Nicolas Cage has been in over 60 films and counting throughout his career. Join me as I watch one each week and share my thoughts on them and the legendary man that's drawn me to them.
It's been a very long time since I did a Cage Quest review. To be honest, I think a big part of it was G-Force absolutely sucking all enthusiasm that I previously had for this project right out of the depths of my soul, but the other part of it was probably just my life catching up with me. However, one must make time for Cage. Cage makes time for all of us, so why not return the favor? So, let me first take a moment to apologize to you, Nic, for spending so much of my time not watching your movies and filling my life with gladness. However, in the time that I haven't been watching your movies, Drive Angry came out, so there's just another one for me to eventually tuck under my belt. And I'm really, really excited to see that one.
Anyway, this week's selection comes to us courtesy of my roommate, who left two Blockbuster rentals on the floor of our apartment for me to find upon coming home with a note praising both. I think it was meant to be that this movie was one of the two, so I went into this with a smile on my face and my fingers crossed, expecting the typical Cage greatness.
This...is Season of the Witch.
I love Nicolas Cage, and I love Ron Perlman. So of course, the fact that the two of them star side-by side in this movie is a huge plus for me. Cage plays Behmen and Perlman plays Felson, both of them Teutonic Knights fighting in what I'm supposed to believe are the Crusades. However, let's stop right there and consider this. The battle shown starting not six minutes into the movie is of such a ridiculous green-screen-desert-scene scale that there's no way the battle could have taken place during the major crusades, which had (as is common knowledge) pretty much ended by the 13th century, while this film takes place in the 14th century. So, not only is the history wrong, but it's obscenely wrong, and utterly ridiculous.
Anyway, after some slow-motion, CGI-blood-filled battle scene where Cage and Perlman joke about the man who kills the most men earning free drinks that night (because slaughter merits free alcohol!), we get some delightful soundtrack of that singer-that-might-be-singing-Latin-but-no-one-is-ever-sure-and-never-talks-about-it, and then we find ourselves in the pub with Cage and Perlman, celebrating with alcohol and women, and then IMMEDIATELY BACK to the slow-motion fight scenes. We go through like five of these, all with ridiculous slow-motion and everyone always wearing the same outfits (although when they're in the snow, they do wear nice fur shawls). I really didn't need five minutes of this onslaught of stabs and "epic" music. It was all just more than a little silly.
Then Cage makes a mistake in the dark and stabs a lady in the chest! And that gives him some epiphany about how they're actually killing people, I guess? And he sees all these dead women and children and is like "DAMNNNNNNNNNNN" and Perlman looks at him and they just. Almost cry. It's so silly.
My name's Hellboy and baaaaaaaAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
Cage and Perlman run outside to cry to their leader, who talks down to them. Cage snarls some wittiness under his breath and Ron Perlman continues to be a very attractive old man.
One month later, Cage and Perlman are wandering around aimlessly in their now battle-free life, and they come across a farmhouse with a long-dead owner, who had suffered from the bubonic plague. Despite not knowing what the plague looks like, they burn the house down and leave.
Arson: always the best choice.
After reaching a town and trying to get proper horses to take them away, Cage fucks up by letting the merchant see the crest on his sword, and soldiers come to detain them. They try to fight the soldiers off, with some awesome ridiculousness involving Cage warding off crossbow arrows with a dagger, but the two of them are eventually captured and taken to see some old dude with the plague who's bedridden and surrounded by doctors. The dude and a priest say that the plague is a curse from the Black Witch, who Behmen needs to take somewhere special to have her burned and free the people from the plague. Cage refuses and Perlman looks snide.
Perlman continues to make witty, Hellboy-esque banter, and both of them are imprisoned, where they see the supposed witch for the first time. Some shit happens with a dream sequence and the girl crying that makes Cage change his mind? I don't know. Shit makes no sense. He looks like he's sympathetic, but then he's like "okay, let's go burn this bitch."
Anyway, then pretty much nothing happens for about an hour. They're traveling to this other city, they lose her, they go find her, and they continue on. The whole way she's manipulating them to make them think that she's good. However, we already know that witches do exist in this world because there was a witch-hanging scene at the beginning of the movie where one of the three women hanged actually was a witch and came back from the dead. So, it's pretty obvious how this one is going to end from the very beginning.
