It’s no secret that Nicolas Cage’s taste in movie roles has changed from the days when he starred in A-list films like Raising Arizona, Moonstruck and Leaving Las Vegas. The 54-year-old actor appears to flip a coin when deciding what to make these days. Sometimes he gets lucky — The Croods has a sequel on the way and Joe made some box office bank — while other times he ends up in films like Outcast, a period piece whose outlandish story careens through Europe and Asia like a drunken soldier on shore leave.
It’s trendy to write Cage off as an actor throwing his talent away, more concerned with cash than art. YouTube brims with videos like Crazy Cage Moments and Cage Rage. Between them they’ve racked up millions of views, which is certainly more people — give or take several zeroes — that saw his recent bizarro-world revenge film Mandy or direct-to-oblivion domestic thriller Inconceivable. And yet, no matter how low rent some of his recent output is, he’s usually compelling.
The vids are an eye-opening compendium of Cage’s trademarked brand of extreme acting — a method of over-emoting perfected in the more than 80 movies he’s made since his debut (under his real name Nicolas Coppola) in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Citing The Incredible Hulk star Bill Bixby as a major influence, he has always been, for better and for worse, one of our most completely fearless actors.
This weekend’s Mom and Dad promises an extra helping of full-throttle Cage. He calls it his favourite movie in a decade, while Glen Kenny, writing in the New York Times said, “In this morbid satire about parents trying to kill their kids, Mr. Cage has plenty of opportunity to go full him.” Cage, who forever will be best known for hits like Adaptation, National Treasure and Leaving Las Vegas, has made many other movies that are worth a second look.
One writer called Cage’s work in 1989’s Vampire’s Kiss “a grand stab at all-out, no-holds-barred comic acting or one of the worst dramatic performances in a film this year,” but decades later the movie has earned cult status because of Cage’s edgy work. The story of a man who may — or may not — be turning into a vampire is best remembered as the film in which Cage ate a live cockroach, but also features one of his most unhinged performances.
A few years later, somewhere between Honeymoon in Vegas and Guarding Tess, came Red Rock West, a genre-busting movie — Ebert said it “exists sneakily between a western and a thriller, between a film noir and a black comedy” — that unfairly barely made it to theatres. Cage hands in some of his best work as a broke but honest drifter, but only took the role after Kris Kristofferson turned it down.
Existing at the intersection of Vampire’s Kiss and Red Rock West is Wild at Heart, a film that perfectly showcases Cage’s manic energy. As Sailor, a lover boy on the run from hit men hired by his girlfriend’s mother, he’s a one-of-a-kind, an Elvis wannabe with a snakeskin jacket and an attitude. It’s a bravura performance. Like the jacket, which he says “represents a symbol of my individuality,” Wild at Heart is a symbol of his artistic individuality.
It is a safe bet that you’ve never seen a movie quite like “Mom and Dad.” Starring Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair as parents trying to murder their children it is dark yet goofy. It’s trashy with no redeeming qualities and that’s what makes it great… or at least a fun night out at the movies.
Cage and Blair are Brent and Kendall Ryan, the slightly bored suburban parents of Carly (Anne Winters) and Josh (Zackary Arthur). He longs for his wild years, she is a devoted mom, but concerned about aging. When a mysterious plague—or is it mass hysteria?—hits town, turning parents against their kids, Brent and Kendall spend twenty-four-hours trying to trap and kill their kids. Finally they can act on all the resentments they’ve been harbouring against their kids for forcing them to grow up and leave their youth behind.
“Mom and Dad” is the very definition of a midnight movie. Cage, a master at playing heightened reality, has rarely been, well, Cagier and the sight of Blair sizing up tools to kill her daughter—should she use a meat hammer or long kitchen knife—is delightful in the most disturbing of ways.
Director Brian Taylor brings the same wild anarchic spirit he brought to movies like “Crank” and “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.” In a quick 85 minutes he provides set-up, quick character studies and enough twisted action to keep eyeballs dancing and then, as though he ran out of film and couldn’t finish the film, it ends. Cuts to black just as it feels like the story is going to head into even wilder territory. I doubt it’s a cliffhanger to trigger a sequel (the story doesn’t have very far to go) so the suddenness of it comes as a shock—almost as much of a shock as parents trying to gas their own offspring.
I suppose “Mom and Dad” may have a secret agenda, a hidden subtext about filicide and the toxic relationships that push people to do the unthinkable, but if it is there, it is hidden under layers of raucously un-PC humour.
If there ever was a story tailor made for Oliver Stone’s sensibilities, “Snowden” is it. Polarizing in the extreme, Ed Snowden, an American computer wiz who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency to The Guardian, was called a traitor by Donald Trump and a hero by the New Yorker. Two hours into this biopic it’s not hard to see which side of the fence Stone falls on.
