"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.