokey. Not to mention kind of incoherent, editing wise. I’d have much rather learned more about Olympia Dukakis’ solo excursions into the world while her husband was out philandering, personally.
No part of Moonstruck is less realistic than Danny Aiello’s reaction to Ronny proposing to Loretta. Yes, he’s broken off the engagement, but there is no way, no way, he doesn’t throw Nicolas Cage across the breakfast table in any other movie.

Next Week: Vampire’s Kiss

Cage Examination #8: Raising Arizona

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

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.

And then there is Our Greatest Living Actor. More force than archetypal actor, the breadth of Cage’s film catalog (which we’ve only scratched the surface of thus far) is practically a tribute to the unexpected. There are precious few moments where you can look a Nicolas Cage film in the eye, and say, “That was a totally mundane, mainstream performance.” Those films are the aberration to a catalog predicated on being “out there,” even when the script calls for no such thing. Nicolas Cage does not merely celebrate weird; he embodies it.

In 1986, when these magnificent filmmakers and Our Greatest Living Actor got together to make Raising Arizona, something magical must have been in the air. Just the Coens’ second project, and Cage’s eighth, the mixture of the Coens’ off-kilter sensibilities and Cage’s malleable facial features seemed like providence. Watching Cage, alongside great actors to come like Holly Hunter, John Goodman, and William Forsythe, embrace the nuttiness of the Coens’ vision wholeheartedly makes you stand up and take notice of just how far ahead of their time all of these people really were. Were I watching Raising Arizona for the first time back upon its release in 1987, I’d have been salivating at the possibility of many more Coens/Cage team-ups to come.

That those team-ups never arrived is a puzzling, tragic thing that perhaps was the only way it could have been.

Before we get into any of that, a brief refresher. In Raising Arizona, Nicolas Cage is H.I. McDunnough, a multiple-time loser who finds himself drifting in and out of the Arizona penal system. His criminal vice of choice is of the classic “convenience store robbery” ilk. H.I. just can’t help himself, it seems; that is, until he meets the woman of his dreams in the unlikeliest of places. While posing for his mugshot following one of his many incarcerations, H.I. meets Edwina (Holly Hunter), or Ed, as she’s simply referred to throughout the film. H.I. is love-struck from the get-go, perhaps even falling out of favor with the law a few extra times just to have the opportunity to talk to sweet Ed. Upon his final paroling, H.I. arrives at the station for the first time as a free man, begging Ed to become his wife.

Their love is strangely beautiful, optimistic, and off-puttingly intense. Once the home and job situations are put to bed, they set about starting a family. Unfortunately, the revelation comes to light that Ed is “barren” (her words, not mine) and thus unable to bear children. A family without children is akin to an armed robbery without a stocking mask, so they begin the painful process of trying to adopt, only to find H.I.’s criminal history all but blacklists them from such a plan.

Then, like a gift from the morally-skewed Heavens, the McDunnough family learns of the newly born Arizona quintuplets. Born to the wealthy furniture store chain owner Nathan Arizona and his rather plain wife, the five babies give H.I. and Ed a peculiar idea. With five babies to care for, the Arizonas must surely be overwhelmed. Surely they wouldn’t fret over the loss of one little baby, would they?

To any normal person, such a question likely wouldn’t even be considered. But to the desperate mind of Ed, so anxious to give her love to child that she cannot bear herself, and to the criminally-oriented brain of H.I., who has bent the law for his own sake more times than can be counted, it all makes a kind of twisted logical sense.

After a brief kidnapping, the McDunnoughs bring the baby home. But it’s not long before kinks in their plan start to emerge. Two of H.I.’s former prison mates—a pair of greaser brothers played by Goodman and Forsythe—escape prison and come to the McDunnough home looking for a place to crash, while H.I.’s boss (played by the great late ’80s, early ’90s movie slimeball Sam McMurray) fires H.I. after a physical altercation, and threatens to tell the police about their crime if they don’t give the baby to him and his wife (played by the great Frances McDormand in an all-too-brief role). And then there’s the little matter of Leonard Smalls (the also great Randall “Tex” Cobb), a demonic renegade biker who looks like he just wandered out of Beyond Thunderdome. Smalls is on the hunt for the missing baby for the sake of earning a hefty reward, and even seems to have a strange, psychic connection to H.I.