Oh, and there's a LORD OF THE RINGS SWEEPING AIR SHOT OF TRAVEL!!! Those are always fun.
Probably the best scene from the tavel montage is when the group is attacked by a bunch of demon-wolves in the middle of the night. The CGI used to make the wolves look more menacing is some of the most ridiculous shit I've ever seen, and I could do nothing but laugh, even as the group's guide was eaten alive.
A-HERP
A-DERPPPPP
Anyway, with about twenty-some minutes left in the entire movie (including the credits), the group finally arrives at the monastery or whatever it is, only to find that all of the monks had died of the plague. The priest in the group tries to use the incantation in the Key of Solomon against witches, but somehow the girl exposes herself as possessed instead of a demon? It's not really explained...? Who fucking knows. So they try to exorcise her and then all this crazy shit happens with the demon coming out and using the dead monks' bodies as weapons? And everyone dies. Everybody. Dies. Including Cage. Shit fucking sucks. But I guess the demon is defeated or whatever by the altar boy. Yawn. YAWWWWNNN.
Good winking death face, though, Cage.
This movie is absolutely ridiculous. The only thing it's good for is Nic Cage and Ron Perlman in capes and looking rugged, dramatic Cage one-liners followed by him turning and walking haughtily away, and music overlain with that who-knows-what-language-they're-speaking-in singer. This is one of those Cage movies that is there solely for Nic to look confused 80% of the time and pissed off the rest of the time. It's nowhere near as bad as G-Force, not by a long shot, but even the fact that Cage and Perlman are both in it isn't enough to redeem it. It's boring. I spent most of the movie wishing it would be over, and just because I had better things to be doing. So.
Mr. Cage, I'm going to have to give this one only 1.5 demon possessions out of 5. It had none of the hilarious charm that Knowing had, but it was still nowhere near as bad as G-Force. Cage, you can do better. Shakin my damn head, bro. (Though you really should wear capes more often.)
This review is loooong overdue. I watched this movie ages ago, but life caught up with me and I just haven't had time to sit down and do it. So, as punishment, now I have to write up THREE REVIEWS this week. That means three times the fun, three times the excitement, three times the groans of absolute disgust. Well...not necessarily. If the other two movies that I review are anything like this one, I think that we might all get out of this alive, after all.
This...is Gone in 60 Seconds.
Cage plays Randall Raines, a retired master car thief, who has to return to Los Angeles and steal 50 cars in 3 days for British crime boss Raymond Calitri. That's pretty much the whole movie. Calitri has some freakish obsession with furniture which later proves to be his one weakness, and Cage doesn't even show up until like...10 minutes into the movie. Anything and everything is better than fucking G-Force, though.
So British McKitchenChairs is threatening to kill Cage's younger brother, Kip a.k.a. "The Douchebag of this Movie Who Will Later Have an Epiphany About What a Dick He Is" , in his car compactor at some bigass metal junkyard, after Kip and his associates don't make the deadline to deliver some stolen cars at the beginning of the movie, thanks to Kip being a huge tool and drag racing in a stolen vehicle/attracting the attention of the police, who raid the warehouse where Kip's team was collecting the cars and impound all of the cars. All of them. Cage makes a deal with Amish Horse'n'Buggy McGinty that he'll steal 50 cars for him by I guess it's a Friday to save his brother's life, and in order to do this, Cage reassembles his old team of badass car thieves which include an old dude who works as a repairman I guess, Angelina Jolie with the worst hair ever, and some tall badass motherfucker who doesn't talk. Some of Kip's stupid friends also join the crew.
Roland Castlebeck, the baddest cop ever, and his partner (whose name is unimportant, and honestly who I thought had a crush on Castlebeck for like 15 minutes of the movie) are the two cops who are trying to catch Cage in the act, remembering what a badass car thief he was back in the day. They're actually pretty good cops and they almost catch the gang at several points in the heist, which takes place all in one night in order to keep suspicion to a minimum.