It’s 2003 when we first meet future whistleblower Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) he’s a grunt in the US Army struggling through basic training. The deeply patriotic high-school dropout wants to serve his country but his body doesn’t cooperate. Honourably discharged for medical reasons he turns to the CIA, hoping to find meaningful work as a computer specialist and because, “it sounds really cool to have a top security clearance.”
Hired on, he learns the tools of today’s warfare. “The modern battlefield is everywhere,” he’s told while designing and building computer systems he believes will keep his country safe. Meanwhile the secretive nature of his work is slowly driving a wedge between he and girlfriend Lindsay (Shailene Woodley), a liberal leaning photographer who doesn’t always support Ed’s views but always supports him.
Over the next decade his efforts to prevent terrorists and cyber attacks leads him down a rabbit hole of intrigue and double-dealings. Partially responsible for running a dragnet on the whole world he helps gather information—using cell phone and computer cameras—on regular everyday citizens as well as the baddies and begins to question his mandate. The NSA, he says is tracking the cell phones of everyone. “Not just terrorists or countries,” he says, “but us.”
In June 2013 he decides to go public by leaking classified information from the National Security Agency to The Guardian. “I just want to get the data to the media so people can decide whether I’m wrong,” he says, “or if the government is wrong.”
A title card at the beginning of “Snowden” reads, “The following is a dramatization of events that occurred between 2004 and 2013.” That gives director Stone ample leeway to tell the story his way. In other words, this ain’t a documentary. It is clear he is on Snowden’s side, that he doesn’t see him as a traitor or snitch but a hero. His thesis seems to be that you don’t have to agree with your politicians to be a patriot. Stone supports his view visually—Snowden literally comes out of the darkness and into the light when he leaves the NSA building for the last time—and through the actions and words of several of his characters. Rhys Ifans plays a CIA trainer/master manipulator who feeds Snowden’s naïve patriotism with defence mantras. “Most Americans don’t want freedom,” he preaches, “they want security.” Later Snowden’s NSA supervisor Trevor (Scott Eastwood) argues that a job like the one Snowden is doing, can’t be criminal “if you’re working for the government.”
But hey, this isn’t CNN or Fox News, it’s a big screen entertainment and on that score it works. Gordon-Levitt transforms into a monotone über nerd, equal parts sweetness and paranoia. What he lacks in warmth Woodley more than makes up for, handing in a performance that is all emotion and concern.
When Ifans leaves a video conference call with the sign off, “I’ll see you soon,” those simple words take on a sinister feel when it is clear that he really can see you, whether you know it or not. Stone may not be able to shape the way you feel about Ed Snowden, but if nothing else he’ll make you want to cover the camera on your computer.
At it’s very core, Snowden is about privacy and how much of it you can expect to enjoy every time you turn on your computer or pick up your mobile phone.
The story of Edward Snowden — an American computer whiz who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency to The Guardian — has been reimagined for the big screen and premiered at TIFF on Friday.
“Unfortunately,” says controversial director Oliver Stone, “Edward Snowden has warned us, more than once, about privacy and he says in the movie the next generation won’t know what privacy is.”
Snowden uncovered widespread snooping by the U.S. government that may have violated the civil liberties of millions of people. Zachary Quinto, who plays journalist Glenn Greenwald in the film, says working on Snowden made him think differently about even simple Internet searches.
“I became more aware of our vulnerability while working on this film and took specific measures to protect myself in ways I hadn’t before,” he said.
“I had this experience the other night. I was shopping for a washer and dryer online. I was Googling the consumer ratings. I left that search and went to another website and immediately the pop up ads on this other website, which had nothing to do with consumer reports or shopping, were about washers and dryers. What we are willing to sacrifice in our privacy without even thinking about it for convenience sake, what we’re willing to give up in our own freedoms and interests just in sitting down at our computers is shocking.
“You can take precautions. You can take steps to enact two-step verifications and put tape over your laptop (camera) and strengthen your passwords but all you need to do is shop for appliances and you are exposing yourself to some kind of tracking, a collection of data.”
Co-star Shailene Woodley, who plays the whistleblowing title character’s girlfriend Lindsay Mills, takes simple precautions to ensure privacy. “I have a Band Aid over my computer (camera),” she says. “Privacy is a privilege now and it is only a privilege if you are privy to the fact that it is a privilege because it is not something you inherently have as a human being in 2016.”
What Joseph Gordon-Levitt has to say about ‘Band-Aids’
“Working on this movie made me much more thoughtful about how the whole internet works. Everyone has asked me about the Band-Aid over the webcam. I think that is a weird metaphor, an unintentional metaphor. ‘Oh yeah, this will fix it,’ but I don’t think it will,” said star Joseph Gordon-Levitt about people putting Band-Aids over their web cams to ensure privacy.