Okay, so that wasn’t a brief refresher, but to be fair, there’s quite a bit going on in Raising Arizona. As we eventually came to expect of all Coen films, Raising Arizona is densely packed with characters, affectations, metaphors, references to various films and literature, and a strange sense of humor that would eventually become the staple of the Coens’ most cherished works.

It is also a film that contains one of the single greatest Nicolas Cage performances of record. As H.I. McDunnough, Cage stretches his face, his voice, and overall demeanor in so many different ways he might as well be an old Warner Bros. cartoon character. And yet, there is a character at the heart of all those gesticulations and screams. It doesn’t take long for the audience to get in rhythm with Cage’s portrayal of H.I. From the opening narration, where H.I. describes his various brush-ups against the law, and subsequent courting of Ed, you immediately like him. He might be kind of a dirtbag, but he’s a loving, kind-hearted dirtbag.

Of interest is the fact that little of H.I. came directly from Cage himself. After all, Cage is nothing if not famous for introducing peculiar affects and seemingly unnecessary traits to his characters. It’s a tendency that has gotten him in some trouble previously—most notably on the set of Peggy Sue Got Married, where his Pokey-esque vocal inflection apparently inspired the majority of the cast to conspire to have him fired from the project. And yet, directors continued to hire him, including such budding artists as the Coens.

We know now, many years after the release of Raising Arizona and its cult favoritism had fully taken hold, that the Coens are notoriously strict when it comes to their vision. Practically everything you see in a Coens film is meticulously crafted well ahead of shooting. The script for Raising Arizona took them three and a half months just to write, and many more months of storyboarding in order to prepare the shoot.

As a result, the relationship between Cage and the Coens was perhaps doomed to be a solitary affair. Cage’s inherent desire to create his own character on the fringes of a director’s vision was something that was never going to play with them. They weren’t interested in his suggestions (of which he reportedly had several) during shooting. This isn’t a scenario where we discover that Cage and one of the Coens got into some kind of fist fight, or what have you. While there were reportedly disagreements between the director and star, it all stayed respectful, and Cage obviously stuck with the production.

That said, given this insight, that may explain why the Coens never again chose to work with Our Greatest Living Actor. Despite seeming like a perfect match, their totalitarian vision of filmmaking and Cage’s more spur-of-the-moment, devil-may-care attitude clearly weren’t designed for one another.

And thus, the only fruit this combination bore was that of Raising Arizona. But what a fruit it turned out to be. While only a modest success at the box office, the film has become, for all intents and purposes, one of the films that comes to mind when you mention the Coens and/or Nic Cage. Its crazed blend of hyperactive energy and legitimate heart at its core is something so many comedies try desperately to do, but end up failing in one area or the other.

No matter how far the rabbit hole H.I. and Ed fall, you never stop loving them as characters. Cage and Hunter are supremely good together, and embody the inherent oddness of the McDunnough’s while somehow still making them relatable as human beings. It doesn’t matter if H.I. is running through the streets with a stocking over his head trying to flee the cops while keeping a firm grip on a case of Huggies, or if he’s fighting off a post-apocalyptic baby hunter while contorting his face like an early-stage stroke victim. H.I. is a character you can believe in, no matter how unrealistic his circumstances may become.

It’s because of this that I consider the role of H.I. McDunnough to be one of Cage’s very best performances. It’s all of the peculiarity we’ve come to expect from Cage, as well as the ability to craft a true-feeling personality underneath all that weirdness. This isn’t sideshow attraction Cage, nor is this sappy, sentimental Cage. It’s the crazy and the brilliant all rolled up into one.

Random Thoughts:

I know I spoke precious little of the work of both John Goodman and William Forsythe in the body of this piece, but let me just take an opportunity here to say, without question, that they are masterful in this movie. That moment where Goodman lifts Forsythe up out of their mud-logged prison tunnel by the ankle is a moment forever etched in my brain.
Randall “Tex” Cobb apparently didn’t even know how to ride a motorcycle prior to Raising Arizona, which is funny and also a bit tragic, given that he was mostly typecast as a biker type in the majority of his film roles to come. Most notably as the villainous Ben Dover in Fletch Lives.
On the subject of his wonderfully akimbo hair style in Raising Arizona, Cage attributed the haircut to simply being the natural quality of his hair. As he said to James Lipton on an episode of Inside the Actors Studio, “That was just me.” Of course such a bizarre haircut should be so effortless, no?
Upon rewatching Raising Arizona for this feature, I became intensely curious as to what had become of Trey Wilson, the actor who played the loud-mouthed, yet surprisingly sensitive Nathan Arizona, Sr. It turns out, he died just a short couple of years after Arizona’s release at the young age of 40. A terrible shame, as he seemed like an actor primed for great character work.
On the subject of H.I.’s bizarre facial tics, especially in the presence of Randall Cobb, Cage also told Lipton that he wanted to give H.I. “kind of a Jekyll and Hyde” quality that occurred whenever Cobb came on screen. Why? Better question: why not?