Castlebeck uses some Saw-style forensics to find Kip's list of cars from his crew's failed night of thieving, and he predicts that Cage will save the 1967 Shelby Mustang GT 500 for last because Cage has unsuccessfully tried to steal that same car numerous times and he refers to it as his "unicorn". He's right, of course, and this leads to a FUCKING AWESOME CHASE SCENE which I think should just be edited into every Cage movie ever to increase the badassery by 20%, even if it's completely irrelevant. Hell, G-Force might have actually been watchable if this chase scene were in it. That's how awesome the chase is. Seriously, even if you don't want to watch this movie, watch the chase scene. Do it.
Cage shows up late to drop off the last car, and Don Pip-Pip Cheerio basically looks at it and says "this is a piece of shit, I'm going to kill you instead of your brother, so there lol". Kip shows up after having his epiphany about what a huge douche he is to save Cage, and Cage, Castlebeck, and Harry Potter have an on-foot chase scene through the warehouse or whatever that ends with Calitri falling to his death in a really hilariously bad show of special effects. In an act of gratitude for saving his life, and understanding his motive for returning to car thievery for one night only to save his brother's life, Castlebeck lets Cage out the cage before the other police arrive to arrest his ass.
What the hell even is there to say about this movie? This movie is about two things: cars, and Nicolas Cage. I say cars first because the cars are definitely the star of this movie. If you love cars, you will love this movie. If you love Cage, you will also love this movie. If you love Cage in cars, you will lose your shit over this movie. Nicolas Cage needs to be in a high-speed police chase in every single movie that he's in, period. This movie was fun to watch, especially since it was on ABC Family for some reason? So all of the swearing was bleeped out hilariously. Why the hell was this on ABC Family? This is about people committing multiple felonies, and there is so much shooting and GETTING SHOT and sex and drugs in this movie...
You know what, I'm not even going to ask. Good job Cage, this movie gets 4 1967 Shelby Mustang GT 500's out of 5. Fun to watch, even with Angie Jolie's ugly-ass hair all up in my face for an hour and a half.
I was scheduled to watch The Family Man this week, but time betrayed me and now it's Saturday. In all honesty, I haven't watched it yet. It's sitting collecting dust on my hard drive at the moment, but it will be watched. I assure you. Wild at Heart and Gone in 60 Seconds are both sitting half-watched on my TiVo downstairs: I know, I know, I'm betraying my code of watching-then-reviewing. But there's a reason for that. Because the abomination that I'm reviewing this week instead of The Family Man is nothing like those (so far enjoyable) pieces of cinematic mastery. I'm in fact dreading doing this review almost as much as I dreaded watching the movie itself, because writing it means re-living the godawful, nothing-but-torturous experience that exposing my eyes and ears to this pile of feces was.
Brace yourself.
This...is G-Force.
If you lived through that, let's get started. I'll try my very best to make this quick and painless.
G-Force is about talking guinea pigs. There's no nicer way to say that. They have some kind of advanced earpiece (not explained) that Zach Galifinakis' character made (God damn you, Zach Galifinakis) and they are also apparently "specially-bred and genetically enhanced". There are three of them (later four): Darwin, the white one, Juarez, the Hispanic one, and Blaster, the black one. The most important character is Speckles the mole, voiced by your favorite and mine, Nicolas Cage.
Let's plow through this "plot". The Wikipedia article for this movie has a plot section that's about five paragraphs long. At the top of the section is the annotation that "the plot section is too detailed/long and needs to be more concise". Really, I think that they just wanted it to be shorter so that fewer people would blow their brains out trying to read about this movie, if for some reason they had to. Some God-forsaken reason. I pity the fool. And myself.
Basically, these multicultural guinea pigs are "superspies" that work for Zach G and his weird girlfriend in some laboratory, and they go on an unauthorized mission to get data on some billionaire who's supposedly installing evil computer chips in all of the appliances that his company makes. The FBI shuts them down and the guinea pigs and Speckles end up in a pet store, and meet another guinea pig named Hurley. Speckles fakes his death and gets thrown into the garbage. The guinea pigs get taken home by weird children, escape, and make their way back to Zach G.
