Red Rock West - mistaken identity strikes again!

In Red Rock West, Cage plays a down-on-his luck former U.S. Marine by the name of Michael Williams. Williams is unemployed, presumably due to some ambiguous-but-undoubtedly-received-in-the-line-of-duty leg injury, but not due to a lack of work ethic or morals, as the film takes pains to demonstrate when he resists the temptation to grab some cash left lying around in an apparently deserted gas station, or to hide his leg issues when applying for a job.

He basically lives in his car, a fact established by the fact that he has an entire "morning-get-ready-for-a-job-interview-to-kick-off-the-movie" scene, all in his car at the side of a lonely Wyoming road.

Williams's moral compass wavers when a bartender assumes that he is "Lyle from Dallas" arriving at his bar for "the job". Assuming (he says) that it's just a regular barroom job, he has a moment of weakness and tells Wayne (the villain of the piece) that he is, indeed, Lyle, and he's here about the job, which turns out to be the murder of Wayne's wife Suzanne.

Wayne, the bartender

Turns out, Suzanne also wants Wayne dead, so she offers Williams even more money to spare her life and take that of her why-is-he-still-her-husband (it's because she's newly rich, by the way), which he accepts, only so far as to take the money and try to leave town, after writing a hastily scrawled note to the local sheriff explaining the convoluted situation.

Anyway, things start to go really "holy-crap-how-can-this-many-terrible-coincidences-happen-to-one-guy" when Williams takes a guy he hits with his car to the hospital, it turns out the guy was shot before he ran into him, and the sheriff is called.

Who is also Wayne.

Wayne, the sheriff

So things continue along those lines, with Williams running into Dennis "Lyle from Dallas" Hopper along the way and all kinds of other crazy shenanigans. The wife, incidentally, is Lara Flynn Boyle, and she's also crazy. The two run off together, and he throws her from a train after a pretty epic graveyard fight scene standoff. Dennis Hopper is a difficult man to kill, as it turns out.

All in all, not a bad movie. I'd watch it, if I hadn't just finished watching it.

Amos and Andrew - Like Die Hard with a Vengeance, only not.

So it's been a while, again, but we arrive at the next thrilling installment!

This time it's 1993's Amos and Andrew, a sort of Much Ado About Nothing meets the Keystone Kops meets Die Hard With a Vengeance comedy.

Basically, Samuel L. Jackson plays Andrew Sterling, a well-to-do and reasonably famous black guy whose job it is to be an angry black guy. He's on the cover of Forbes magazine, he teaches at a university and generally gets around on the speaking circuit. He's quite rich.

Sterling has recently moved to an unnamed, upper-class island community in the Northeastern United States. As he's moving his stuff in - in the dark and at night - some nosy neighbours, who are planning on paying a visit to whatever definitively white family used to live in the house, see him moving some stuff around and "naturally" assume that he's burgling the place, so they call the cops.

Incopetent cops, led by a politically ambitious chief, arrive on scene, one thing leads to another, shooting starts happening, and then stuff becomes really big. By that time, the chief has realized that the black guy inside the house and the "hostages" that he's taken are one and the same, and that they're all the famous Andrew Sterling, so he enlists the help of thieving vagabond Amos Odell (played by our hero) to pretend he's taken Sterling hostage, go through the negotiations motions and then be released once everyone's saved face.

It doesn't work out that way, and Amos takes Andrew hostage for real.

Anyway, it's a thoroughly enjoyable movie. The story moves along, one facepalmingly stupid mistake after another, and in the end Amos and Andrew can call each other brother.

That's right. A racially vitriolic Samuel L Jackson learns by the end of the film that the white guy he's been forced to work together with might not be all bad, and may just be an alright guy after all. Remind you of any other movie? That's what I thought.

Wild at Heart - David Lynch and Nicolas Cage together again!

Well, what can you say about Wild At Heart?

It's a David Lynch movie. If that last  sentence means nothing much to you, I'd recommend starting with Industrial Symphony No. 1, because it's short, and will actually make this look almost reasonable by comparison.

If you're familiar with Lynch, but haven't seen Wild At Heart, then you'll be fine. It's definitely no Eraserhead or Mulholland Dr..

It does contain this shot, and a remarkable fixation on fire, that will offer plenty of reminder that you're watching a David Lynch film...

It's got a fairly contiguous storyline, featuring the ne'er-do-well Sailor (played by Our Hero), his love interest (who spends a seriously large portion of the movie either entirely or partially disrobed, FYI) Lulu (played by Lynch favourite Laura Dern), her legitimately crazy mother and a supporting cast of people, most of whom are trying to kill Sailor. Because Lulu's mom asked/paid them to.

Seriously. Her mom's a crazy person. That's lipstick. Everywhere.

The real story picks up after Sailor gets out of jail, where he did time for beating to death a thug who Lulu's mom hired to kill him, and follows the lovers on their quest to go to California together, despite his parole conditions.

Lulu also brings Sailor his snakeskin jacket. It's a symbol of his individuality and his belief in personal freedom.

Sailor's a weird character, but he manages, in the context of this film's universe, to be fairly normal at the same time, and Cage plays him well, despite the accent.