It’s no secret that Nicolas Cage’s taste in movie roles has changed somewhat from the days when he starred in a-list movies like “Raising Arizona,” “Moonstruck” or “Leaving Lost Vegas.” The fifty-year-old actor appears to flip a coin when he decides what to make these days and sometimes he gets lucky—recently “The Croods” and “Joe” haven’t been embarrassing—and other times he ends up starring in films like “Outcast,” a period piece that careens through Europe and Asia like a drunken soldier on shore leave.
East meets west as the fourteen-year-old heir to the imperial throne Zhao (Bill Su Jiahang) is on the run from his from his bloodthirsty, power-mad brother Shing (Andy On). “I will have what is mine,” says Shing through clenched teeth. With his sister Princess Lian (Crystal Liu Yifei) in tow young the prince turns to holy warrior Jacob (Hayden Christensen), a Crusader tormented by his actions in the war, and his former partner, the Templar Knight-turned-outlaw Gallain (Nicholas Cage), for protection. “If you save this boy,” Gallain tells Jacob, “god will forgive you.”
Cage is in rare form here, theatrically dropping lines like “I am the White Ghost,” and laughing maniacally when he isn’t slashing and stabbing his way through Shing’s army. He isn’t in the disinterested reach-for-the-paycheque mode of “Left Behind” here, instead he’s in full-blown peacock mode, grimacing and growling his way through fight scenes so shaky it’s as if the camera was attached to a YoYo.
Christensen doesn’t fare much better but we don’t expect much from him. Cage disappoints because when he’s good, he’s brilliant but when he’s bad he’s catastrophic. His bad performances can make for some fun viewing—there’s a Nic Cage drinking game that will leave you hammered by the second acts starts—but his increasingly lazy work in movies like “Outcast” isn’t toast worthy, it’s embarrassing.
“Left Behind” stars Nicolas Cage and sets much of the action on board a plane, but make no mistake, this isn’t “Con Air.” Instead of raising hell, Cage is playing it pious in a remake of a Kirk Cameron movie about the rapture.
Cage is Rayford Steele, husband, father, pilot and sinner. The day his daughter Chloe (Cassi Thomson) comes to visit he leaves on a cross-country flight to be with his mistress, flight attendant Hattie (Nicky Whelan). On board are investigative reporter Buck Williams (Chad Michael Murray) and a group of passengers who get the shock of their lives when some of their seatmates seemingly disappear, leaving behind only their clothes. The phenomenon has caused turmoil on ground level as well. Millions of people have vaporized; cars crash randomly, their drivers suddenly gone and chaos reigns. “If this is a weapon, it’s not from this planet!” Chloe struggles to comprehend what has happened, find her brother and mother (Lea Thompson) and try and help her father land his plane. Meanwhile in air Steele tries to calm his hysterical passengers and Buck tries to figure what the hell is going on. Or maybe that should be what in God’s name is going on.
Based on a popular book series about the rapture by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, “Left Behind” is a mainstream reboot of a successful string of Christian movies. Directed by Vic Armstrong, the legendary stunt man best known for the “Indiana Jones” movies, the new “Left Behind” has a distinct b-movie feel, with flimsy sets and bad dialogue (“Either I’m going crazy or the whole world is insane!”) but it does feature something rather remarkable—a subdued performance from Cage. Lately he’s been a practitioner of something he calls Nouveau Shamanic school of acting but here he has dialed it way down perhaps out of respect to the religious nature of the material, or perhaps he’s saving the wild stuff for “Con Air 2: This Time it’s Biblical.”
David Gordon Green has one of the strangest careers in Hollywood.
He made his name directing keenly observed art house films about life in the rural South like “George Washington’ and “Undertow.” They are rich with details, if sketchy story wise.
He’s probably better known, however, as the filmmaker behind the ribald comedies “Eastbound & Down” and “Your Highness.”
His career is a study of contrasts, of high art and low culture. His latest, “Joe,” rests somewhere in the middle. Like his early work it’s a Southern Gothic, set in a rugged small town where rusted pick-ups are a prized possession and there’s only work when the sun is shining. The outrageous humor of his comedies is absent, but what “Joe” lacks in laughs, it makes up for in story.
Nicolas Cage is Joe Ransom, foreman of a work crew who poison healthy trees so a forestry company can come in, raze the area and raise more valuable saplings. He’s also an ex-con, constantly struggling with a volatile temper.
When he meets and hires fifteen-year-old Gary (Tye Sheridan) he finds a kindred soul, a damaged kid with a drunken violent father (Gary Poulter). Gary is a hard worker—the main breadwinner for his drifter parents—and looks to Joe as a role model.