Zach's like "lol you're not special/genetically-altered", the guinea pigs baww, Hurley's like "LOL NAW YOU GUYS ROCK", they get psyched, nobody gives a shit except for the guinea pigs and Zach, because seriously...what the fuck is this movie, I couldn't even deal with this shit half of the time. It's so overloaded with shitty pop-culture references and just FULL TO BURSTING with Black Eyed Peas music for some reason...and oh my god, Disney, you need to learn when toilet humor is actually funny. Fart jokes are funny when they're subtle and well-executed, not when you have guinea pigs lighting each others' farts on fire in a pet store and shit like that. Toilet humor is an art. An art that Disney fails to grasp. And it's painful.
Let me pause for a moment here to say that within the first six minutes of this movie, I wanted to kill myself ten times. This movie is eighty-eight minutes long. That means that, by that standard, I wanted to kill myself about a hundred and forty-seven times throughout the movie's run. Though believe me, it was well into the two hundred range.
You know what? I'm not even going to finish talking about the plot of this movie, because it's just not even worth talking about. You want to know what happens at the end? Everyone lives and the villain gets his comeuppance. It's a Disney movie. That's what happens. All the $150 million CGI couldn't cover up the shitty plot and the shitty jokes and the shitty music choices that tried to make this movie "hip" and "cool for the whole family". If I were a parent and my child wanted to see this movie, I would tell them that no, no they did not. And then we would watch Babe. Because if you want to watch a movie where animals talk, you should at least watch one that's fucking good.
You could probably play a drinking game while you're watching this movie. I would call it the "Disney Blacksploitation Drinking Game", because the black guinea pig is treated like shit throughout the entire movie/is pegged as the stupidest character/consistently fits the black stereotype. You would be drunk off your ass by about the 25-minute mark. Take a shot every time Blaster says something stupid, or something stereotypically black. Good luck being alive in the morning.
And now, let me raise another fine question, here: why the HELL are these guinea pigs different ethnicities?! I mean I get that they wanted to have a star-studded voice cast, but oh my fucking god, there is just something so goddamn grating about that. When animals are voiced by POC, and you can tell that they're supposed to represent that ethnicity. You have to stereotype to do that, and it's just disturbing. Why is this allowed to happen? Why is this okay for kids to watch? Aren't we supposed to be teaching children about equality? How is this helping that?!
Don't watch this movie. Just don't. There is no reason to watch it. Not if you like Nic Cage, not if you like Zach Galifinakis, not if you like the Black Eyed Peas...well, I guess if you like racial stereotyping, you can watch it, but fucking seriously. Seriously, Disney? This is atrocious. Every few years, Disney just puts something out that makes me want to vomit, and this is one of those movies. I hate myself a little more for sitting through this piece of bullshit. I can't believe that this grossed as much as it did. God damn stupid kids. Please, parents. Please. Make your children watch Babe or Homeward Bound. Just...please. For the sake of the future.
I am sickened by this movie. Not even Nicolas Cage could make this better. Zero out of five hamster pellets. Rot in hell, G-Force. Rot in guinea pig HELL.
Laughing. Screaming. Crying. The things one does for Cage.
I have to admit that I was much more excited to watch this movie than I was to watchKnowing, so I actually sat down and watched it on my computer so that I could take notes on it rather than watching it on the television. My summary might be a bit more stop-and-go "this is what happens" and less summation as a result, but this is really a movie that needs to be watched carefully, absorbed bit-by-bit, and savored like a fine cut of meat, so an in-depth summary is really the best way to go.
This...is Vampire's Kiss.
Supposed present-day (which is, at this time, the eighties). The movie opens with a nice, haunting orchestral piece accompanying the credit sequence and shots of New York City, cutting shortly after to a scene of Cage (character name Peter) at his psychiatrist's office, on the couch. Cage has an almost indeterminate accent in this movie, despite being in New York. He's also almost...dare I say it...? Distractingly handsome in the beginning of the movie, though this quickly goes to hell. He's telling his psychiatrist about the events of the night before, when he'd been out clubbing and he'd picked up a girl and brought her back to his apartment (a regular occurrence for him). His accent is absolutely atrocious, and at this point I can't tell if he's actually trying to sound English or not. There's a long, somewhat awkward sequence of Cage and his ladyfriend stripping and engaging in foreplay, which is interrupted by an embarrassingly awful animatronic bat that Cage eventually chases out of his apartment. He and the girl head off on the town again.
