“The Croods,” Nicolas Cage’s new kid friendly flick, is set in a time when cave drawings were considered high tech, but despite its paleontological roots, it feels very modern. It may be about a family of cavemen and women—imagine “The Flintstones” without the brontosaurus ribs—but the 3D animation is state-of-the-art and you don’t need to be an anthropologist to get the father-and-daughter story. It’s only the mother-in-law jokes that feel almost as prehistoric as the characters.
Cage voices Grug, a caveman dad with some Neanderthal ideas about how to protect his family. “No one said survival is fun,” he grunts. His teenage daughter Eep (voice of Emma Stone), however, wants something more from her life than hiding in a cave and surviving. Sneaking out of the family grotto one night she meets Guy (voice of Ryan Reynolds), a caveboy with good looks and a brain—he invents fire, belts, shoes and other necessities of life!—who warns her that a colossal change is coming.
The news does not go down well with Grug and his “Anything new is bad,” attitude until the earth begins to split, their cave is destroyed and they are forced to follow Guy to higher ground. Their journey takes them through a changing world where they’re no longer the top of the food chain and must learn to adapt or die.
OK, adapt or die sounds pretty heavy for a kid’s film, but the movie is about how facing adversity actually brings this family closer together. There are other messages wedged in there—adapting is good, acceptance is better and loyalty is best—but the movie uses run-ins with ancient animals—fanciful kid friendly creatures—to entertain the eye and get its main idea across.
It’s chock-a-block with beautiful images. Eep’s introduction to fire is gorgeous, as is the new landscape created with every eruption of the earth. There’s loads of caveman comedy and Paleolithic physical action—apparently cavemen invented Parkour—and it contains the best self-aware line Nicolas Cage has ever uttered on screen—“Hand me those acting sticks!”
The family dynamic works, although Grug’s ambivalence to his mother-in-law’s (voice of Cloris Leachman) survival seems like a relic from another era. “The Croods” does err on the side of sentimentality near the end—even cavemen have feelings!—but to quote the theme song from another stone-age family cartoon, you’ll still “have a yabbadabba-doo time, a dabba-doo time” with Grug and his clan.
In this weekend’s Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Johnny Blaze, played by Nicolas Cage, joins a long line of movie characters in the ultimate fight — battling Satan! Everyone from Jack Black to Viggo Mortensen to Santa Claus has been hell bent on battling Old Scratch on the big screen.
In Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, Jack Black and Kyle Glass play heavy metal musicians who must play a musical battle with Lucifer.
“The demon code prevents me from declining the rock off challenge,” says Old Scratch before they engage in a metal showdown.
If they win, they’ll be superstars and the keepers of the magic pick made of Satan’s tooth. Lose and Kyle gets a new roommate — the prince of darkness.
The Devil in Prince of Darkness takes a slightly different form than Pick of Destiny’s traditional ruby-skinned imp.
In this John Carpenter chiller the Devil is an alien life form trapped in an alternate world.
Meanwhile, his son lives on our planet, boiled down into a vat of sinister-looking green liquid.
E-critic.com hated the movie, suggesting the advertising tagline for the movie should be: It’s NEW and IMPROVED LIQUID SATAN!!!, but it has some good thrills, a moody synthesize score, a cameo by Alice Cooper and a great performance by Donald Pleasance as a priest who does battle with the Devil.
One critic called The Prophecy “Paradise Lost reimagined as a droll B horror picture.”
Christopher Walken plays an angel trying to wage war against God. You might imagine that would put him in league with the Devil, but you’d be wrong.
“Your war is arrogance,” says Mephistopheles, who looks a lot like Viggo Mortensen, “That makes it evil. That’s mine.”
The movie spawned four sequels, but the original remains the best, if only to watch Mortensen deliver lines like, “While heaven may be closed I am always open, even on Christmas.”
And speaking of Christmas, one of the strangest cinematic demonic battles happens in the Mexican fantasy film Santa Claus. Described as “Ho Ho Horrible!” by one critic, it’s cut-rate and cheesy but has a certain kitschy charm.
Sometimes referred to as Santa Claus Conquers the Devil, this weird movie sees St Nick shoot the Devil with toy arrows.
Though marketed to kids, the Mystery Science Theater 3000 folks summed it up best when they said the movie is “good old-fashioned nightmare fuel.”
