Sara Watches Stuff

Once afternoon in early 2017, my friend Mia gifted me with one of the greatest experiences of my life: my first time watching Nicolas Cage’s 1989 “horror black comedy”  Vampire’s Kiss.  This is the perfect testament to strange directorial and dramatic choices, one of the best so-bad-it’s-good flicks I’ve seen in a long time. It tells the story of Peter (Cage) whose life consists of therapy sessions, one night stands, harassing his secretary and getting aroused by bats. There are parts that feel like they are genuine attempts at humour, but others which are funny for completely different reasons - Nicolas Cage’s bizarre accent and mannerisms throughout are a great example. There is even an occasion where the same scene - literally, the exact same shot - is cut and pasted (the visible nipple covers are in the same place and everything) and passed off as another scene. Sometimes Nicolas Cage just yells! Perhaps his real ailment is a lack of ability to reasonably control...

Man, what? What was this movie?  You look at the cast list for this movie and it’s like someone was playing mad libs. Nicole Kidman, who I am notoriously unable to lose in most roles, and Nicolas Cage, who is Nicolas Cage, play an unhappily married couple who are subject to a home invasion that grows increasingly more by-the-numbers as it goes. Because this is a Nicolas Cage movie, everyone is constantly trying to outdo each other in this ridiculousness stakes, and the performances are out of this world. Cam Gigandet, who you may remember from once being a part of a bad guy crew in a Twilight movie or as the STD guy from  Easy A , is clearly supposed to be playing a dramatic role but everything involving his character is unintentionally hilarious. Nic Cage is at Next level Cage for most of the movie (pun clearly intended). There are parts of it where the thieves are demanding entry to the safe, and his responses border non-sequitur in their delivery. I've watched it...

National Treasure  is a national treasure. Like all Nic Cage movies, though, it’s off-the-charts weird. Would you expect anything less? On a scale of really bad to really good Nicolas Cage fare, this is pretty good stuff.  It’s cheesy as all hell, as you would expect from the damn movie where a guy decides to steal the Declaration of Independence. Still, it's coherent and there’s no shitty accent and even though the characters act on bizarre whims and strange logic, it is watchable without actually being a case of agonisingly-awful-watch-through-your-fingers watchable.  While it's plodding along with standard adventure movie tropes, it's doing so in style. Puzzles are solved in ridiculous fashion, people proceed from A to B via J, and it’s wonderful. Nicolas Cage, in his slight elevation from reality, really works in his role! That feels like praise I rarely get to apply. He has absolutely no romantic chemistry with the historian played by Diane Krueger, sure. Still,...

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...

Next  is ten years old, and while Julianne Moore hasn’t aged a day, somehow this movie feels older than just a decade. This is Cage with his mid 00s hair - think  Knowing  (this wasn't a new watch this year, but I'll get to reviewing it one day), think  National Treasure . Cage as a Vegas magician is, I must say, the perfect match made in casting heaven. It’s deranged-terrorist-for-hire level perfection. He can see roughly two minutes into the future, somehow without taking up any time in the present, and is on the run from the government trying to track down a nuclear bomb AND a terrorist organisation, all while seducing Jessica Biel. Can he do it? He's goddamn Nicolas Cage. You're watching a movie where he's a psychic magician. Of course he can. While it’s a wild ride, there is some genuine trash going on in this movie. Two minute future vision gets used in excess to play mindgames and essentially trick his love interest into his arms. I think we’re ...

Despite my devotion to 2017 as the year I work through the Nicolas Cage back catalogue, I somehow managed to completely forget the entire experience of watching this movie. That’s not to say it’s a bad movie - it is arguably a more complete cinematic experience than something like  Next  - but...it's not great.  When I refer to it being a "complete experience", I'll give credit to its casting and action sequences and even the plotting, but it all adds up to a movie that takes itself relatively seriously makes it a lot less fun than some in the Cage oeuvre.  This is Cage at his most restrained, acting like a normal person for 90% of the movie. The most bizarre thing about this movie that I could spot was a villain who was also a carpenter (a long-locked Christopher Eccleston). There's one or two lighter moments amongst the gritter, overly self-serious moments that tend to plague a lot of car-based action movies, and the imbalance overwhelmed everything for m...