Later on the next day, Cage is at work (at a literary agency) being a douchebag to everyone, especially Alva, one of his secretaries, who has very unfortunate 80's shoulder pads and whom he tasks with the job of finding a long-lost contract. Cage creeps on some people that are kissing outside of his window in his typical Cagey fashion while some off-putting clarinet music plays. He returns to his apartment after work to find his window still open from the night before and the bat nowhere to be found. He does, however, find his socks.
Cut back to his psychiatrist's office where she's trying to psychoanalyze him based on his story. Cage admits that the bat turned him on while he was fighting it off, barring the fact that he was DRUNK AS HELL when this happened (god I wish I could make that text flash, that would really emphasize how ridiculous that scene sounds when he's explaining it), and he was about to have sex with a girl moments before. His psychiatrist stares at the floor, totally aghast after Cage leaves. That evening, Cage gets dressed to some horrible synth piano + backbeat music and goes out on the town again because he's SUCH A LADYKILLER. He meets a girl named Rachel, whom he predictably takes back to his apartment, where, after they have sex, she bites his neck and drinks his blood, putting him into a trance. The next morning, he prepares coffee for “Rachel”, who's no longer there.
Cage goes on a date with another woman, but he's so distracted by thoughts of Rachel that he walks out on the new girl. He goes back to his psychiatrist's office, totally despondent and denying his arousal at the bat. Cage goes back to work and is a dick to Alva again. Dick to Alva count: 2. Then he leaves work, miserable.
Rachel's bite keeps bothering him. The twinges of pain that he feels are hilarious: he shows pain by clapping a hand to his neck and baring his teeth, opening and closing his mouth like a dying fish. Cage probably makes the greatest faces of his career in this movie: he goes from Zoolander-style Blue Steel one moment to...well...
...Yeah. Let's move on.
To try to get over it, Cage calls the girl from the bat-freakout night again, setting up a date that he ends up blowing off because Rachel shows up at his apartment, claiming him as her lover and again seducing and biting him.
Cage goes to work the next day and literally scares the shit out of Alva (Dick to Alva count: 3), chasing her out of the office and into the women's bathroom. She threatens him with her gun and he's hit with a sudden wave of sympathy and fear when he notices the cross around her neck, leaving the bathroom awkwardly after that. Alva continues to look for the file, uncomfortable and scared. Cage recounts the story during a meeting and laughs with his coworkers. He then goes home to find a note from bat-incident girl in his mailbox, which he tears up, upset. He then proceeds to go insane and wreck his own apartment, knocking furniture over and breaking mirrors. If Cage went insane in every movie like that, he would win an Oscar for every one of them. Or, if he recites the alphabet and has a hissy fit. That would also work.
Cage starts wearing huge, ridiculous sunglasses to work because “it's too bright”. He calls Alva in to be buddy-buddy with her and ends up creeping on her again, berating her about not yet finding the contract (Dick to Alva count: 4). He has an incredible monologue about how Alva has a miserable job and how she has to do it because he tells her to and she can't afford to quit, his face getting creepier and creepier as he progresses through it. That scene alone proves that Cage is a good actor: he comes down from it so quickly that it's eerie, begging her to use her gun on him immediately after she leaves.
Rachel is still haunting Cage, keeping him from answering his phone and continuing to suck his blood, which leaves him in a state of euphoria after each encounter, but miserable all day long. The following day, Alva calls in sick to work and Cage looks up her address, going to her house to track her down. He's nice to her and asks her to come to work, convincing her to take the taxi back into the city with him, only to pitch another fit at her about the lost contract and half-vomit in the taxi (Dick to Alva count: 5). It's a thing of beauty, really. The cab driver tells Cage about his wife—probably the third encounter that Cage has had with the idea of true love and marriage in the movie so far (this is not even an hour into the movie yet). Meanwhile, Alva is talking to her brother at a gas station, begging him to give her bullets for her gun. He gives her blanks because that's all that he has. At work again, Cage threatens Alva again (Dick to Alva count: 6) Following that, Cage has a hilarious scene where he hallucinates not seeing himself in the mirror, much to the chagrin of another man in a stall. Panicking, Cage hides in a corner of his office and weeps, thinking that he's become a vampire, himself.
