Nicolas Cage is a shouty man

Oh yes he is.



Anyone else feeling the need for a Nicolas Cage movie marathon now?

Nic Cage Appreciation Month: Snake Eyes (1998)

When Nic Cage plays sleazy, he really goes all out. In Snake Eyes, he's Rick Santoro, an Atlantic City police officer with a gambling habit, a wife and kids plus another woman on the side, and some rather, um, unusual methods. With a large amount of money riding on a big prize fight, he's angry when the champion appears to throw the match - but he soon has more important things to worry about, as the Secretary of Defence has been assassinated and there appears to be a conspiracy afoot...

Snake Eyes is kind of strange because Cage is definitely off the leash here - he orders martinis and makes an Elvis reference in the space of about 30 seconds, and I can't believe that outfit came from anywhere other than Cage's own wardrobe - yet because of the bizarre structure of the film and because there are so many other characters vying for attention, he doesn't completely steal the show. Which is really strange, because there are very few lines of dialogue he doesn't deliver by shouting them. It's a bit of a weird film, actually; it's really well put together technically and visually, with lots of long long long dynamic tracking shots and well-used musical score, and the structure of the narrative, which keeps revisiting the same events from different angles and from different subjective points of view, is really interesting, but it doesn't quite pay off properly. According to the IMDB, that's because originally the film was supposed to end with a tidal wave wiping out the casino, but for some reason this was cut in post-production. Thinking about it, that would really help tie up various loose ends - as it stands, the tropical storm raging outside doesn't really have anything to do with anything, so the subplot with the news reporter filming outside doesn't go anywhere, and Nic Cage's rambling final speech about dreaming about drowning is completely irrelevant. Which is a shame.

Snake Eyes isn't one of Nic Cage's really great films, and neither is it a really great or even particularly memorable Cage performance. Disappointing.

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Nic Cage Appreciation Month: The Weather Man (2005)

The Weather Man is a painfully mismarketed film. The tagline on the DVD calls it "a comedy to brighten your day", but if you were having a bad day prior to watching this film, it'd probably finish you off. There are a couple of funny moments, sure, but it's essentially a film about a horrible man who has grown to hate his life and can't find a way to fix things. Not really all that cheery, then.

Nic Cage has played some utter bastards in his time, and David Spritz really doesn't compare - he's not a con artist, or a terrorist, or a gun runner, or a murderer, or even a criminal of any kind. He's just not a very nice man. He's incredibly selfish, and seemingly incapable of summoning anything remotely like empathy: his ex-wife can't bear him, he's rubbish with his kids, and he barely pays any attention to his dying father, choosing instead to obsess about, well, mostly, sex. His successful career as a minor TV personality - a weather man with a particularly grating persona - makes him an awful lot of money, but no respect (in fact, people regularly throw things at him in the street) and instead of this being one of those feel-good movies where everyone grows and learns and cries and hugs, it's just... not. At the end, Dave is just as alone and just as pathetic as he was when it started, if not more so. There's no neatly packaged moral here. It's just all a bit miserable.

Which isn't to say this is a bad film. Far from it, actually. Gore Verbinski keeps Cage firmly on his leash (I didn't spot a single Elvis reference in this film, which indicates that this was a very restrained Cage performance), making him actually act, actually play a character, rather than swanning around being Nic Cage. The cinematography is gorgeous; The Weather Man feels like an indie film, only with a much higher budget, better actors, and a slick of Hollywood gloss. It's definitely one of Cage's better films, but whoever stuck that tagline on the box really ought to have been sacked. The urge to make a weather-related pun of some kind is entirely understandable, but The Weather Man is really more of a drizzly, grey film than any kind of bright spell.

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Nic Cage Appreciation Month: Gone in Sixty Seconds (2000)

Nic Cage is a retired car thief who just needs to pull off one last heist to prevent an evil gangster killing his daft younger brother. Lots of high speed car chases ensue, and it's all delightfully silly - though Cage is mostly behaving himself, and rarely even raises his voice. The scene where he tries to seduce Angelina Jolie using car-themed metaphors for sexual intercourse is priceless, though.

