In Which "Vampire's Kiss" Damns Twilight to 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 watch Knowing, 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.

Things That I Have to Look Forward to. No, I Mean, I MUST Look Forward to.

There are so many.

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.

Let Me. Tell You. About "Knowing".

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.