Not long after I wrote that post on Nic Cage's late-period career last week, I came across this article, in which Cage talks about his upcoming movies Drive Angry and Some Bullshit About Witches, and in so doing, shines a light into his creative process. About the first:
"Drive Angry I'm doing right now," he said, "which is why I have this Celtic blonde hair. I was gonna shave my head and tattoo my skull with black fire but the producer talked me out of it. So I went blonde. I'm the undead. I've been called up from Hell, because Jonah King, played by Billie Burke, a charlatan satanic cultist, sacrificed my daughter; and I'm called up to get vengeance."
Again, let it never be said that Cage coasts through the B-movie roles he takes. Here he's in a movie about a reincarnated damned soul who goes around running people over with a car as if he were Matthew Broderick, and his producer has to convince him to tone it down. As for SBAW, Cage has this to say:
"Season of the Witch is another supernatural movie. As you may have noticed, I enjoy playing supernatural characters – City of Angels, Season of the Witch, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Ghost Rider, and Drive Angry. Because when you play a supernatural character the possibilities are limitless. It's endless what you can do with it, the choices, because it's infinity, right? You're not stuck in some contextual reality, whatever that is. So I can get abstract, get outside of the box, as I like to call it."
Translation: somebody's going to get paid for this movie, so it might as well be him. Also, the part of Cage's brain that controls his misunderstanding of quantum physics overlaps with the part that controls his desire for maniacal overacting.
If, like me, you've ever wondered what happened to Wes Bentley, the actor who played Ricky Fitts in American Beauty, over the last decade, mystery solved! He was strung out on heroin. Ironically, drug use did not help him reconnect with his true self and tap into hidden reserves of courage, as I would have expected based on the plot of American Beauty.
Above: Nicolas Cage's eyebrows have their own acting coach. (Editor's note: probably not true.) The upcoming release of Kick-Ass, which I'm probably more excited for than any other movie this summer with the possible exception of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, is as good a time as any to address this topic, which has been percolating in my brain for longer than it's probably healthy to admit. With the possible exception of Robert DeNiro, I can't think of any prolific actor whose career choices have been as widely and openly maligned. For instance: in commemoration of the opening of Knowing last winter, EW's Owen Gleiberman wrote a piece entitled "Nicolas Cage: Artist or Hack?", and Peter Travers wrote a blog-length kvetch about the (indisputably true) fact that Cage's worst movies are also his most financially successful. The standard format for the argument against Nicolas Cage is that he started out as a daring and promising young actor, sold out to blockbuster Hollywood immediately after winning Best Actor in 1995, and has since been cashing checks left and right by lazing his way through uninspired B-movies.
Factually, this analysis is correct. Cage did indeed have a pretty incredible string of roles in the late 80s/early 90s (Raising Arizona, Vampire's Kiss, Wild At Heart and the like), and pretty much immediately went into big-budget action filmmaking after winning the Oscar. Also, a substantial proportion of his movies since that time have been terrible (worst offenders being Ghost Rider and Gone in 60 Seconds, by my reckoning, although there's quite a few I haven't seen). Even so, I'm going to argue that not only has Nicolas Cage not wasted his talent in his post-Oscar work, his career choices make him one of the most interesting actors in the movie business. Let's break this down into a series of simple points.
1. Pretty much all award-winning actors go on to make underwhelming movies. Let's be honest: most feature-length dramas aren't very good. In fact, most critically praised feature-length dramas aren't even very good. And yet, if an Oscar-winning actor wants to "live up" to his talent in his subsequent role choices, the widespread perception is that acting in dramas is the best way to do so. As a result, most of them follow up award wins with horseshit middlebrow films that everyone pretends to care about for five minutes and promptly forgets. Consider the subsequent films of some of the Best Actor winners since Cage won in '95 for Leaving Las Vegas. Roberto Benigni followed up Life is Beautiful (which, for the record, is a movie I despise) by playing the lead role in Pinocchio (no, really). I don't think we even need to mention Kevin Spacey, but in case you forgot: Pay It Forward, K-Pax, and The Shipping News. Denzel Washington did Antwone Fisher after winning for Training Day. Adrian Brody followed up The Pianist with motherfucking The Village. Even Daniel Day Lewis, who's been in something like three movies his entire career, did that musical remake of 8 1/2 that came out last Christmas after winning for There Will Be Blood.