That night, Alva finally finds the contract as Rachel is drinking from the unconscious Cage. When he wakes up, he hallucinates the cab driver telling him about his wife again, and as romantic music plays, he opens the door to his office to find Alva with the contract, victorious. He tells her that it's too late and chases her through the office again (Dick to Alva count: 7!!!), following her all the way down the stairs in spite of her screaming. He begs her to shoot him, threatening to rape her if she doesn't, but she just shoots her blanks at the floor. He tears her dress open and starts to kiss her, but Alva turns into Rachel, who laughs as Cage tries to shoot himself in the mouth with the blanks. Thinking himself immortal, Cage cries in THE FUNNIEST WAY IMAGINABLE and then tells Alva that he's a vampire, ripping her cross off of her neck and then running down the street, screaming that HE'S A VAMPIRE!!! HE'S A VAMPIRE!!! HE'S A VAMPIRE!!! HE'S A VAMPIRE!!!
He ransacks his own apartment AGAIN, breaking every mirror and throwing shit all over the place, blocking his windows with clothes and sheets and making a makeshift coffin to sleep in out of his overturned couch and some books. Rachel laughs at him, telling him that he's “completely with her” and telling him that he knows what he needs to do. Cage battles with himself, sobbing and biting his pillow to simulate biting the neck of a human being. He avoids the sunlight and is distraught by the fact that he doesn't have vampire fangs. Alva, meanwhile, is also bedridden and sobbing, traumatized from her experience the day before. Cage goes to the costume store and buys fake vampire teeth, making his way to a payphone to call his psychiatrist to try to make his appointment sooner than its scheduled Tuesday afternoon time. He then chases after pigeons in the park until he catches one, stuffs it into his jacket, and takes it home, eating it.
Cage is still wearing the ridiculous fake plastic vampire teeth at this point, and after sleeping a full day away, he goes out to a club in search of a human neck to bite. At this point he bears an eerily strong resemblance to Nosferatu, which is a nice, none-too-subtle touch adding to the movie's charm. He finds a young woman in a back room who's all alone, and she laughs at him at first, until he eventually bites her neck to drink her blood and ends up accidentally severing her jugular vein, killing her. He leaves her and vomits. Rachel finds him and berates him, spitting in his face for his sad display and then leaving him for another victim. Cage stumbles through the dancing crowd at the club, throwing a fit and accusing Rachel of being a vampire, which gets him mocked and thrown out of the club.
Alva tells her brother about Cage trying to rape her, and the two of them go to find Cage at his apartment. Cage, meanwhile, is trying to stake himself, carrying around a broken 2x4, moaning, and begging people to kill him. He hallucinates that he's having his appointment with his therapist, and he tells her that he thinks that finding love will save him and cure his depression. His hallucination continues to him imagining meeting a woman that his therapist introduces him to in her “office”, which is really just the corner of his street.
Alva and her brother see Cage going into his apartment building, and Alva's brother follows Cage up to the apartment, breaking in and following him. Cage meanwhile is hallucinating an argument between himself and his imaginary girlfriend of ten minutes. When he finds Cage, Alva's brother stakes him with the severed 2x4, killing him.
Vampire's Kiss, as cheesy as it is at times, is a fun, entertaining movie, told more as a series of vignettes about the same character than as a continuous story. Cage's discomfort in his own skin is apparent from the very beginning. There are so many brief scenes in which Peter's madness truly shines through—the moments when he's talking to no one barely scratching the surface...the moment when he touches the mirror and hisses at the feeling of the glass and when he grabs and eats a bug skittering along his stove serving to better find a place in the crust of the situation. His madness progresses at a very realistic rate, and it's totally unclear whether he was hallucinating all along, or if Rachel truly was the vampire that he thought she was. The film starts out funny enough, but it gets quite dark and honestly disturbing just past the hour mark. It was marketed as a black comedy, and it's certainly on the darker end of that spectrum.
