Category Archives: Ed Harris

Announcing The Return of the Full-On Cage Experience

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Recently I defended Michael Bay (while simultaneously expressing how odious his movies can be), and now I rush to the defense of another man used as a lazy punchline to a billion deeply unfunny jokes about bad cinema: the acting colossus called Nicolas Cage. As with Bay, Cage is treated like a cautionary tale about how that vile, Chthonic monolith called Hollywood can drive people insane with greed, how talented individuals can lose their way and begin a descent from making art to making dross. He is accused of sleepwalking through films, cashing checks, appearing in unworthy crowd-pleasing dreck, and working with anti-cinematic infidels. His personal life is raked over (he keeps impulsively marrying women! He calls his kid a silly name! He buys too much crap!), his eccentricities treated as signs of mental illness, and his success used as example number two in the case against modern culture (example one being the success of Bay). Only Ben Affleck is treated with less respect, a fact that I intend to address in a future post where I defend him too. (I’m serious about that. Affleck is awesome.)

There are millions who seem to love to take a short-cut in thinking and just refer to Cage as a has-been with no understanding of what a joke he has become, though Cage’s most famous critic has been Sean Penn, the former friend who once told the New York Times, “Nic Cage is no longer an actor. He could be again, but now he’s more like a…performer”. This was said around the time that Cage appeared in two Bruckheimer productions — The Rock and Con Air — which seems to be the one thing an artist can do that will sink his credibility. Why did Penn single out Cage for that and not Cage’s co-stars Ed Harris, or Sean Connery, or John Cusack, or John Malkovich? They’re respected actors who have won awards and are considered to be fine actors, but Cage falls into the line of fire for moving from carefully considered character pieces like Leaving Las Vegas to action movies, three of which he did in a row (the third being the classic John Woo SF actioner Face/Off). His wildly broad performances in those movies were almost certainly a factor, but then he has always given broad performances, within which lie subtle moments (see also Wild At Heart, Birdy, Peggy Sue Got Married, etc.). They’re entertaining displays of eye-rolling crowd-pleasing acting pyrotechnics, but there’s a soul there too. This is what I think of as getting The Full-On Cage Experience, with madness and soulfulness tied together. Penn could never pull off anything like that. When he mugs, he ends up wrecking the movie.

By all that’s holy and unholy, how much better was Penn in Milk, or Dead Man Walking (incidentally, that’s one of my favourite screen performances of all time)? It’s not even a fair competition. Besides, this accusation, insinuating that Cage is no longer an actor, is rich coming from someone who appeared in I Am Sam. I’ll take an entertaining and unpretentious actor having fun playing a demonic avenger with a flaming skull than some humourless chide wasting his talent on Oscar-baiting bullshit like that any day of the week. Sadly, Penn’s not the only one who thinks Cage has pissed his talent away. In this little essay, Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman compares Cage to Dr. Wesley T. Snipes, which is prescient considering Cage’s current tax woes, but while Snipes has descended into Direct-To-DVD hell, Cage is still working on big-budget movies and smaller curios, still attracting the viewing public, and still cranking out performances that are — at best — thrilling, and — at worst — merely entertaining.

The one argument that genuinely annoys me is the one where Cage is cranking out piss-poor, lazy performances since his last truly astonishing performance in Jonze and Kaufman’s Adaptation. I’ve often said that I think his work in that (along with his work in Leaving Las Vegas and Raising Arizona) deserves a coveted Shades of Caruso Free Pass…

freepass

…but of all the movies he has made since, only three performances really disappointed me: his work as Benjamin Gates in the first National Treasure movie, where he seemed awfully tired; his creepy performance in Next, the empty action thriller adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s clever short story; and his catatonic turn as a greasy-haired loser assassin in the disastrous remake of Bangkok Dangerous, which I suspect he took so he could get a holiday in Thailand. That last one really did give me cause for concern, but Gleiberman likes to make out that Cage is regularly signing on for “grade-Z genre schlockers”, which apparently include Ghost Rider and The Wicker Man. Neither of them are good movies, but they were not developed as low-budget cash-ins. Ghost Rider was obviously meant to be a big comic book adaptation, with a pretty good cast and a $110m budget, and even if it was absolutely dire, it was made with love by fans of the character, of which Cage is one.

The Wicker Man is a dumb-ass movie by any standards, but it’s made by Neil LaBute, who was once a promising director. He could have turned in a thoughtless remake of the excellent original (which would fit under Gleiberman’s umbrella of “genre schlocker”) but instead made something personal, for better or worse. For all its faults it’s obviously of a part with his other movies, dealing with his favourite themes of misanthropy, deceit, misogyny, fear of opening up to others, and gynophobia. I’ve occasionally argued that The Wicker Man is a satire on male fear of impotence and castration, a paranoid comical fantasy about a scheming cabal of exaggerated feminist ballbreakers who are out to destroy the penis, turning all men into drones and semen-donors whose sexuality is merely a sacrifice of power to the almighty womb in order to replenish the earth with children.

