"Am I getting THROUGH to you, Alva?!"

October 10th, 2012
Vampire's Kiss, (1988)
Nicolas Cage is Peter Loew

"In my own mind I was convinced that there could be a new expression in acting. I was weaned, oddly enough, on German expressionistic films like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and I wanted to use that kind of acting. Which, shockingly enough, you allowed me to do; you allowed me to go there. I don't think any other director would have let his actor go there. I don't even know if I could do it now or again."

That's Nicolas Cage speaking to director Robert Bierman on the commentary track of Vampire's Kiss. I wrote in my Raising Arizona post about how frustrated Cage was that he wasn't allowed the kind of freedom he wanted by the Coen brothers. Vampire's Kiss is an example of what happened when a young Nic Cage was given that kind of freedom.

Coming off his breakout turn in Moonstruck - a film Cage says he didn't actually like until years later when he was, in his words, "mature enough to understand it" - our man was feeling the pressure of success. After initially agreeing to star in Vampire's Kiss Cage was convinced by his agent to drop out, that a manic turn in a no-budget black comedy about a deulsional man who thinks he's turning into a vampire would be career suicide. Bierman then signed Judd Nelson only to have him pull out as well. Despite having been greenlit and budgeted it looked like Vampire's Kiss wasn't meant to be until Cage called again and asked to be taken back. He needed to "blow it out" after Moonstruck and make a "punk rock movie" and commit to a sort of Brechtian primal scream of a performance. Which is really just an elevated way of saying that Nicolas Cage needed a role in which he could go absolutely apeshit bonkers. If Cage was trying to change acting and challenge his critics no performance in his career has been more challenging than his turn as Peter Loew in this film. It is truly one of a kind.

"Love don't make things nice; it ruins everything!"

October, 4th
Moonstruck, (1987)
Nicolas Cage is Ronny Cammareri

"I lost my hand! I lost my bride!"

Italians can make me uncomfortable. Big Jewish and Irish families, too. All those raw emotions just out in the open being shared; all those expressions of familial love. Deep in my blood flow the puritanical genes of my ancestors that reject any big display of emotion if it could potentially make anyone else uncomfortable. My people bottle that shit up for everyone's safety.

Watching the family in Moonstruck was like watching a nature doc on TV. I recognized it as being real to some people's experience but the characters I identified most with were couple whose bathtub Vincent Gardenia fixes. My people!

 

"Well, it ain't Ozzie & Harriet"

October 4th, 2012
Raising Arizona, (1987)
Nicolas Cage is Herbert "H.I." McDonnough

It's embarrassing to say but the Coen brothers' dramatic movies leave me cold. They're master craftsmen with an eye for great set pieces, an ear for dialogue and an ability to work within any genre, paying homage and subverting it in equal measure. But the key word there is craftsmen. In a 1987 piece for American Film David Edelstein quotes the Coens' acclaimed cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld saying:

"It's not an emotional thing at all. Given any topic, [the Coens] could write an excellent script. Topics are incredibly unimportant to them - it's structure and style and words. If you ask them for their priorities, they'll tell you script, editing, coverage and lighting."

The Coens made an unexpected splash with their independently funded 1985 noir Blood Simple. With their follow-up, Raising Arizona, the two brothers made a point to make a movie that existed on the opposite side of the spectrum from their debut. Where Blood Simple was ponderous and cynical, Raising Arizona was a speedy, big-hearted romp. Edelstein presses Joel Coen on the difference between creating a movie around a murder and creating one around a baby. Joel responds:

"You have a scene in a movie when someone gets shot, right? Bang! And the squib goes off and the blood runs down and you get a reaction, right? It's movie fodder, you know what I mean? And in a really different way, a baby's face is movie fodder. You just wanna take elements that are good fodder and do something different with them."

Both Sonnenfeld and Coen himself are spelling out the reasons that I respect the hell out of movies like Fargo, Miller's Crossing and No Country for Old Men but can't make myself love them. The Coens seem to view humanity from an ironic distance. Reality is messy and emotional and, to my eyes, the Coens' sensibility erases that messiness with an overabundance of control.

"Who needs physics when we have chemistry?"

September 28th, 2012
Peggy Sue Got Married, (1986)
Nicolas Cage is Charlie Bodell

We have entered Nicolas Cage Golden Age. For the next few entries it's going to get pretty gushy on my end. I don't claim any journalistic objectivity in this electronic Nicolas Cage diary but all the evidence says that Peggy Sue Got Married is the kind of film that separates John Q. Moviegoer from a blindered Cage apologetic like me. The general consensus from audiences and critics is that Cage's performance in Peggy Sue is annoying and the whole film is a pleasant but flawed brief return to form before Francis Ford Coppola lost the plot. I totally disagree; I love the shit out of this movie.