Though he could be accused of over-acting in this film, that really doesn't seem to be an appropriate accusation, at least from my perspective. His character, Peter, was depressed from the beginning, and his struggles with finding love and wanting to be romantically successful are very obvious from the start as well. He pretends to talk to a woman who isn't there several times as the movie progresses, imagining a happy life with a loving woman: a life that he'll never have.
The way the story is told, with progressive vignettes, really help to set the mood, and a lot happens quickly, but you don't feel overwhelmed watching it. Though there are obvious issues with a few things (Cage's accent undoubtedly being the worst offender) and there is a gratuitous amount of exposed female nipples, the costumes and makeup are wonderful, the music is spectacular, and the cast truly shines.
I'll give this four and a half bites out of five. I loved it. Way to go, Cage. Keep being Cagey.
One of the things about Nic Cage that's attracting me to him and his movies is his tendency to over-act, even when the situation doesn't call for it (and probably never will). Half of the time, it seems as though he's over-acting to make up for how terrible the movie he's in is: this was true for Knowing, and it's definitely going to be true for The Wicker Man, though we'll see how many others it's true for. I'll keep a running tally of how many times Cage over-acts inappropriately, and at the end of my Quest, I think it'll be interesting to look at the results of my studies.
In the meantime, I'm super-excited about a lot of the clips in this video. I'm watching Vampire's Kiss next week and it looks like it's going to be spectacular.
What happens when your lungs give out from laughing?
So Nicolas Cage is now a part of my life, like a third arm that I never asked for. Not a fully-functioning arm, though: just a shriveled-up, freaky, clawed baby hand that juts out of my back at an awkward angle and makes it uncomfortable for me to sit down. I’ve committed myself to watching at least one Cage movie a week until I’ve seen them all, and last week I watched the fabulous Con Air. Sadly, I didn’t review it, though I should have. I will revisit it again at the end of my journey. Today I watched Knowing. From now on, I’m going to do reviews as I watch every single one of Nicolas Cage's films, because those who haven’t seen his movies need to know the joy that they stand to provide.
This...is Knowing.
In 1959, the “weird girl” in a class of elementary school students (named Lucinda) hears the voices of, you guessed it, aliens. (I knew it from like, 5 minutes in, so no spoilers here). In honor of her school’s commemoration or something, Lucinda suggests that everyone in the class draw a picture to put into a time capsule to be opened in 50 years. She, of course, writes out the aliens’ message, which is a list of dates, coordinates, and the number of deaths for all of the disasters that are going to happen within the next 50 years. Her teacher puts her paper into the time capsule anyway, and that’s that.
Cut to 50 years later, and Nicolas Cage is hanging out with his son at their house in the woods. Cage plays some physicist named John who works at MIT and is depressed because he’s given up hope that there’s purpose in life ever since his wife died and he didn’t “know something was wrong” when she was burning to death. His deadpan, no-personality son, Caleb, is played by a sub-par child actor who exhibits the true extent of his talent within the first twenty minutes of the movie by ironically asking Cage’s character if he’s deaf when Cage asks Caleb when he was going to tell him that he’s decided to become a vegetarian. (It’s ironic because Caleb wears a hearing aid. But you don’t know that for a few more minutes).
Anyway, Cage is the most important part of this movie, so. He works too much, he’s the typical brooding, overworked single dad who’s hung up on the death of his wife (as evidenced by his sudden and creepy staring off into space in the midst of a lecture that he’s giving). His professor-buddy keeps trying to hook him up with new women, but Cage is having none of it. While in the midst of a conversation with his friend, Cage remembers that he’s missing the ceremony that celebrates the 50-year anniversary of the elementary school from the opening sequence. This is important because his son goes to this elementary school and they’re unearthing the time capsule that day.