The idea that Nicolas Cage deprived the world of a plethora of brilliant dramatic performances in order to become the next Sylvester Stallone is bullshit. If you were faced with the choice between making umpteen "respectable" variations on Captain Corelli's Mandolin for the remainder of your career or turning yourself into the most overqualified B-movie star in Hollywood history, which would you pick? Moreover, which would you find more challenging or artistically satisfying? This leads us to point number 2...
2. Nicolas Cage almost always substantially improves the bad movies he's in. Whatever you can say about the quality of his movie choices (any you can obviously say a lot), Cage can't be accused of misunderstanding the fundamentals of B-movie acting. Take, for instance, Con Air, Cage's second action movie after winning the Oscar, which combines an idiotic premise with thoroughly incompetent direction and yet manages to be fantastically entertaining. The latter fact is almost completely due to the casting choices: along with Cage, the movie features John Malkovich, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, and John Cusack, plus a slew of recognizable B-listers, and gives all of them free reign to chew as much scenery as they like. Although the protagonist is written as a run of the mill action hero, Cage plays him with a stoned stupor and a gleefully over-the-top hillbilly drawl. His Forrest Gump-meets-Steven Seagal performance works because it acknowledges both the underlying ridiculousness of the movie and the need to make it entertaining (the same applies to a lot of the leads in Con Air, especially Malkovich).
I can't think of many Nicolas Cage movies that would have been better if they had starred someone else. In fact, most of them would have been worse. Cage gets a fair amount of shit for his overacting, but it's worth mentioning that very few of the movies to which that criticism applies would be improved in any tangible sense by more subtlety. If you've seen Knowing, try to mentally substitute, say, Johnny Depp in the lead role. Would it have been a more enjoyable movie if it featured Depp's trademark eyebrow raising and muttering instead of Nic Cage's trademark manic gesticulating? A hint: no. It would just have made it boring to watch.
Without question, the most glorious example of Nicolas Cage's willingness to go to excess in support of a work of dubious value is in Neil LaBute's staggeringly unnecessary remake of The Wicker Man. There's a fairly famous YouTube compilation of the most over-the-top moments from the film that I'm not going to link to (assuming it hasn't been removed for copyright violation) because seeing the scenes out of context hardly does justice to the sheer inexplicable craziness of the full film. I think of The Wicker Man remake not as a failed attempt at a coherent filmed narrative, but as a deeply personal collaborative attempt by Nicolas Cage and Neil LaBute to merge their dominant artistic impulses (respectively, barely suppressed emotional extremes and hatred of women) into a single work. In that sense (and none other), it's a complete success as a film. Even if you don't care to submit The Wicker Man to a close reading, you can't go wrong marveling at the ridiculousness of it with some friends over beers, and that's far from low praise in my book.
3. He's also done a surprising amount of legitimately fine work. Something that often gets overlooked in the discussion about late-period Nicolas Cage is that he's also done a lot of good acting in some really good movies alongside the B-grade action flicks. Adaptation is probably the most widely acknowledged of these, but there are others, like the underrated Matchstick Men and Lord of War, and last year's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which is probably the best argument for the artistic value of Cage's manic tendencies to date.
Moreover, it's hard to argue that Cage should have turned down many of the dramatic movies that he's starred in that didn't exactly set the world on fire. I doubt most leading men in Hollywood would pass on opportunities to work with Martin Scorcese, Brian DePalma, or Oliver Stone. Even something like Windtalkers, a World War II movie made back when people were still holding out hope for John Woo's Hollywood career, probably seemed like an acceptable risk.
The real issue with Nicolas Cage circa the past 15 years isn't that he does bad work, or even that the bad work outweighs the good work. Rather, it's that the sheer volume of movies he stars in makes him a difficult actor to pin down. This is an actor so prolific that in the first half of the 2000s, he starred in no less than three separate films entitled "The ______ Man." I don't think Cage's chronic inability to not be making a movie at any given point in time (which is hardly an exaggeration, per his IMDB page, he's averaged three films a year over the past decade) is necessarily a bad thing. It just guarantees that his output is going to be wildly uneven. This year alone he's in the promising-looking Kick-Ass and the promising-sounding The Hungry Rabbit Jumps (it has Guy Pearce and is from the director of the The Bank Job, which I enjoyed.) He's also in this movie, henceforth to be referred to as Some Bullshit About Witches:
So it goes. In 2011, he'll be starring in a 3-D movie called Drive Angry, summarized as "A vengeful father chases after the men who killed his daughter." I can't wait.