Next Week: Moonstruck

Cage Examination #7: The Boy In Blue

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

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.

I’m not sure what that text introduction is actually meant to inspire in watchers of The Boy In Blue. Are we supposed to relate it to the context of modern sport? Are we supposed to not feel as bad about dropping a hundred bucks on the Super Bowl because, hey, gambling on sport has a rich history and tradition? Are we supposed to suddenly get way into sculling, because it’s obscure and old?

I’m sure someone out there is angrily wagging their finger at their computer screen right now, cursing my lack of knowledge about this kingly sport and its rich history. Fine, I’ll acquiesce that rowing, as a sport, probably does have plenty of prestige and historical interest and all of that. That said, I have to imagine that even the most vehement of sculling scholars would probably find a lot to hate about The Boy In Blue. After all, it portrays one of the most heralded names in the sport, 19th century world champion Ned Hanlon, as little more than an overly impetuous, alcoholic vagabond who more or less lucked into his championship success. That it has the production values of a Canadian made-for-TV movie and features Nicolas Cage at his most forcibly hinged helps matters little.

Look, I know I’m a massive Cage apologist. After all, how could I possibly do a feature like this unless I were willing to look the other way when it came to some of Cage’s more…problematic roles. That said, The Boy In Blue is perhaps the earliest example of the kind of lackluster, uninvolved performance we’ve only recently become so very accustomed to seeing from the man.

I can’t say I necessarily blame Our Greatest Living Actor. While the possibility of a starring role in a period piece/sports “epic” probably sounded great on paper, the actual production of The Boy In Blue is nothing short of suffocating. The amount of drama in The Boy In Blue can be measured in teaspoons. The stakes never become anything but dreadfully low. Even as poor Ned rows for his life in the climactic final race against the villainous Australian champion, you can’t help but just kind of sit there and shrug your shoulders at the whole thing.

Granted, the filmmakers can’t be entirely blamed for trying to ape the progression of the many successful sports films that came before it. Sculling on its own is a pretty niche proposition for a film-going audience—certainly more so than the baseballs and footballs the kids were oh so very into circa 1986. And the fact that the sole point of interest regarding Ned’s early career is that he was the first to utilize the “sliding seat” technology means that focusing on his bootlegging days and fight against villainous villains who do villainy is probably for the best.

Except that the makers of this film never quite get a grip on how much personal drama versus sports drama they want to inject into the cinematic life of Ned Hanlon. The film sets him up as a brazen Canadian bootlegger, who uses his rowing skills more often to evade cops trying to arrest him for distributing illegal moonshine than for any worthwhile competition. Once the film does get around to making him into a local Canadian hero, it almost immediately abandons making you care about any of that to try and get you into a ridiculous romantic subplot involving the niece of a wealthy colonel. That colonel, played with sneering villainy by Christopher Plummer, alternates wildly throughout the movie between being Ned’s financial ally, and Ned’s greatest enemy, so naturally their romantic feelings must be kept on the down low.

So down low, in fact, that we never see a single spark of romantic chemistry between Cage and the lovely, aristocratic girl (played with exhausting breathlessness by Cynthia Dale.) He’s smitten with her, but she’s engaged to be married to a stuffy Harvard man who of course Ned hates because he’s a stuffy Harvard man. By the time Dale gets around to taking her top off (in what might be the most welcome, yet wholly unnecessary boob shot in mid-’80s film), you’re pretty sure she actually kind of hates him—which makes their absolutely whirlwind sex-to-marriage progression all the more bewildering.

