Nicolas Cage: A Career Devoid Of Quality Control

I like Nicolas Cage.

Or at least I used to.

Or at least I do sometimes.

Do I?

Actually, I don’t know whether I do like him. It’s so confusing. Sometimes he is incredibly interesting to watch, giving rich and intense performances in deserving and gripping movies (increasingly rarely), and other times (increasingly often) he slums it in vapid and soulless crapfests where he spends the whole time acting like he’s spent the previous evening being punched in the head and is only interested in helping the terrible asshead powers that be force more of their soft salty bollocks into our eye sockets whilst they ransack our pockets, thus replacing our eyeballs with their foul genital rubbish and leaving us blind to the crap they’re all peddling. Cage seems to pick his projects with an increasingly reckless random abandon, as if he really and genuinely doesn’t care, and for every good movie he has made there are whole toilet-filling avalanches of vile faecal slurry and total tiresome brain dead sputum that you cannot believe he has actually decided would be interesting films for him to make.

BRILLIANTLY INTENSE HIGH POINT

Of course, his high point was back in the mid 1990s when he played the alcoholic ex-movie executive Ben in Mike Figgis’ excellent Leaving Las Vegas (9.8/10), which is probably my favourite movie of all time. That was a sensitively played and brilliantly intense performance that gave us a character that inspired great sympathy and identification at the same time as alienating us with his callous behaviour and self destructive alcoholism. This was a complex and multi-faceted performance that justly met with plaudits and acclaim, and positioned Cage in my young mind as a genius actor from whom we could all expect great things.

EXPLODING EXPLOSIONS AND STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE

Imagine my surprise (and mild horror) as he followed that up with not one but two exploding, car flying, airplane skiing Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay movies where he ran around spouting utter claptrap and shooting assholes like his life depended on it, all lovingly captured in Bay’s signature style over substance, glossy, ass-clenchingly dull fashion. Not that The Rock (5/10) and Con Air (5/10) were godawfully bad necessarily. They weren’t. They were OK, fine within their field, and mostly inoffensive explosion movies that were basically positioned as gun-fetishising adverts for the American Dream (of blowing shit up and being awesome at the same time), although because of the near-constant use of slow motion as things exploded both movies boasted an absurd running time. The Rock, particularly, was notable for a rare appearance by Michael Biehn and for Sean Connery acting like someone’s drunken uncle at a cocaine enema party. So I didn’t hate or resent these movies (you may be surprised to hear), but I was surprised and frankly a little disappointed to find that Cage wasn’t going to follow up his brilliance in Leaving Las Vegas with something equally worthy. 

INCREASINGLY POINTLESS WET TURD SPREAD

And since then that seems to have been all Cage has to offer us. Since then he has mostly given us a mass of wet turd spread thinly across an increasingly pointless brace of films whose only purpose seems to be to defeat the reputation he once enjoyed as a serious and credible actor. We can look back through his career and pick out the odd relative gem, Raising Arizona (7.5/10), It Could Happen To You (7.2/10), Adaptation (8/10), Bringing Out The Dead (7.8/10) or Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call- New Orleans (which I STILL haven’t seen, but have on good authority that it’s worth watching), but there are far more films that are total wastes of time and all the most frustrating because we have seen just how good Cage can be when he sets his mind to it. Even City of Angels (5.3/10) and the directionless vagaries of Snake Eyes (5.5/10) now seem like relative high points amongst the dross.

The world really hasn’t needed to sit through unimaginably flaccid twat-fodder like Gone In Sixty Seconds (2/10), Face/Off (3.7/10), Knowing (-/10), Ghost Rider (1.5/10), the nonsensical and unnecessary remake of The Wicker Man (4/10), and his frankly sense-confounding appearances in G-Force, Kick Ass (see my earlier post: https://pablumbiolab.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/kickass/), Astro Boy, and the National Treasure movies, just to list a few examples. I’m at a total loss to explain what is going on in the man’s head. Perhaps his agent runs the show and is quite happy to splatter this sort of pointless excrement all over the now faded memory of the pinnacle of his charge’s career in the hope that he can wring some extra cash from the pockets of those too baffled to resist whatever is playing when they arrive at the idioplex and are all too happy to hand over their money for two hours of cinematic vaccuum. Who knows? If you do, then tell me! Genuinely, I want to know.

And, as I’m sure you know, Cage’s latest movie is the kiddie razzle dazzle doo doo CG magic fest The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and I’m sure beyond a shadow of a doubt his talents will be put to good use amongst the idiot pixels and thoughtfully penned dialogue.

Genuinely Perplexed Regards

Biolab (Concerned)

Wack-Ass

What is the big deal with this Kick-Ass movie?

Like anyone else who has been to the cinema lately, I’ve seen the trailer but frankly I don’t get it. As a trailer it wasn’t quite as tedious to sit through as the Green Zone or Legion ones, but it did seem equally pointless and also infinitely more irritating. I almost slit my wrists then and there with the razor sharp excuse for wit vomiting out of the screen.

MAGNERS

This is another one of these films aimed at pot smoking mid teens and adults who should know better but have killed too many braincells with endless teeth dissolving bottles of Magners/WKD and handfuls of idiot drugs to actually realise they stopped being a kid over a decade ago. In other words, this is a film for people who think Superbad is Citizen Kane and Russell Brand is some sort of Bill Hicks. People who were still eggs/sperm when Mallrats came out, or were mentally at the level of eggs/sperm and haven’t progressed much in the intervening years.

EYE BOILING 

Kick-Ass. Even the title is eye-boilingly awful, like the kind of thing you’d be embarrassed to find your own child saying and then would need to take them to Jurassic Park in an intense tropical storm or send them to investigate a mysterious distress call in space to ensure they never say it again.

PUNCHED IN THE HEAD BY TOSS POTS

Not that this titular failing has proven a handicap to this film, juding by the ill-informed avalanche of superlatives loaded onto its flimsy, pimpled shoulders by the kind of idiot tastemakers who still think an apostrophe indicates a plural. In fact, the slew of enthusiastic statements reading off the poster has the same effect as being repeatedly punched in the head by tosspots (an experience that I’m sure is only magnified when actually watching this vomitorious garbage). It’s excellent! It’s amazing! It’s the best thing since the surrender of the Nazis! And no doubt some imaginative pricklet has commented that it also ‘kicks ass.’

CAT EATING

Even the WHSmith browser’s film rag of choice, Empire, seems to like it. Not that they know what they’re talking about of course. Just like Q Magazine, they merely give 3 or 4 stars to anything ITV considers vaguely hip. But I have it on good authority that you have to be a cat eater to work at Empire. I do have a friend who eats cats (but doesn’t work for Empire- he works for TotalFilm, which isn’t any better), and his girlfriend has a glass eye. Together they lay out thickly sliced wedges of rum and raisin fudge to tempt cats into their flat, and then he clubs out their brains with a copy of Eyes Wide Shut. His girlfriend then goes through the entrails to determine how good any given new release movie is and sears the carcass by focusing a ray of sunlight through her glass eye. Then they eat the poor dead creatures on a bed of child abuse shaped pasta.

MISSING THE POINT

Or maybe, just maybe, in my bitter ignorance I’m missed the point here. This thought occurred to me whilst, appropriately, taking a piss, and I’m prepared to admit I’m wrong if I am.  Maybe a two joke film with the high point being a foul mouthed little girl kicking people is funny and worthwhile and not in fact evidence of both total laziness of both audience and filmmaker and not a harbinger of impending apocalypse. After all, at least it’s not got Jennifer Aniston or Adam Sandler in it.

Apocalyptic Regards…

Biolab