There are some fairly... vivid... flashbacks as they catch each other up on the weirdness that's made up their lives prior to each other (Lulu's cousin, for instance, was completely nuts, made sandwiches all night and had a cockroach fetish.) that also serve to remind you that your brain and eyeballs are in the hands of the man who made Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet.

This is The Good Witch. This scene is in this movie.

It's a weird movie that swings between surreal ridiculousness to raunchy erotica to really surprising violence to black humour and back again with all the agility of a greased mongoose, but assuming you're cool with all of those things, I'd recommend it. It's an experience, if nothing else - like just about all of Lynch's movies.

Also, Willem Dafoe's in it.

Okay, it was unfair to spring that on you. Here's a shot of how Nic Cage gets out of a car when he's excited about finding some heavy metal on the radio:

You're welcome.

Raising Arizona - A wild Nic Cage Crazy Face appears! In a Coen brothers movie!

Here's the thing: Nicolas Cage is, as you and I both well know, awesome. He's also Nicolas Cage. A friend of mine once mused that if a film casts Nicolas Cage for a role, and the role is not a Nicolas Cage role, and the film suffers for it, the fault lies not with Cage, but with the producer/director who decided to try to change Nicolas Cage into something else.

Raising Arizona is not one of those movies, and the Coen brothers are not that type of filmmaker.

As a possibly-slightly-Asperger-suffering ne'er-do-well, Cage is a perfect H.I. McDunnough:

 who married the police mugshot photographer (Ed - short for Edwina):

 who he got to know over the course of his several incarcerations, and who later discovered she was unable to have kids. They learn through local news sources that local rich couple Nathan Arizona and his wife Florence have had quintuplets, and then decide that the right course of action is to even out the average distribution of children and take one of them.

Anyway, as is the case in most Coen brothers films, tremendously excellent writing ensues, along with healthy dollops of hilarious adventure, and everything works out in the end, in its own way.

(and perhaps most importantly, it has John Goodman in it)

I love this movie. I've seen it a couple of times now, and it just keeps being awesome, all the way through.

Cage is perfect, and the movie even features the very first patented Nic Cage Crazy Face moment!

If you haven't seen it yet, see it soon. Or now.

Actually, yeah, go see it now.

***end transmission***

The Cotton Club - "Cornet Solos by Richard Gere"

You know what's awesome? Nostalgia.

Not actual nostalgia, mind you, which can be pretty debilitating at times. Movie nostalgia, on the other hand - especially for periods that you didn't even live through, is pretty amazing.

Enter The Cotton Club. For a guy for whom jazz played such a role in high school, this movie would be worth watching for the primary setting (the legendary eponymous Harlem jazz club) and the soundtrack alone.

I'm not a particular fan of Richard Gere in general, or Richard Gere in this movie specifically (playing "Dixie" Dwyer - jazz cornet/piano player) - I don't really buy his half-indistinguishable generally-old-timey-New-York-Gangster accent, or any expression that he pulls other than "smug."

But Gere aside, the tone and feel of the movie is thoroughly enjoyable.

Nic Cage and a thoroughly jazz-musicianed-up Richard Gere

There are some fairly ridiculous scenes in the movie, though. IMDB says that the movie is the only one of Francis Ford Coppola to ever receive a Razzie, and I don't have a huge amount of difficulty believing it.

Maybe it's just because I didn't live in the 1928 Harlem Jazz/bootlegger/mob scene, but the scene where Gere and Diane Lane are repeatedly slapping each other and fighting on the dance floor, then the rest of the dancers treat it like the start of a trend, and then the two of them go back to Dwyer's mom's place and knock boots just doesn't quite ring true for me.

Like I said, though - who knows, maybe it happened all the time, and I just don't know it.

Anyway, that scene (and a couple of others like it) aside, it's still a fairly enjoyable mob movie, and as the credits say, it features cornet solos by Gere himself. I haven't found anything that contradicts that, so I'm willing to believe it - they sound good, too.

Cage plays Vincent Dwyer, Dixie's big brother, who has quite a minor role in the whole show, despite being the one who gets Dixie dragged into the mob scene in the first place, only to become the "Mad Dog Mick" who makes enemies of just about every mob boss in New York.

What does Nic Cage look like when he's the most hated man in the New York underground? This.

Bob Hoskins is in it - as club owner/mob boss Owney Madden, Gregory Hines is in it - as tap dancing hero Sandman Williams, Fred Gwynne (Herman Munster and the judge in My Cousin Vinnie) is in it - as Frenchie Demange, Madden's right-hand man, Larry Fishburn plays a black mob boss, Tom Waits plays some random guy and some random guy does a shockingly good Cab Calloway.

The Bob Hoskin-Fred Gwynne dynamic may just be the best part of the whole movie, actually.

If you like mob movies, and you like Nic Cage, you should think about seeing this.

Just for kicks, I've started making movie barcodes (inspired by this awesome stuff) and will cap each post with the visual summary of its movie.

So here, without further ado, every 90th frame of The Cotton Club, shrunk to one pixel wide and stitched together!