Somewhere amid Ned going through bouts of drunken misery, losing his edge, getting it back, losing it again, getting banned from North American competition, getting the girl, then going to England for his big climactic match-up, director Charles Jarrott does at least manage to cram in as many rowing/training montage sequences set to anachronistic synth rock as you can possibly hope for. I know it was very of the times to set pretty much everything to keyboards and drum machines that have been set to “getting ready to fight somebody,” but seeing it in the context of a bunch of guys rowing boats in the late 1800s is quite possibly the most hilarious example of such musical accompaniment of all time. It’s even better when Cage romps around shirtless, with his pecs and abs greased up like he were an early incarnation of Antonio Sabato Jr. Hey, gotta have something for the ladies, right?

All the sports movie cliches are here, and they’re certainly laughable. It’s just tragic that more of The Boy In Blue doesn’t follow suit. This is not one of those hilariously awful Cage movies—this is one of those awful awful Cage movies, the kind that can’t bring itself to be ridiculous enough to enjoy because of its various faults. It’s so dully dedicated to its sculling/Canadian history lesson, that it can’t be bothered to be entertaining. Cage, at times, seems like he’s trying to break out of the movie’s shell—most notably during a particularly absurd sex scene early in the movie—but seems utterly stifled at every turn.

Then again, when you factor in that the bulk of the movie’s funding came from a mixture of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Regatta Productions, a company that only existed long enough to finance this film that evidently spawned out of some boating club—hence the focus on that damned sliding seat, I suppose—it’s hard to imagine any of those money folk wanting to have much fun with their very serious, very interesting rowing movie. The makers of The Boy In Blue wanted the rowing equivalent of Rocky. Instead, what they got was the rowing equivalent of Rocky V.

Random Thoughts:

I know I’ve poked my share of fun at Canadians and the CBC here, but truth be told I love Canadians. It’s because I love them that I can’t bring myself to abide by this film’s utter indifference to anything likably Canadian. Like, where’s the maple syrup? Where are all the bears? And the lumberjacks? They don’t even show one hockey stick!
I’m also pretty sure Nicolas Cage makes way more fun of Canadians in this movie than I did in this article. Every time he finishes a sentence with “eh?” you can’t help but wonder if he’s mocking the accent on purpose.
That boob shot really does come out of nowhere.
The good news? There’s almost no chance you’ll find yourself accidentally watching this movie. It wasn’t even available on Netflix until this week. I had to buy a UK region DVD from some random Amazon seller. Now I own The Boy In Blue, forever and always. As one of the signs from Ned’s welcome home parade stated, “Hip Hip Hoorah!”

Next Week: Raising Arizona

Cage Examination #6: Peggy Sue Got Married

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

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.

One very unlikely plunderer of both these tropes was director Francis Ford Coppola with his 1986 film Peggy Sue Got Married. We’ve spent a good bit of time talking about Coppola’s various financial pitfalls throughout the decade already. Suffice it to say, by the time Coppola got around to making Peggy Sue Got Married, he was doing it solely as a method of making some damn money. Looking at the script for Peggy Sue, you’d have a hard time pegging Coppola as the kind of director who would be hyped to make something so decidedly commercial, sentimental, and downright hokey.

But make it he did, and with Nicolas Cage returning once again to complete his Coppola trilogy. What began in Rumble Fish and seemed to grow into something potentially interesting in The Cotton Club more or less derails and kills everyone in the surrounding area in Peggy Sue Got Married. As the male lead in this bizarre, female-centric riff on Back to the Future, Cage gives what can only be described as perhaps his most bewilderingly affected performance in a career full of bewilderingly affected performances. It is honestly a wonder that his career even survived this role.

I’m going to bet that a number of you are scoffing at me right now. Deriding Peggy Sue Got Married in any way, shape, or form has often drawn me scorn by those old enough to remember seeing the film at some point during their youth, whether it was during the ’80s or otherwise. People love this movie in a way that often gets reserved for ’80s classics like Back to the Future, Weird Science, and The Breakfast Club. Having never seen it all the way through until just recently, I have to say I am completely baffled by that fact.

It’s not that Peggy Sue Got Married is a particularly awful movie; it isn’t, by any stretch. Its story of an unhappy, soon-to-be divorced Kathleen Turner going to her 25th high school reunion, suffering a heart attack, and then somehow traveling back in time to her senior year in 1960 is actually quite a cute one. The script by Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner doesn’t bother trying to bog itself down in too much explanation for the whole time travel thing, instead opting to focus on deeply intense scenes of female wish-fulfillment.