Sadly, even if this was LaBute’s intention — and even if Cage was in on this project for that reason alone — it’s still ridiculous and poorly made and filled with wonderfully camp moments. Cage maintains that the comedic aspects of the movie were not lost on him. In an interview with Spike Jonze, Drew McWeeny discusses meeting Cage, and Jonze is full of praise:

Jonze: I love [Cage]. We had the best time working together. He really works and focuses.
McWeeny: His publicist was a little wary of me being there, I guess, because he doesn’t do a lot of press and he doesn’t allow press around a lot, but he really was very accessible once I’d been there for a few days, and he kind of warmed up to me. And he was really just fascinating. I loved chatting with him about stuff.
Jonze: Totally chill.
McWeeny: Yeah. And I think far more self-aware than most people think. Like I think some people think Nic is in this vacuum and doesn’t realize how crazy some of his performances are. I got the feeling he was totally aware of how people perceive things. We were talking about THE WICKER MAN, and he was like, “How do people call that an unintentional comedy? I’m in a bear suit kicking Lelee Sobieski in the throat. I know it’s funny.”
Jonze: He just takes it so seriously that nobody knows how to take him. Like PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED, I was like, “What is that?” Like I was 15 so I didn’t really know.
McWeeny: I just love how you can always count on him to push things further, like VAMPIRE’S KISS. He ate a roach, man.
Jonze: And also just the insanity of that performance, just the balls-out fearlessness.

Is it enough that Cage is aware of the ridiculousness of the movies he is appearing in? For me it is. I strongly suspect Cage is the most easily bored person in the world, and unfortunately that is paired with the ability to get work in movies that pay millions of dollars for him to spend on cars and comics and castles. Some of the films he has been in lately are truly awful, and I would never argue that they weren’t. Neverthless, I watch them for those flashes of manic commitment from Cage — The Partial Cage Experience — that delight me so. Are they valid acting choices, or is he merely trying to entertain himself while he trudges through formulaic populist bilge? As far as I’m concerned, even if he’s merely trying to entertain himself, he succeeding in entertaining me, and surely that’s what counts.

The only other popular actors that delight me as much are Clooney (who can do pathos and comedy equally well), Streep (who is always the best thing about everything she has ever been in), and maybe Jeff Bridges. Even those fine actors have not given me as much pleasure as Cage does, even when you forget about his early, golden years and concentrate on this bizarre stretch of poor movies. Since Adaptation we’ve had the insanity of Not The Bees…

…a literally hysterical fiery transformation…

…a Shout-Off with Rose Byrne (who is utterly overmatched, despite her invention of the word “chuldren”)…

…a run in with an obnoxious know-it-all child (the best part of which is how he treats the kid like an adult for most of the scene)…

…and a frustrating teaser of what could be his finest hour, if ever Rob Zombie got the money to make it…

His willingness to make fun of himself is the thing that keeps his crazy public and professional persona viable, and though many of his actions seem completely deranged, I honestly believe he’s playing a trick on us. Can someone who makes a series of adverts like these really be unintentionally weird?

(N.B. Anyone who has a sense of humour about themselves gets a break from me. Even the reportedly tyrannical and insensitive director Michael Bay gets points for playing up to his image with this commercial for Verizon:)

I’m a fully paid up Cage fan. For entertainment value, he can’t be beat. To see a person with such intelligence, quirkiness, restlessness, fearlessness, and energy do his thing in such big-screen movies is a rare thrill. If I squint I can see why Cage is now considered a hack by critics and film-watchers, because it’s easy to confuse being in a terrible movie and actually being terrible, but I worry that maybe people are also turned off by his intensity and his allegiance to the weird. The odd soporific performance aside, perhaps what baffles people the most is seeing him devote so much energy to projects that they feel don’t deserve it. Personally, I think that’s admirable. He’s getting paid enough, after all. Dance, you fucking monkey! Dance for your millions!

And yet even though I revel in his passionate and unpredictable work in crud, I’ve become concerned that we would never get another performance out of Cage that is as electrifying as his best work (disclaimer: I’ve not seen Lord of War or The Weather Man, and some have said he gives solid, rounded performances in both). Once upon a time he would work with Lynch and Scorsese, and the performances he gave were over-the-top yet grounded in some kind of emotional profundity, but lately those performances — while entertaining, memorable, and stronger than popular wisdom would have you believe — are lacking that extra fire. Well, I’m happy to report the return of The Full-On Cage Experience, as he takes on the task of being the 21st Century Klaus Kinski. More on that tomorrow, when I review Werner Herzog’s excellent Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

Adventures in Heinous: Boycott Turner Classic Movies!