A cleverly edited YouTube video featuring a montage of Nicolas Cage “losing it” in the movies has racked up 1,677,816 views, which is probably more people than saw his recent trilogy of Razzie-worthy work, The Wicker Man, Bangkok Dangerous and Knowing.
The vid is an eyeopening look at Cage’s trademarked brand of extreme acting — a method of over emoting perfected in the 66 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 acting influence, he has always been, for better and for worse, one of our most completely fearless (and cuckoo bananas) actors.
This weekend’s Season of the Witch promises an extra helping of full throttle Cage and will likely do some bang-up box office, but the actor who is best known for hits like Adaptation, National Treasure and Leaving Las Vegas, has made many other, lesser known movies that are also worth a look.
One writer called Cage’s work in 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” and 21 years after those words were written it’s still hard to judge. The story of a man who may—or may not—be turning into a vampire is best remembered as the movie 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 drfiter, 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 that, like the jacket which he says, “represents a symbol of my individuality,” is a symbol of his artistic individuality.
By the time Nicolas Cage screeches, “Shoot him again! His soul is still dancing!” near the end of “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” his master class of extreme acting reaches its apex. This is the performance that Cage has been slowly working toward; a koo koo bananas performance that makes his demented work in “Knowing” look restrained. But you know what? It works.
Set in post Katrina New Orleans, Cage is Terence McDonagh a good, but wild cop who injures his back saving a drowning prisoner in a flooded jail. Soon he becomes addicted to pain killers, then coke, then anything that will ease his aching back. When he can no longer easily get drugs from the evidence room at work for him and his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes) he goes off the deep end, falling into an abyss of sex, drugs and gambling. Throughout it all he works to solve the case of a family of murdered Senagalese immigrants. “Just because he likes to get high,” says Stevie Pruit (Val Kilmer), “doesn’t stop him being the po-lice.”
“Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” doesn’t have the same operatic madness as Brian DePalma’s “Scarface,” it’s too down and dirty for that, but it does have an unhinged quality that makes it the most surprising film of the year. The police procedural portion of the story is fairly straightforward, but Cage’s acting—which is as big as the 44 Magnum he has permanently wedged in his belt—and director Werner Herzog’s surreal touches, like a hallucination scene complete with close-ups of iguanas, a Tom Jones soundtrack and a bug eyed Cage, make it a memorable experience.
Finding the tone of the film may be the most challenging part of finding enjoyment here. It’s gritty and silly, but unlike the film it is very loosely based on, Abel Ferarra’s cult classic “Bad Lieutenant,” it doesn’t take itself very seriously. That’s not apparent at first, but when Cage physically abuses an elderly woman, shrieking, “I’m trying to be courteous but I’m beginning to think that’s getting in the way of me being effective,” while coked out of his mind, it becomes obvious that this is a satire of bad cop movies like “Narc” or “Training Day.”
Seen as parody, the film’s richness and don’t-give-a-damn energy—even if the plot points don’t always add up—make it one of the more unusual and entertaining movies of the year.
I’s been awhile since there’s been a good animated ant movie in the theatres. In 1998 there were two—Antz and A Bug’s Life—but ant lovers can rejoice as The Ant Bully comes to theatres today. Adapted from a kid’s book that the movie’s producer, Tom Hanks, used to read to his son, The Ant Bully is the story of a lonely ten-year-old boy who is bullied by the neighborhood kids so he takes out his frustrations on the only thing smaller than him—the ants in his yard. That is until the day the ants come up with a potion that cuts this anthropoid down to size—ant size. It’s kind of a Honey I Shrunk the Kids with insects.
Inventively animated—the director John A Davis seems to have taken his inspiration not from kid’s movies but from the great science fiction look of 1950’s films like The Day the Earth Stood Still—The Ant Bully features the standard moral lessons for kids about cooperation, equality and kindness, but sells those messages with a great deal of gentle humor.
The ant society is effectively compared and contrasted to the human world, displaying the differences in a hilarious scene featuring a firecracker that could be potentially devastating to the ants but makes barely a pop in the human world, and the similarities in the interpersonal relationships. The movie takes its first third to really get in gear, but with the voice work of Julia Roberts, Paul Giamatti, Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin it soon finds its footing.
Voice work aside the best reason to see this movie are the incredible visuals. The inner workings of the ant colony are particularly well realized, as are the incredible wasps, which look like high-tech aircrafts as much as insects.
