Sara Watches Stuff

Most of what there is to say about  Con Air  has already been said by the countless reviewers: it is inexplicably conceived and bizarrely performed. It was 1997, the same year as Face/Off , and it was right at the end of the period of time Nicolas Cage could be taken seriously as an actor. This movie is aware that it exists as a ridiculous action movie, but the question as to whether or not Nicolas Cage was in on the joke is something else altogether. His accent is truly baffling and more frustratingly, inconsistent. He’s an “ex-con” (his crime very easily an argument of self defense, but sure) on an air travel prisoner transfer, and the other criminals take over the plane. Hi-jinks occur of both comedic and deadly varieties. The humour is ridiculous, presumably unintentional at times, and the plot is absolutely absurd. The exposition is extraordinarily clunky and lumped up all together in giant blocks. I rolled my eyes more times than I could count. There are all of thes...

I didn’t know what I was in for when I convinced a friend to watch  Face/Off  with me in continuation of my  year of Nicolas Cage : I knew there was some body swapping action with him and John Travolta, and that at some point someone was going to say “I want to take his face…off.” My lovely friend Mia, guru on all things Cage related, assured me that this was one I would want to see and she was right: it was wild. It was released in the same year as  Con Air  and the two would make an excellent double feature - they are really interesting to consider side by side. Where  Con Air  often takes itself bizarrely seriously,  Face/Off  is seriously aware of its bizarreness. In his first real scene, Cage - dressed as a priest, of course - stops in a crowd to headbang, and then gropes a choir girl. John Woo gets it. This piece of cinematic mastery follows a cop, Sean Archer (initially, that’s John Travolta’s character) whose son was ki...