Above: Kevin Smith makes a movie about his right temple and you'd better not criticize it.
Let me propose something: no single individual has been affected more negatively by the coarsening of American popular culture than Kevin Smith. Back in the day, after Clerks almost got an NC-17 rating for language and went on to become a word of mouth cult hit, Kevin Smith was widely seen as a daring counterculture auteur whose unabashed vulgarity stood in bold contrast to the staid mainstream cinema of the day. More simply put: Clerks had a lot of dick jokes at a time when people actually stood a chance at being legitimately offended by dick jokes. In the past 15 years, Kevin Smith has mostly demonstrated his ineptitude at all the part of movie making that don't involve writing down dick jokes and Star Wars references and our culture has pretty much lost the ability to be offended by anything. This is a big problem, not just for Kevin Smith's current terrible movies, but also for his past movies that everyone used to like. In a time when we can hop on the Internet to read the richest athlete in the world's text messages about wanting to piss on porn stars, I'd venture to guess that the blowjob jokes in Clerks don't hit as hard as they used to.
For whatever reason, complete artistic irrelevance hasn't made Kevin Smith any less visible. Mostly, this is because of Kevin Smith's other skill, which is starting to look more and more like his true calling: endless and defensive complaining about every single real and perceived slight he experiences. Last week, he posted a diatribe on Twitter about the injustice of professional film critics pointing out that his latest movie, Cop Out, is a piece of shit, including this rebuttal:
“Like, it's called #CopOut ; that sound like a very ambitious title to you? You REALLY wanna s**t in the mouth of a flick that so OBVIOUSLY strived for nothing more than laughs. Was it called "Schindler's Cop Out"?”
He then goes on to compare his movie to a retarded child. No, really. The substance of his argument isn't that his movie is actually good, it's that he wasn't trying very hard, so pointing out the fact that it isn't good is mean. Hey, Kevin Smith! People that go to the movies don't get a discount on the price of admission because you decided that doing a studio comedy gives you carte blanche to phone it in. We all still have to pay $9.50 to watch you fail at your job.
Smith goes on to unveil his master plan to replace the tyranny of professional criticism:
“Next flick, I'd rather pick 500 randoms from Twitter feed & let THEM see it for free in advance, then post THEIR opinions, good AND bad. Same difference. Why's their opinion more valid?"
I can spare Kevin Smith the cost of setting up a screening room for 500 of his Twitter followers for his next movie and tell everyone right now how this would turn out: they'd all give it rave reviews. Why? Because they're following Kevin Smith on Twitter, and Kevin Smith has one of the most slavish fanbases in the entertainment industry. This is a man who puts out DVDs of himself giving lectures and Q & A sessions as if he were Noam Chomsky or some shit, and people buy them. If they get invited by Kevin Smith himself to an advance screening of a new Kevin Smith movie, they're going to be coming in their pants no matter how objectively awful what's onscreen is. Of course, that's not a problem for Kevin Smith, but it is a problem for non-Kool Aid drinkers trying to figure out whether to spend their hard-earned dollar whatever self-indulgent bullshit Smith decides to throw onto the screen next go round.
The supreme irony of this whole episode is that Kevin Smith is bar none one of most critically over-praised filmmakers in recent memory. Gaze upon the favorable reviews for Clerks II, a movie I'm still bitter about wasting money on four years after the fact. Remember Dogma, which was marketed as a bold skewering of religion and was actually a tedious blend of pseudo-theological nonsense and forced attempts at "edginess"? Critics liked that one, too. (Sidebar: the Catholic League should have gotten some back-end points on Dogma, since their protests basically were the movie's marketing campaign. Although since the organization is currently attacking the New York Timesfor exposing a cover-up of horrific child abuse by priests, it's probably best they don't have any more money than they already do.) Even Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, essentially a feature-length complaint by Kevin Smith about how people make fun of him on Internet message boards, got average reviews.