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Much to our perpetual amazement, we have found that we actually control TV with nothing more than our brainwaves. All we have to do is discuss a film that one of us hasn’t seen, proselytise about it at length, and make vague comments about hiring it out or buying it cheap. Then, voila, it turns up on TV a few days later. It has happened so often we’re starting to take our power for granted. Surely this could be harnessed for good somehow? We could move to China and talk about Kundun a lot, so that it magically appears on one of their state-sponsored channels at peak time. That should resolve that human rights catastrophe in time to stop Sharon Stone wrecking what’s left of her career because she just can’t stop herself from speaking out about injustice.


Re: our superpower, case in point. Just a week ago I went into praise overload about Philip Kaufman’s wonderful adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. I can’t remember why I suddenly started on about it; perhaps it had something to do with overdosing on Geoff Johns’ brilliant run on Green Lantern, which is currently revisiting the test pilot past of Hal Jordan (calling all comic fans wandering past this blog; buy Green Lantern! It’s the easily the best DC title on the shelves right now). Whatever the reason for my rabid wild-eyed praise, I bent poor Canyon’s ear about the movie for a loooong time, a filibuster she endured with much stoicism, and said she would watch it if we got in on DVD. And then, as usual, it turned up on Turner Classic Movies a couple of days ago. Huzzah! Last night we watched it, thinking it would be a pleasing experience after a week of watching some really crappy movies, some of which were misguided (Flags Of Our Fathers, Catch and Release), and some of which were just flat-out dreadful (Nell, Pearl Harbor).

For the most part, it was a great antidote to all of the nonsense we have been watching recently, filled with superb performances (especially Ed Harris as John Glenn), beautiful photography by the legendary Caleb Deschanel, and skillful writing and direction by Kaufman at the height of his powers. I loved it when I was young, and it was great seeing it again. At least, up to a point. It seems the movie’s length was a problem for the culture-hating jerks at TCM, who removed several moments in order to shoehorn more adverts into it.


It’s common knowledge that TCM was once in the habit of tinkering with recognised classics, such as colorising black and white films, a practise satirised by Joe Dante in Gremlins 2: The New Batch (in which Daniel Clamp’s movie channel shows Casablanca “in colour, with new happy ending!”). I had hoped that with the cancellation of the colorisation project that that would mean the end of any future tinkering, but sadly not. While the US TCM has no adverts, UK TCM has a surfeit of the goddamn things (broadcast at a predictably earsplitting volume in comparison to the muted film), and as a result they think it’s fine to hack away at the movies being shown. I honestly thought we had moved past this kind of behaviour, considering the success of the ad-free, uncut Sky Movies channels.

Sadly, no. While the meat of The Right Stuff remained in the film, an early shot of Yuri Gagarin’s flight was hacked out, leaving behind a sliver of music in the next scene. Warning bells began to sound in my head. Later on, John Glenn’s flight over Australia is truncated, missing out the moment where his arrival is heralded by sparks seemingly flying into space from a fire lit by Aboriginal magicians. While the movie doesn’t seem damaged by that moment, the tone of the film shifts, something that is cemented by the appalling, ire-inducing decision to remove all of the cross-cutting from Chuck Yeager’s final flight. In the original, while he risks his life and almost dies, we cut back and forth from his peril to scenes of the astronauts enjoying a reception meal to commemorate the opening if NASA’s new HQ in Houston. While watching an ethereal dancer on stage, they seemingly become linked by a premonition that something important is happening elsewhere, that the man they most admire is still risking his life to push the envelope while they eat steak and shmooze. To have taken out every shot of the astronauts while leaving in the shots of Yeager’s perilous flight must have taken a lot of effort and thought.


Or should I say lack of thought. When the movie ended and I began to calm down, Canyon asked me what I liked so much about the film (she enjoyed it, though she was as pissed as I was that it had been edited). Other than the sheer quality and intelligence of it, what I like most is that while it is a celebration of human spirit and courage, it is also a satire of such, puncturing the cockiness of the astronauts with broad comedic moments while never fully making them look like fools. There is still a nobility to them and their desire to become pioneers and explorers of a new frontier, even if there is, for a long period of the movie, a lot of egotistical behaviour and preening before the ever-present, chittering paparazzi. What helps get that across is the poetic nature of the movie, mostly conveyed during the two latter scenes that had been removed. By introducing a spiritual aspect to the movie (with the beautiful shots of Glenn’s capsule being buzzed by mysterious embers being particularly important), the tone of the film is lightened of its machismo and broad comedy, becoming way more than the sum of its parts. Once those scenes are removed, it runs like a straight biopic about macho men trying to outdo each other with acts of derring-do and laddish one-up-manship.

So, basically, fuck Turner Classic Movies for wrecking one of my favorite movies. It’s the very last time I will be watching anything on there, and now I’m wondering how many movies I’ve seen on there for the first time that might have been altered as well. I’m aware I’m probably a long way behind common knowledge of TCM’s scissor-happy escapades, but I really thought these kinds of practises had been stopped by now, but apparently not. If you love movies, and want to ensure they are treated with respect as works of art, then you’ll avoid the channel too. Bad TCM! Shades of Caruso most certainly doesn’t approve.