"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.

“Just wait'll those Japs see me and my eagle come chargin' over the hill!”

September 10^th, 2012

Racing with the Moon, (1984)

Nicolas Cage is Nicky

All this talk of nostalgia is a perfect segway into Racing with the Moon, another film that looks to the past to explore how youth slips away. It's the story of two young men killing time during the Christmas of 1943 awaiting induction into the US marines. The debut film of writer Steve Kloves - who would go on to write Wonder Boys and all but one of the Harry Potter movies – Moon has such a lived-in specificity of place and time that I was surprised to learn that Kloves was born in 1960. Maybe some of that credit goes to director Richard Benjamin who was born in 1938 and would go on to direct The Money Pit and, um, My Stepmother is an Alien.

Anyway, Racing with the Moon kicked up my own memories of times gone by - namely, Fast Times and The Best of Times. Which is an irritating way of saying that it stars Sean Penn and features Crispin Glover as an asshole rich kid that Nic Cage clocks in a bowling alley before wiping the blood of Glover's girlfriend's blouse. It's kinda pretty awesome. 

Introduction

My idea to make a diary on the films of Nicolas Cage has had a long life; so long that it now seems a lot childish. I like to think of myself as a grown man (I'm twenty-five) and different in many fundamental ways from the thirteen-year-old who once declared that 1995's Con Air not only a great movie but my favorite movie and Cage my favorite actor. 

It's easy to forget after we leave all the bullshit of middle- and high-school behind us but to a thirteen-year-old stating an opinion that flies in the face of accepted social norms can take a small measure of bravery. Youthful codes of conduct are shifting tides to the shy and socially awkward; it's much safer to put up one's sails and drift quietly along the current of popular opinion than to row against the wind. Any strong opinion that has not been approved by the council of one's peers could potentially tar you as the strange outsider you fear yourself (and secretly know yourself) to be.

This meditation on what seemed like courage as a youth speaks both to how good Con Air actually is and to Nicolas Cage's appeal to the teenager I was. In the early 2000's he was incomparable to anyone else in Hollywood, in part by his unabashed weirdness. David Lynch reportedly once referred to him as "the jazz musician of acting" and indeed, Nic Cage's performances have the loose-limbed excitement of jazz.. I had a pet theory I put forward to my friends at the time that Cage's films weren't just good or bad. Some transcended our notions of what good and bad films are to a separate artistic plane that could only be called "awesome". Part of this has to do with the projects he picks and part of it has to do with his performances. Even at his most phoned-in, Cage seems to effortlessly imbue his characters with emotional depths, alluding to thoughts and emotional undercurrents in the way H.P. Lovecraft hinted at stranger realities just beyond our comprehension. There's something rippling under the surface of Nicolas Cage that gives simultaneous impressions that he is an actor of ineffable talent and also potentially unwell.