Probably the real reason that Kevin Smith is so emotionally volatile about criticism at the moment is the relative commercial failure of his last movie, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, which as I understand it was an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Seth Rogan by remaking the little-remembered Comedy Central original movie Porn 'n Chicken. Clearly, that didn't work out the way it was supposed to. He admits as much in this junket interview:
“That was supposed to be the one that punched us through to the next level. Everyone thought it would do $60 (million) to $70 million, and it wound up doing Kevin Smith business. I was like, ‘I’m done.’ If I were to write at that point in my life, it would about the poor fat kid whose movie didn’t make enough money. . . ."
Whatever dark night of the soul the underperformance of Zack and Miri caused him to experience clearly didn't last long enough, because within the same fucking interview he's saying:
“All the (stuff) I used to put in the films, I can put into my blog or into my podcast, so that leaves me wide open in terms of what do I want to do in film.”
If you've paid to see more than two of Kevin Smith's films in your lifetime, did you ever leave the theater thinking that his problem was a surplus of good ideas that couldn't be fully mined by just one mode of expression? Unless you're a member of the Kevin Smith Cult, my guess is no. In fact, you were probably thinking something like "why does he keep dragging out Jay and Silent Bob again and again?"
In fact, Kevin Smith's unfettered access to so many forums for his ceaseless bitching, lucrative as it may be for his lecture DVD and book sales, is probably the worst thing that could happen to him as a film director. That's because it reinforces his biggest flaw over and over again: his pathological inability to detect the line at which a good idea starts becoming a bad one. For instance, take the incident in February in which he was kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight for being too fat. It'd be pretty reasonable for him to be upset about that, to take the issue up with the airline, and to use his celebrity status to raise awareness of his displeasure at the incident and the broader (no pun intended) issue of the way the airline industry treats the overweight. Instead, he declared a goddamned electronic jihad against Southwest: according to his Wikipedia page, he devoted two hourlong podcasts and a series of 24 YouTube videos to the subject (the latter of which I was heartened to find out that hardly anyone watched), along with severallengthy diatribes (the second of which is hilariously titled "Running out of gas on this subject") on his blog and who knows how many tweets. I remember sitting in O'Hare airport right after this happened and wondering why in the fuck CNN was reporting on Kevin Smith's Twitter feed, and getting kind of annoyed with the whole thing.
Similarly, Kevin Smith's whole "I'm a regular dude with a limited formal background in movie making, and I'm not a great visual stylist" persona used to come across as refreshingly unpretentious and in keeping with the spirit of independent film making. When he does it nowadays, it looks like he doesn't give a shit about developing his formal command of his medium, despite his resources, because he knows that if he throws enough "fucks," oral sex jokes, and Star Wars references into a script, his devoted fanbase will eat it up with a spoon, and when his attempts at making a more serious film fail miserably, he can just shrug it off with a few one-liners in his interviews rather than trying to take any sort of lesson from it.
Anyhow, the other bit of Kevin Smith news from the past week is that his next movie is going to be Red State, a low budget horror film about fundamentalist Christianity reportedly inspired by the notorious Fred Phelps. It's being pitched as a dramatic departure from his usual work, which I guess it would have to be, so good for him. In typical Kevin Smith fashion, this quote about the film gives me pause:
"...it's not like a splatter film, it's not like slasher balls-to-the-wall gore, it's more unsettling and disturbing type of horror."
So it's going to rely on Kevin Smith's ability to convey tone, pacing, and insinuation? Good luck with that. If, say, Eli Roth were announcing this film, I'd be intrigued. Hell, if Kevin Smith were making this film six years ago, I'd be cautiously optimistic. Maybe I'm wrong, and Red State will turn out to be the next Exorcist or something. More likely though, it'll be a wildly uneven mix of Smith's trademark diminishing-returns "edgy" dialogue punched up with some gratuitous violence and a running, ham-fisted attempt at social commentary. None of that will matter, though, because Fox News will get wind of it and start running a series of its trademark saturation-level outraged editorials about "Hollywood sneering at conservatives again" a month or so before it releases. To which Kevin Smith will respond with his trademark genial mock-surprised smartassedness on the ten thousand forms of electronic communication over which he has provenance. Then the media coverage over the "controversial new film" will ensure that it at least recoups expenses with a bit of return, since Kevin Smith certainly isn't going to spend more than $15 dollars making it. Also, I imagine that a fair number of critics will praise it for its "boldness" and "irreverence" regardless of its actual quality, except for one or two scribes whom Kevin Smith will complain at length about in his podcast and next DVD. And everyone will come out a winner except the people who have to pay to see the movie.
