How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb…

OK. I know that I said that last post was gonna be the last one for awhile, but I’ve got time on an airplane. (upon which, by the way, I’m sitting next to a guy who’s downed at least an entire bottle of champagne and appears to have narcolepsy. He smells like root canals and I don’t think he was even remotely impressed at how good I am at Mario Tennis.) 
But I digress.
In preparing to come home, I know I’m going to face a lot of questions. Inevitably, people will expect me to have had some big epiphany, or realization, or climbed to the next level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. So, I’ll spare you all the trouble of asking and lay it out right here, right now: I love Nicolas Cage movies. 

And when I say that, I mean all of them. I’m not gonna come here and say ‘I like Nicolas Cage, but only in Adaptation.’ because that’s too easy. That’s like the people who say they like Bruce Springsteen, but only Nebraska. You’re just missing the point. But before I get into that, allow me to rewind a little.

I can’t really pinpoint when this hit me, but if I had to guess it would be the walk around the Osaka Loop Line, because thinking about things like that took my mind off of the excruciating pain coming from my heels. To go back further, in SE Asia, most non-pool downtime was spent watching movie channels, because movie channels are indoors and indoors is air conditioned. So between my time spent there so far, as well as planes, I’ve seen a decent amount of Nic Cage movies (including, but not limited to, in pieces or their entirety: Con Air x 4, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Raising Arizona, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans x 2, Lord of War, and a couple that are escaping me right now. Its now to the point where I noticed his 2 seconds on screen as an extra in Risky Business. This one was uncredited, unlike his brief appearance in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, where he is listed as Nicolas Coppola.) The point is both that I’ve seen a lot of Nic Cage movies and that Nic Cage makes a lot of movies. 

And people rag on Nic Cage for making a lot of movies and say that he can’t act. The man has an incredible work ethic, and he’s begrudged for that. It’s pretty obvious that the man takes every script handed to him, I think maybe he’s in trouble with the IRS or something. And it’s also obvious that he’s going through the motions on screen a lot of the time. But who hasn’t done that? Who hasn’t had a job that they’re doing for a paycheck and nothing else, and therefore not giving their all. In that sense, Nic Cage is an Everyman, a blue collar actor for blue collar times. Are actors supposed to be shielded from the recession for some reason? 

But aside from the work ethic, you also have to respect his self-awareness. It’s like he knows he’s going through the motions, and he knows the audience knows he’s going through the motions. It’s post-acting. He’s the complete opposite of method actors like Val Kilmer who immerse themselves in their roles, to the point where it becomes their lives over the shoot and become completely crazy. (For example, in one interview, Val Kilmer has stated that he has a better understanding of how it feels to kill someone than someone who has actually killed someone, because he’s killed someone on screen. True story). But Nic Cage… Nic Cage leaves his job at the office. Nic Cage respects work/life balance.

So, in thinking about this on that long, fateful walk, I got an idea: They should start re-making classic movies, but starring Nic Cage. They wouldn’t even have to actually re-make the movie, they could just green screen him in there. The possibilities are endless: The Godfather, starring Nicolas Cage; The Big Lebowski, starring Nicolas Cage; Lost in Translation, starring Nicolas Cage. I could go on, but you get the idea. You can argue that this would not result in good movies (and you’d be right!), but you can’t deny that it would result in interesting movies. Would anyone honestly not be curious to see Nic try his hand at Forrest Gump? So I was telling some friends about this idea, which led to googling Nicolas Cage, which led me to discover that this is something that is almost actually happening – Nicolas Cage is planning to headline in a stage remake of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The revolution will not be televised, but it will be off Broadway.

And this brings me back to the Bruce Springsteen comparison. Bruce Springsteen needs Nebraska to strip away the bombast of the E-Street band and give us just the songs, just the lyrics, just the stories. But then you tie those basics in with the whole band, and you’ve got yourself some classic albums. And similarly, Nicolas Cage needs Adaptation to show us that given the right script, the right story, the right director – he can be an amazing actor. Without that glimpse into the actual ability, he would just be a terrible actor with a great agent and a knack for picking terrible roles. But with that glimpse, the terrible roles take on new life, and while we’re not exactly treated to watching a master of his craft, we do get to watch someone who knows what needs to be done, and does just that, nothing more and nothing less. Which in some ways is just as admirable.