Let's start with the beauty of this film's premise. When Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) attends her 25-year reunion she is surrounded by ghosts from her past: the friends she lost touch with though they had planned to stay close, the athletic beatnik kid she had a crush on but never acted on (Kevin J. O'Connor), her laughingstock ex-husband, appliance salesman "Crazy" Charlie Bodell (Cage), the weasely nerd no one liked who has since become a billionaire inventor (Barry Miller). Overwhelmed, Peggy Sue faints, only to wake up 25 years earlier, a teenager again. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, Peggy Sue can choose to change her past or accept the decisions she made as the right ones.

"They say I look bigger with my clothes off."

September 25th, 2012
The Boy in Blue, (1986)
Nicolas Cage is Ned Hanlan

I'm not sure what the buzz around The Boy in Blue was on its release but I have to imagine that audiences were a little surprised when they discovered that, despite the movie's promotional poster and dramatic trailer, The Boy in Blue is not some sort of antiquated, Canadian Rocky.


It does have some of the Rocky hallmarks - at least a fourth of the movie is Nicolas Cage, shirtless, training for the "next big race" and there's a driving synth score pushing the whole thing forward, despite its 1880's setting - but The Boy in Blue doesn't just want to thrill and inspire you. In fact, thrilling is probably third on its list of prerogatives. The first and second are to educate and instill a sense of pride in Canadian heritage. Funded by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Telefilm Canada, BIB shows its hand from the first frame as text appears, reading:

"Before baseball, football, or soccer, one sport alone captured the imagination of both rich and poor - - sculling."

Sure, you kids have heard about all the baseball and football and soccer greats a thousand times but let me hip you to the original cool: sculling: the sport of kings. And who do you think was the greatest sculler of all time? Why, Ned Hanlan, Canada's favorite son and, in 1880, the first world sporting champion in an individual or singles event! Can-a-DA! Can-a-DA! Can-a-DA!

"I saw a guy, Dix, who they also said would be fine and he had a face like a medium-rare cheesburger."

September 22nd, 2012
Birdy, (1984)

Nicolas Cage is Al Columbato

I'm about a month into my Nicolas Cage diary and this is my first sticking point: how do I approach a movie like Birdy?

I have to organize my thoughts. First, this is the first appearance of Nicolas Cage as we know him. Cage's performance here is not good by any standard definition but it's not really bad either. Interesting would I guess be a kind word for it. And isn't that kind of the story of his career?

Cage is supposed to a blue collar, puffed-out everydude who's best friends forever with an introverted spacecase played by Matthew Modine. Not only do Cage and Modine have no real chemistry as friends, Cage out-crazies Modine in scene after scene with his manic charisma. By the end of the film when Cage is on the floor of a hospital with his face bandaged and his legs splayed as he cradles Modine and shouts to the heavens Nicolas Cage the Dramatic Actor has been born and our lives would never be the same.

"Bugle Boy, meet Jesse James!"

September 19th, 2012
The Cotton Club, (1984)
Nicolas Cage is Vincent "Mad Dog" Dwyer

Critics often cite Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate as the deathknell  for the '70's Golden Era of auteur filmmaking. Before Cimino's film single-handedly brought United Artists to near-bankruptcy money was no object in service of a director's artistic spectacle. Afterwards former golden boys like Robert Altman, Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola had to soft shoe a little more if they wanted anything near the budgets they were once allotted. If Heaven's Gate was a deathknell then 1984's The Cotton Club was the nails in the coffin. Throwing money at a troubled production wasn't a solution anymore.

The same year Heaven's Gate came out Francis Ford Coppola pulled up on the tiller and managed to cut his own near-debacle - the notoriously costly Apocalypse Now - into arguable the greatest war film of all time. Years later Coppola was in deep debt following his self-funded, little-loved film One From the Heart and Robert Evans' Zoetrope Pictures was looking for a hit. Evans, the financial force behind the Godfather movies and Coppola's biggest frenemy had optioned James Haskins' pictoral history of New York's famous Cotton Club with the intent on directing it himself. With distributor Orion Pictures' money already spent Evans hired Coppola to write a draft of Godfather-scribe Mario Puzo's script in the hope of attracting some private investors  With tensions mounting between the two men directing duties fell to Coppola and once more he found himself trying to land a cinematic Spruce Goose.