Caleb of course gets the envelope that has Lucinda’s message in it, and he takes it home against the wishes of the school officials. Cage finds it and tells Caleb that he needs to take it back the next day, but then he gets drunk and while he’s cleaning up a spill that he’s made, he notices the following sequence of numbers:
911012996
Which he links to September 11th and the 2996 deaths that occurred on that day. He spends all night in a drunken fury, finding more and more disasters and death tolls, and the next day he shows his work buddy the paper, discredited by the fact that there are gaps full of numbers that he can’t yet explain. However, Cage quickly discovers the meaning of the remaining numbers when his GPS shows the coordinates of his location on the day that the next sequential event is supposed to take place. It’s a plane crash that happens in terrible CGI and of course the predicted 81 people die.
Meanwhile, Caleb is visited by strange men with white hair who don’t speak and make his hearing aid buzz. Cage, instead of shooting them, plays the clueless dad who just lets these things keep happening. One of the best encounters between Caleb and the strangers happens in his bedroom, when one of them shows him a vision of the world outside his window on fire (the CGI of the forest animals all aflame and flipping shit is absolutely beautiful, and by beautiful I mean hilarious). After that encounter, Cage runs outside with a flashlight and a baseball bat in hand, screaming and shooting the beam of light everywhere imaginable. He asks the strangers if they “want some of this”, he hits a tree with the bat, and then goes back inside.
Anyway. Cage starts to stalk Lucinda’s daughter, Diana, and granddaughter, Abby, when he learns that she’s died recently, and when confronted with the information that her mother left behind, Diana discredits Cage and runs away, until a huge subway accident happens in Manhattan that Cage warned her would occur. When Cage gets home after the subway incident, Diana is at his house with her daughter and she tells him about a house that Lucinda had built in the woods to “get ready”. Cage, Diana, and their children go into the woods to the house, and Diana points out that at the end of the list of numbers that Lucinda had written, there are two letters written backwards instead of the usual death toll: “EE”. While in the house (and while the kids are still in the car!!!), Cage and Diana discover that EE means “Everyone Else”. Caleb and Abby, meanwhile, are almost kidnapped by the strangers. Cage continues to be clueless. He follows one of the strangers into the woods and it pulls some ridiculous X-Files shit on him by opening its mouth and blinding him with a flash of light. That’s about it, though.
Yadda yadda, Cage discovers that there’s going to be a huge solar flare the following day, he calls his father to warn him to get underground but he doesn’t listen, Diana goes crazy and takes the kids to try to hide in caves, Cage flips out on the phone and screams that THE CAVES WON’T SAVE US!!!, the strangers kidnap the kids, Diana dies because she’s an idiot. Cage follows the final sequence of coordinates back to the woods to Lucinda’s house, and the kids are there with the strangers, who are—no surprise—aliens. They want to take the kids to repopulate a new planet with humans (why? It isn’t explained), but Cage must stay behind.
It would have been awesome if the movie had just ended after Caleb and Abby are taken aboard the spaceship, because Cage just falls down into this mass of rocks and sobs until he falls asleep, but there’s a brief sequence of him driving through an apocalyptic city to get to his parents’ house, where he hugs them and his sister before THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD CATCHES ON FIRE.
Yeah, that’s right. Everyone fucking dies.
Cut to some shitty CGI world reminiscent of the top of the moon in Majora’s Mask, where Caleb and Abby are living carefree and happy as the last two humans in the world.
So.
Knowing is every bit as atrocious as I was expecting it to be. Maybe even more so. But the sad part is, Cage was actually trying pretty hard. I mean, he was his regular goofy self in this movie, but he did a good job in his role. I could tell he was actually depressed about how shitty this movie was. It was very convincing.
Like I said, if it had ended before the “end of the world” sequence, it would have been so much more satisfying. Instead, it pulled an “I’M NOT AN M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN MOVIE”, and it showed us a bunch of bullshit that was just thrown in there to use up the bulk of their CGI budget (which they should have just spent on earlier sequences to make them less shitty). The story was bad, the acting was bad (except for Cage, though he was probably just the best of the worst), and the CGI was bad. The music was horrible, except for the classical piece that played recurringly throughout the film.
I’m going to have to give this one two prophecies out of five. Sorry, Cage, but this is no national treasure.
