Nicolas Cage

[nauru]

What is with this guy? Why does he insist on making dramas?

To me it is really obvious that Nicolas Cage is a natural born action superstar. His most successful films have been The Rock, Con Air, Face/Off, and National Treasure which grossed a combined 1.3 billion dollars or something ridiculous like that. Ok National Treasure is not action in the classical sense but it's action-adventure, the plot moves at a healthy Jerry Bruckheimer tempo that I would say is faster than Indiana Jones, and there are occasional chase sequences so it passes for action or pseudo action as far as I'm concerned.

When he does drama, it seems that the people who like his action work find his quiet films very dull compared to other dramas. And people who are really into slow quiet drama films, and particularly slow quiet indy drama films just seem to shit on him no matter what he does because they think he's a bad actor or his hair looks stupid or he has hammy lines or he speaks with the signature Nicolas Cage inflection, or some other reason.

When he does action people who like action love his work, and people who don't like action just skip those films since that's not their genre. Everybody wins, and presumably when the film grosses over a quarter billion dollars (as is typically the case whenever Cage deigns to make an action film) he gets a nicer payday than when he takes on ill-fated projects like Adaptation and the Weather Man.

Someone will comment that Kick-Ass didn't make 250 million dollars -- true but Cage wasn't in a lead role there, it was some skinny kid instead; I bet if they made a film about Big Daddy in his batman suit going around the city killing bad guys with a shotgun and grenades while dropping one liners it would gross over 250 million dollars. Same goes for Sorcerer's Apprentice, which barely passes for action; that was a skinny kid in the lead, with Cage relegated to a small supporting role. Plus the movie was aimed at kids. If they had Cage dropping justice and one-liners on mythical bad guys while getting assistance and occasional ass from Monica Bellucci on the side I bet it would gross over 250 million dollars. Drive Angry wasn't traditional action, nor was Season of the Witch.

Lord of War was in my opinion Cage's best dramatic role and even that effort wasn't particularly successful from a commercial standpoint. But still, with its decent level of intensity and occasional bits of excitement it did a heck of a lot better than the Weather Man and Adaptation not to mention other Cage dramas.

So anyway, I wish the guy would go back to making action movies. He's really good at them and every year he spends making dramas is a missed opportunity for him to be great again.

I suppose it's similar to the beef I have with Jim Carrey, who for some reason insists on making dramas despite being much better at absurd comedy like Ace Ventura and The Mask.

[SirStuckey]

6 of his last 7 movies have been action and you think those performances are better than Adaptation, Leaving Las Vegas, Raising Arizona, The Weather Man, or Moonstruck?

[Kojiless]

Last I heard, Nic Cage desperately needed money to pay for all the Harleys, dancing fish plaques, Caribbean islands, laser hair removal operations, and solid gold Nescafe espresso machines he's purchased over the past decade or so. It sounds like he'll be in any movie that'll have him, whether it be action, drama, comedy, dramadey, draction, dromactamy, etc. I, personally, am waiting for him to reprise his role from Vampire's Kiss so I can hear that awesome accent again.

[td888]

I was just wondering the same thing after watching Seeking Justice last night. It's not a high flying movie, but not as bad as the reviews it has now. I just guess Cage bashing is popular nowadays.

It looks like he is desperate to make money and will grab anything they throw at him. Still, I do have a soft spot for him and will watch anything he appears in. He has a weird vibe, it started after watching Zandalee (also set in new Orleans) and Raising Arizona. If you watch Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, the last 20 minutes show this weird vibe again.

They should have cast cage in Cowboys & Aliens in stead of that mummy Daniel Craig. I think it could have been his big (action) come back.

[Zozan]

I dont agree with these arguments at all.

Leaving Las Vegas is in my top 10. All time favorite. My highest rated Cage movie with a score of 97. Drama.

On the other hand, the lowest rated Cage movie of mine is Bangkok Dangerous, has a score of 5. Action.

It seems that I ranked 25 Cage movies so far and, drama and action seems to be evenly distributed among the tiers.

[TheDenizen]

I'm gonna completely disagree on the "Nic Cage is a born action star" line.