Specifically, Peggy Sue fulfills the wish of any woman of the era who found herself suddenly very unhappily married. Divorce rates peaked at then-record highs back in 1981, and then leveled off through much of the decade. Without getting too statistical about any of it, that means there were a lot of really unhappy divorced women hanging around in 1986 who probably themselves wouldn’t mind a do-over on their younger years.

In this case, Turner’s Peggy Sue really wishes she hadn’t married her high school sweetheart Charlie, otherwise known as a now fatter, thinner-haired, furniture-selling version of a once handsome, if slightly squirmy Nicolas Cage, who skipped out on college to pursue his apparently doomed singing career. Turner loves her children, but bemoans the hasty decision making that led to their wedding, and subsequent years of turmoil and unhappiness. When fate/the universe/the screenwriters grant her the opportunity to travel back to her Halcyon days as a popular high school chick, she sees the prime chance to reverse course on her life.

Interestingly, Peggy Sue’s first instinct isn’t to just out-and-out dump Cage. She dances around the idea by citing something Charlie had floated to her previously: namely, the idea of seeing other people before settling down with one another. Cage, in his gaspy, nasally, goofball way, is aghast that Peggy Sue would suddenly be okay with this. Let’s be honest, guys: how many times have we pitched this idea to women expecting to get slapped in the face? If she said yes without a second thought, how totally demoralizing would that actually be?

So Peggy Sue sets about making good on her various dreams. She starts hanging around the class nerd (Barry Miller), who she knows will go on to become a billionaire, as well as the class malcontent, a burgeoning beatnik played with rebellious petulance by Kevin J. O’Connor (otherwise known as that squeaky-voiced guy in pretty much every Stephen Sommers movie). Her romantic intentions toward Miller’s nerdlinger are somewhat nebulous; you’re never quite sure if she’s actually interested in him, or just using his smarts to try and figure out how she ended up back in the past. As for O’Connor, she’s all over him, quoting beatnik poetry right back to him as he smarmily tries to disarm any possibility that she might actually understand his deeply complex and unconventional mind. Unsurprisingly, this freaks out both Charlie and Peggy Sue’s friends, who squeal and gasp with horrified delight as Peggy Sue reluctantly recounts her romantic misadventures.

Those friends, by the way, are played by a slew of recognizable faces that were then mostly unrecognizable. Joan Allen and Catherine Hicks play Peggy Sue’s besties, while a young Jim Carrey chews through his few allotted jokes with plenty of limb-bending mania as Cage’s best bud. The actors play both the youthful and older versions of themselves, often to rather unfortunate effect. Turner is the only one spared this treatment, while everyone else from Cage on down are forced to don wigs and makeup that either make them look 20 years older than they are, or roughly ten years younger—or, at least, that was the intention. Cage, with his giant blonde pompadour and gold lamé jacket looks ridiculous, of course, but nowhere near as ridiculous as he does when he’s forced to try and affect the mannerisms of a paunchy, balding, utterly heartbroken 40-something version of himself.

Allen and Hicks get similarly odd treatment. Hicks looks pretty much the same age no matter how she’s done up, while Joan Allen seems to dart between a 35 year-old high school student and a version of my grandmother attending a high school reunion. Carrey, meanwhile, looks like a teenage boy dressing up like his father for Halloween. The only actress not to receive this tragic treatment is the young Sofia Coppola playing Peggy Sue’s (perhaps dead in the future?) younger sister. Yet again she is thrust into one of her dad’s films despite having no acting talent whatsoever. She avoids any weird makeup situations, but her presence is nonetheless horrifying for a variety of other reasons.

And yet, while various costuming and makeup choices do a good bit to make everybody in Peggy Sue seem a bit ridiculous, Nicolas Cage goes that extra mile to really stand out as completely fucking insane. Cage has famously been quoted as saying that the peculiar, highly nasal inflection he gave his voice in Peggy Sue was inspired by Pokey, the horse sidekick on The Gumby Show. It’s a voice that both the producers of the film, and even Uncle Francis absolutely hated early in production, but Cage somehow managed to convince them was a good idea. I do not understand how he was able to do this, but in a way, I’m rather grateful that he did, because it led to opportunities for line deliveries like the ones seen in this short, yet brilliant compilation video:

This seems like as good a time as any to maybe address that perhaps superfluous rating system I have back at the top of these articles, the one where I judge the performance “quality” given by Our Greatest Living Actor in a particular film. Here’s the thing: it’s not really about quality as most would perceive it. A Nicolas Cage performance can rarely be defined by the terms of quality most other actors are judged by. If so, he’d have been laughed out of Hollywood long ago. He’s not a traditional actor, in that so many of his performances revolve around unpredictable bursts of energy and bizarre character quirks that often barely matter in the context of the story being told. He’s an actor you watch specifically to see how far beyond the boundaries of “known acting” he can go before crossing over into the realm of pure laughability. Peggy Sue Got Married is a prime example of him just scraping that barrier without quite going over. When I award him nine Cages out of 10, it’s not because he deserves an Oscar for this movie. It’s because he’s an absurd entertainment that, quite frankly, you can’t take your eyes off of. Hell, his pronunciation of the word “wang” is probably worth eight Cages right there.

Cage’s weirdness alone would be enough to make Peggy Sue an oddball choice for an ’80s classic, but there are no shortage of other bizarro touches that pile on the peculiarity. Coppola, for his part, seemed interested in trying to turn Peggy Sue into anything other than another Back to the Future-esque lark. He gets way into cinematographic gimmicks, reusing the same “mirror shot” at the beginning, end, and even a few other parts of the film. This, of course, is the shot where the mirror reflection is actually just a frame featuring the actors in another room, while a body double mimics the motions of the other actor in reverse, so as to avoid the camera crew appearing in the shot. Granted, the body double never quite syncs up with Turner, so it looks exceedingly off-kilter.

Coppola also made a few changes to the script, including toning down a subplot in which Peggy Sue used her foreknowledge of the future to invent panty hose and invest in Xerox. That said, I have no idea if the completely ridiculous third-act scene of Peggy Sue being brought to her grandfather’s lodge meeting of time travel enthusiasts in order to be sent back to her time was something in the script originally or not. I really wish I could find a clip of this scene to show you, but sadly I cannot. Just imagine the Stonecutters episode of The Simpsons accidentally wandering into a 1960s period comedy, and you’ll have an idea.

For these many reasons, I still find myself utterly incapable of grasping Peggy Sue Got Married’s apparent “classic” status. Usually when you go back and talk about ’80s classics, they tend to be of the more broadly bizarre ilk, rather than the kind of artistically quirky weirdness and outright batshit nonsense so prevalent in Peggy Sue. There is broad comedy to be found, certainly. But the darker, more tragic touches of the film seem completely incongruous with the kind of free-spirited fun found in so many other, similar films of the era.

Not that those darker touches are unwelcome, but they do serve to make Peggy Sue Got Married stand out as more of an oddity than anything else. That said, much as revisiting the world of 1960 allowed Peggy Sue to discover how far her life truly had come, revisiting Peggy Sue Got Married more than 25 years after its release does provide at least a few examples of how far film has progressed in the ensuing decades, especially in the realm of makeup. The next time someone bitches about Leonardo DiCaprio’s old man makeup in J. Edgar, maybe show them a few clips of Nicolas Cage’s old man get-up in Peggy Sue Got Married. It never hurts to have a little perspective before complaining, you know?

Random Thoughts

I haven’t said much about Nic Cage’s singing in this movie, because it’s arguably the least interesting thing he does. I don’t know if it’s even Cage’s voice doing all the vocals, but whoever it is ain’t super great. Still, that gold suit jacket is pretty incredible.
There are at least two scenes (not featured in the video compilation) where Cage completely drops the weird voice. It might have been out of necessity, as perhaps he couldn’t find a way to maintain the oddball tone while sobbingly pouring out his heart. It’s pretty amazing to watch him slip in and out of the voice, especially when you’re not expecting it.
Since I think this is the last time I’ll have the opportunity to mention it, I just want to be clear: I love Sofia Coppola as a director, but she’s pretty much the worst child actress of all time.
Peggy Sue Got Married was largely filmed in my hometown of Petaluma, California. All of the shots of them driving around in town and hanging out in front of various people’s houses are filmed in places I spent most of my youth growing up in and around. Other noteworthy films either partially or fully shot in Petaluma include: American Graffiti, Inventing the Abbotts, Lolita (1998), Cujo, Howard the Duck, Flubber, Mumford, and Basic Instinct.

Next Week: The Boy In Blue