Emotionally involved, Joe puts himself in the middle of a father-and-son conflict.
Like Green, Cage’s career is marked with high highs and low lows. “Joe” sees him hand in his best performance since “The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans.” He’s not exactly understated here, but he is textured and nuanced, giving Joe some real depth. The histrionics that earned him the nickname “Ragin’ Nic Cage” are mostly absent, replaced by an actor who convincingly portrays a raw nerve of a man who fights against his impulses on a daily basis.
He is supported by Sheridan, who delivers on the promise he displayed in the Matthew McConaughey film “Mud.” He’s a terrific actor and doesn’t allow Cage to overpower him.
The film’s tour-de-force performance comes from the late Gary Poulter in his film debut as Gary’s violent degenerate sot of a father. Green plucked him from the streets of Austin, Texas, where decades of addiction had ravaged his body. He passed away two months after filming was completed, drowned, after a night of heavy drinking. In the movie the 53 year-old is menacing, dangerous and disturbing in a role that requires him to pimp out his own daughter and physically abuse his son. It’s the work of a pro and it’s a shame we won’t see more of his work.
“Joe” may be mainly a character study of the three men, but it doesn’t skimp on the story. It’s bleak, with little relief from scene to scene, but is a happy medium for Green, melding his indie work with his Hollywood films in an interesting and satisfying way.
From the knitting needles of yarn artist Carson Zickersham comes the strangest Christmas gift on the list so far, a needlepoint piece featuring Nicolas Cage as Ariel from “The Little Mermaid.” Titled “Nic Cage Wants to Be Where the People Are,” the 5″ x 7″ handmade artwork can be yours for only $65.35 Can. Thanks to the Huffington Post for pointing the way on this one.
Popular culture has frequently paid homage to the lowly rodent. The Captain and Tennille scored a hit with Muskrat Love, their ode to arvicoline amour and Michael Jackson rode to the top of the charts on rat back with the tune Ben, possibly the only love song to a rat ever released.
Ben, of course, was the theme song to the 1972 movie of the same name. It was the sequel to Willard, the original “revolución de las ratas” flick. Ben and Willard, along with Stuart Little, Mr. Gopher, the burrowing terror from Caddyshack, Rizzo the Rat, Despereaux Tilling, Fievel Mousekewitz, the gang from Once Upon a Forest and of course, the biggest rodent star of all, Mickey Mouse, have left their mark in movie theatres. This weekend a new set of rodents that go by the collective name G-Force hope to do for guinea pigs what March of the Penguins did for tuxedo clad furry birds.
This mix of live action and animation from hotshot producer Jerry Bruckheimer centers on a team of trained secret agent guinea pigs. There’s team Leader Darwin (voiced by Sam Rockwell), Juarez (Penélope Cruz), Blaster (30 Rock’s Tracy Morgan) and mole Speckles (1996 Best Actor Nicolas Cage). In the midst of their biggest US government assignment ever—stopping evil billionaire Leonard Saber (Bill Nighy), from destroying the world with household appliances—they are shut down and sent to a pet shop. There they go rogue, hooking up with Hurley (Jon Favreau) and hamster Bucky (Steve Buscemi) and get back to the business of saving the world.
On the cute scale the G-Force members are somewhere between Ratatouille and Stuart Little, which is to say they are quite adorable. Pet stores should brace themselves for a run on guinea pigs but I couldn’t help but think that the rodents are less characters than prototypes for action figures and other toys. As is so often the case with bad kid’s films, more thought seems to have been given to the spin off toys kids will want after they leave the theatre than what is actually up on the screen.
The story is silly, but really, what did you expect from a film about crime fighting guinea pigs? It’s not the story that brings G-Force down, but the flat, bored performances.
The live actors aren’t the focus of the movie, but Wil Arnett and Bill Nighy do little more than simply show up and Zach Galifanikis blows whatever street cred he built up after his bizarre breakout performance in The Hangover.
The voice cast includes not one, but two Oscar winners, which may be an indication that the recession has finally taken root in Hollywood. When the best gig Penelope Cruz can get involves saying lines like “Oh, I have to save his fur again?” you know times are tight for a-listers.
Voice work wise only Nicolas Cage seems to be putting in much effort, doing a kind of Pee Wee Herman impression as the brianiac mole Speckles and Steve Buscemi has a naturally good cartoon voice but the other actors blow through their lines as if they had something better to do elsewhere.
The 3-D is sharp but other than a few fun stereoscopic gags it adds nothing to the movie except $3 to the price of the ticket.
G-Force has some good messages for kids about believing in yourself and the importance of family, but they are wrapped in a frenetic and cynical excuse for a movie that ends by setting itself up for a sequel which, if there is a patron saint of film critics, will never happen.