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Nic Cage Appreciation Month: Matchstick Men (2003)

mMatchstick Men lets Nic Cage be a complete and utter bastard whilst remaining a sympathetic character and being more than slightly crazy - Roy Waller is a con man with a catalogue of phobias and obsessions (including some OCD tendencies) who's forced to re-evaluate his life when he discovers he has a teenage daughter.

Or something like that. I don't want to give too much away about the plot, since it's actually one of Cage's genuinely good movies, but suffice it to say that since it's a movie about con men, nothing is ever going to be quite as straightforward as it seems.

Cage is on brilliant form here - twitchy and nervous with several spectacular blowups (the best of all, without question, being the part where he shouts at a guy who tells him off for cutting a queue: "Have you ever been dragged to a sidewalk and beaten till you PISSED BLOOD?") yet somehow still rather endearing. It's Cage under control, too; very few overtly quirky Cageisms creep in, though there are martinis involved, and the shouting all seems to be scripted rather than improvised, though I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are alternate versions of the "...pissed blood" line floating around out there. So, hats off to Ridley Scott for channelling Cage accurately and effectively; this isn't a movie that's good in spite of Cage, or a bad movie that's improved because of Cage; it's actually really quite good, and Cage is great in it. Hurrah!

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Nic Cage Appreciation Month: Raising Arizona (1987)

Raising Arizona was a bit of a disappointment, Cage-wise. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying he was bad in it - on the contrary, he was really rather good - but he wasn't playing Nic Cage in it. This is one of the few films where he actually acts, rather than doing that drawling, whole-arm-pointing Elvis impression he's liable to do whenever a director doesn't have a tight enough hold on his leash. It's probably because this was quite early on in his career, though, and Cage does sport some spectacularly crazy hair and incredibly sharp cheekbones, which went some way towards making up for it.

Cage plays H.I. McDunnough, an ex-con who ends up marrying Ed, a police officer played by the ever-wonderful Holly Hunter. Everything goes about as well as such a match could be expected to go until they learn that they're barren. Coincidentally, in the news that week is a story about a couple who've just had quintuplets. The couple decide to steal a baby, and from then on the film is pretty much your standard farce.

The Coens' movies seem to be something you either get or you don't. It's not quite the Marmite effect, because although I'm not sure I really got this movie, I certainly didn't hate it, it just didn't quite click with me. The most interesting part was how much it seems to presage Cage's later career. (Okay, I'm talking about Ghost Rider again, but the Leonard Smalls character, about whom H.I. has nightmares, practically is Ghost Rider. There's even a shot where Smalls rides his bike past a lizard in the desert and it burns up and dies, which I'm certain recurs in Ghost Rider.) Cage's accent, the fact that he's playing an ex-con, and some graffiti on a toilet wall all point towards Con Air, and there are plenty of seeds sown for the kind of quirkiness and insanity that will later characterise Nic Cage as a movie star. There's definite promise here.

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Nic Cage Appreciation Month: Con Air (1997)

Con Air was nominated for two Oscars in 1998, and though it didn't win either of them, it did win a Razzie for Worst Reckless Disregard for Human Life and Public Property. That sums this film up better than I ever could, really. And any film that starts with Nic Cage stalking around in a military uniform with How Do I Live playing in the background can't be anything less than awesome.

Cage plays Cameron Poe, a US Ranger who accidentally murders a man who was harrassing his wife and ends up doing 7-10 years for his trouble. On the day he's due to be released, he, for some ridiculous reason, ends up hitching a ride on a private plane which is being used to transport highly dangerous prisoners from one prison to another. Finding himself in close quarters with every famous serial killer and rapist in the country is pretty unpleasant, but it's about to get worse, because some of those prisoners have hatched a plot to hijack the plane and fly to freedom. The exact details of this plan are kind of sketchy, and it doesn't really make sense, but when you're packing as many explosives as this movie is, who needs a well-thought out plot anyway?

It's difficult to pick the best Nic Cage moment in Con Air - the number of times he ends up running in slow motion away from an explosion, his long hair streaming behind him in the breeze, is incalculable - but the line that's destined to be most quoted is certainly "Put the bunny back in the box."

Brilliant.

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Nic Cage Appreciation Month: Next (2007)

Although Next's opening credits claimed that the story was based on a Philip K. Dick story, a tiny bit of digging around on Wikipedia revealed that, er, well, that's not really true. The only bit taken from a Philip K. Dick story is the idea of seeing into the future just far enough to see the consequences of any one single action. Next resembles, more than anything else, a computer game - actually, it's more reminiscent of a computer game than most computer game adaptations.