My two highest rated Nicolas Cage films are Leaving Las Vegas (T10) and Bringing Out the Dead (T9), both dramas. Not counting Kick-Ass (which you also excluded on the grounds that it's not Cage's starring vehicle), my top ranked action films for Cage are Face/Off (T5) and The Rock (T3).

And I prefer action movies over dramas 9 times out of 10.

But Kojiless has hit the nail on the head. The reason Cage has been in so many crap movies recently is because his personal financial situation is so desperate that he'll take on any project, no matter how shitty, for the cash to keep the tax man at bay. There's a valuable life lesson here: you probably don't need to own multiple European castles or a personal fleet of Rolls Royces.

I also think Jim Carrey is a much better dramatic actor than he gets credit for. Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine are both infinitely better than his spastic gurning in Ace Ventura, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, etc.

[frederic_g54]

Why does he insist on making dramas?

You should check out some 90's Nic Cage films (notably his dramatic work), where he gave some of the coolest, ludicrously over-the performances of his hit-or-miss career. While I enjoyed him in action films such as The Rock and Face/Off (!), I'm a much bigger fan of:

[Spunkie]

He's at his most authentic when he's spurting out nonsense, does that relate to his real persona?

[hellboy76]

He's at his most authentic when he's spurting out nonsense, does that relate to his real persona?

Yeah the first thing springs to my mind with Cage is Wild at Heart and Red Rock West. Adaptation and Raising Arizona are my highest rated, but the most memorable are his bonkers stuff.

As a side note, I just happened to come across this while looking for clips of the Wicker Man... I hope you enjoy it on an immensely uncomfortable level, just as I did.

[Anomaly]

Cage was a box office star in the late 90s/early 00s; his bankruptcy and subsequent "do any role with a good paycheck" attitude has certainly affected his reputation - he's now known for starring in some really bad movies - and so it's hard to believe your claim that "If they had Cage dropping justice and one-liners on mythical bad guys [...] I bet it would gross over 250 million dollars." His current action film at the box office right now, the new Ghost Rider, delivers exactly that but has made (current weekend estimation) 89 million worldwide, on a 57 million dollar budget. It'll probably make a profit over the next few weeks, but not something huge. Film stars don't have as much of a sway over box office earnings as they have had before, so it's less Cage, and more how good the film looks. He's been in some crappy action film recently, so they haven't made as much bank. If he were to star in something appealing, then yes, he could have another super hit, but do the studios want to take the risk, considering his recent reputation?

But enough philosophizing, more Nicolas Cage insanity:
http://www.empireonline.com/interviews/ ... p?IID=1444

It was the first time that I played Ghost Rider. Blaze was easy; I knew he was a man who had been living with a curse for eight years of having his head light on fire, and the tone that would take. I compared him to a cop, or a paramedic who develops a dark sense of humour to cope with the horrors he has seen. But Blaze has also caused the horrors, so he's hiding out because he doesn't want to hurt anyone else.

Ghost Rider was an entirely new experience, and he got me thinking about something I read in a book called The Way Of Wyrd by Brian Bates, and he also wrote a book called The Way Of The Actor. He put forth the concept that all actors, whether they know it or not, stem from thousands of years ago – pre-Christian times – when they were the medicine men or shamans of the village. And these shamans, who by today's standards would be considered psychotic, were actually going into flights of the imagination and locating answers to problems within the village. They would use masks or rocks or some sort of magical object that had power to it.

It occurred to me, because I was doing a character as far out of our reference point as the spirit of vengeance, I could use these techniques. I would paint my face with black and white make up to look like a Afro-Caribbean icon called Baron Samedi, or an Afro-New Orleans icon who is also called Baron Saturday. He is a spirit of death but he loves children; he's very lustful, so he's a conflict in forces. And I would put black contact lenses in my eyes so that you could see no white and no pupil, so I would look more like a skull or a white shark on attack.

On my costume, my leather jacket, I would sew in ancient, thousands-of-years-old Egyptian relics, and gather bits of tourmaline and onyx and would stuff them in my pockets to gather these energies together and shock my imagination into believing that I was augmented in some way by them, or in contact with ancient ghosts. I would walk on the set looking like this, loaded with all these magical trinkets, and I wouldn't say a word to my co-stars or crew or directors. I saw the fear in their eyes, and it was like oxygen to a forest fire. I believed I was the Ghost Rider.