Nic Cage plays a man called Cris Johnson. Cris has the power to see into the future, but only for about two minutes, and only events which are directly related to himself. So, for example, he might forsee that, when he changes the channel on his TV, there'll be a movie on that he wants to see, but if it started more than two minutes ago, he has no way of switching over quickly enough to catch the beginning. He also wouldn't be able to forsee any kind of natural disaster happening on the other side of the world, since he wouldn't be directly involved, and let's face it, with only a two minute headstart, he'd be pretty useless at avoiding a catastrophe anyway. There's only one exception to this two minute rule: he has a recurring vision of meeting the woman of his dreams in a diner. He looks at his watch, and it's 8:09, but he doesn't know the date or even whether it's a.m. or p.m. All he knows is that he'll meet this woman one day, and it'll be just gone 8 o'clock when it happens. Unfortunately, while he's arsing about drinking martinis in a diner, his future-seeing antics have been spotted by an FBI agent who wants to capture Cris and use his abilities to predict when a terrorist group will use a nuclear bomb they've stolen to blow up Los Angeles. (This is in spite of the fact that she knows he's limited to two minutes and that he can only see things that concern him; she's just wacky like that.)

The film sort of wants to concern itself with issues of free will and predestination, but given that Cris can avoid any unwanted consequences of his actions (and does so, frequently) that's sort of moot. Or paradoxical, I guess. Not that it really matters, because Next is a brain-meltingly stupid film. The plot makes no sense, whatsoever - the terrorist plot doesn't actually hold water, the FBI randomly resort to illegal acts and arsing around with psychics rather than actually doing their jobs, and Cage... well, he's actually kind of subdued, by his standards, though he's by far the star of the show because no-one else is even bothering to phone in a performace. It's more like they've texted it in. Julianne Moore seems to be under the impression that she's supposed to be playing Jodie Foster circa Silence of the Lambs, Jessica Biel is pretty but totally pointless, and, um, was there even anyone else in this movie?

The only thing that makes Next worth watching is the final third, where everything goes utterly batshit. In order to visually depict Cris's foretelling of the different outcomes of his actions, you get multiple Nic Cages onscreen at the same time, and there's one bit where he sort of becomes a CGI Cage blur as Cris figures out exactly how to duck in order to avoid getting hit by a bullet. It's beautiful, but completely insane. But my favourite bit, which surpasses bullet-time Cage and the Clockwork Orange homage, is the moment when Cris realises that he's made a wrong move somewhere along the line, and rewinds half the movie, as if he were a character in a computer game returning to the last save point before everything went wrong. I've long said that I'm desperate to see a computer game movie that uses that device - a character getting something wrong and dying only to restart again from the last checkpoint - so seeing it here was an unexpected but delightful surprise.

Sadly, there's very little shouting and no whole arm pointing whatsoever in this film, so it never quite matches the dizzying brilliance of Ghost Rider. It's still good clean Cage fun, though.

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June is Nic Cage Appreciation Month!

I know, we're already more than a week into June, which makes it a little bit late to declare it anything-month. But I am, right now, declaring June to be Nicolas Cage Appreciation Month.

Once upon a time, I really didn't like Nic Cage. I couldn't tell you why, exactly, but I found him really off-putting and would deliberately avoid watching movies he starred in.

Then, Ghost Rider happened, and my Nic Cage movie viewing history was immediately divided into two distinct halves: BGR (before Ghost Rider) and AGR (after Ghost Rider). In the latter part, I acknowledged that Nic Cage is, after all, a complete and utter fucking genius. The man can turn any role and turn it into an Elvis impression - he can take any script and turn it into a winking, smirking Cage comedy. He's brilliant.

So, to celebrate, I'm laying in every Nic Cage movie I can get my hands on, watching them, and then writing about 'em here. I possibly need a brand new ratings system to implement for this, but I'll work out the wrinkles as we go along. (If you want to play, feel free! Please leave me a comment with a link to any Cage-related insights you make this month. Or don't. Y'know, it's not obligatory - it's just awesome.)

Let the Cage commence!