Time to Kill - Why was this so hard to find?

I was really expecting to watch this movie more or less against my will.

It basically stands as the second hardest item in Nicolas Cage's filmography, and since it was shot/released after he had more or less become established, I assumed that this was because it sucked a lot.

However, I'm pretty confident in my opinion that anyone who tells you that this movie was absolutely terrible has A) limited ability to assess films in general or B) never seen Vampire's Kiss or Moonstruck.

Now, that's not to say that there aren't some pretty serious issues with this movie. Because there are. But luckily, especially in light of Vampire's Kiss, they don't really have anything to do with Cage, who turns in a pretty decent performance, all things considered. Actually, forget that last clause. He's just good in it.

Basically the story's set in Africa, during the Italio-Abyssinian war in the 1930s, and Cage plays Lieutenant Silvestri, a man with a bad toothache. The toothache causes him to up and leave camp, only to have his truck run off the road, sending him to find a doctor on foot. Taking a "shortcut" back to camp, he comes across an idyllic waterfall populated by a single bathing Ethiopian woman, who he proceeds to rape, but then ends up having a genuine relationship with her (I should note here - whether or not this comes as a surprise to anyone - that the movie is based on a novel written by an Italian), only to accidentally shoot her in the stomach while trying to fend off a hyena in the middle of the night.

After burying her, he spends the rest of the movie psychologically crippled. While a cursory read-through of most synopses would have you believe that this is simply because he believes that she had leprosy, which he caught from her, I disagree. That's definitely part of it, and it weighs on him heavily, but I do think that there's genuine grief at her death there. I don't feel like spoilers on a movie this obscure and hard to find are a thing, but skip to the next paragraph if you disagree. The fact that his ultimate moment of relief comes from his reconciliation with her father, and their proper burial of her, is a dead giveaway.

I found another blog tracing the filmography of Cage (it only actually appears to have gotten to Time to Kill, but I don't know that the author was going in order) that seems to have found the movie itself very perplexing and bizarre, but narrative-wise it didn't strike me as particularly obtuse. It follows a series of flashbacks as presented by Silvestri to his army chum, so it's a bit disjointed, but other than that it flows pretty well.

I didn't mind this movie at all.

Oh, and he makes a chameleon smoke at one point. So there's that, too.

Peggy Sue Got Married - Time travel

You know what's awesome? Time travel. Particularly when it happens in movies and doesn't have to actually conform to any real physics or science, and doesn't really need to concern itself with the myriad paradoxes involved.

So Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) is a soon-to-be-divorcee who is/was married to Charlie (Nic Cage). Helen Hunt is their daughter, but that's not particularly important.

Their 25th high school anniversary is rapidly approaching, and turns out about how you'd expect - people are basically the same, the class clown (JIM CARREY!!!) is big into cocaine, the nerdly outcast is now a wealthy author, etc.

So Peggy Sue is elected queen of the prom reunion, and promptly faints in a spell of flashinglightsandcandlesandclappingandsinging. When she wakes up, it's 1960 again, and she's back in high school.

In some ways, it's a pretty typical go-back-and-fix-things from the same vein that brought out Being Erica, but it pulls it off fairly well, I think.

As for Cage, this is an interesting example of old Cage playing young Cage (which we just saw a mere five years earlier in that Best of Times ABC pilot). This time, he decides that in order to really sell the idea that he's a teenager again, he needs a funny voice. So he dons a funny voice.

And poofy hair. And enormous sunglasses.

I don't know why. Particularly because young Charlie fancies himself as the next lead singer in the next gigantic four-piece singing group.

Featuring, yes, JIM CARREY!!!

Unsurprisingly, Charlie's dulcet tones and simply stupendous sense of personal style end up winning the jaded-and-cheated-upon-soon-to-be-divorcee-in-her-own-teenage-body Peggy Sue that what they had in high school is, indeed, worth not undoing. Happily ever after, and all that.

Overall, good movie. Not what you'd call a stellar and moving film, but entertaining enough in its own right, and like I said, time travel movies are awesome.

Oh, did I mention that it has JIM CARREY (!!!) in it?

The Boy in Blue - a movie about rowing

I feel like a better Canadian having found out about this Ned Hanlan character, even more so having heard about him through a Nic Cage movie.

My main complaint is that they seem to have gotten the mustaches reversed, as Hanlan appears to have sported a killer stache, while the secondary villain of the piece (rival sculler Edward Trickett - as an aside, it appears to be a champion rower in the 19th century, you must have been known as Ned...) was cleanly shorn.

Oh well.

So Ned Hanlan, in the film, is a guy who earned his massive rowing pipes by running moonshine across the border to the Americans, who gets discovered by a sleazy-then-good-natured-then-sleazy-then-good-natured guy who wants to introduce him to the wide world of 'professional' rowing.

There's a girl involved, as well, of course.

One other thing: Christopher Plummer's in it!

Gee, a movie about one of the first (if not the first) Canadian sporting hero, co-starring one of the most celebrated Canadian actors ever, shot almost entirely in Canada? You'd think this was a Canadian production...

Ta-DA! This blog's first major piece of Can-con!

"But wait!" you say. "Don't Canadian movies usually do... less than spectacularly at the box office?"

Yes. Yes they do. According to IMDB, this movie grossed $275,000. On a budget of nearly eight million.

In today's dollars, though, that's... still abysmal.

No matter, I've watched an entertaining movie, learned a little bit more about Canada's sporting pedigree, and supported, in my own small way, the Canadian film industry of the mid-1980s.

Also, there were plenty of manly sporting montages, which almost always serve to counterbalance the general coolness and awesomeness of athletes by having them make faces like this over and over again in slow motion:

I guess the A/V club never truly forgets high school...

Anyway, if you get a chance to see this movie, you should do it, and now here's the barcode:

Birdy - or: What Happens When the Psychological Effects of War Strike Someone Who's Already Sort of Crazy?

So here we are: the end of 1984 (as it applies to the filmography of Nicolas Cage).

Birdy is about... well, a lot of things, really.

It's about friendship, being misunderstood, the Vietnam War, mental illness (though this is much more subtext than anything else), the tole of combat... and birds. Obviously.

The movie follows, through a series of flashbacks and disjointed timelines, the friendship of Al Columbato (played by Our Hero) and "Birdy" - his weird friend who descends from an affinity for, to an obsession with, birds, played by Matthew Modine.

When Al and Birdy meet, the latter is, or at least seems like, what you'd call simply a bird lover.

But the normal kind. This... changes... later.

His fascination with birds becomes an obsession, an eventually all-consuming one, to the point where it drives a wedge between him and Al, just before they ship out, having been drafted to serve in Vietnam.

An experience that, not uniquely, screws them up. In different ways.

When they both come back, having been discharged due to injuries, they're suffering, but in different ways, and maybe not even in the ways that they seem to be. Al's face has been badly burned by an explosion, and Birdy hasn't spoken since he came back, after being MIA for a month following a helicopter crash and a napalm attack.

Al is brought in to see if he can help bring his friend back to the 'real world' - to the surprise of very few on this side of the fourth wall, Birdy has now well and truly taken up residence in his bird-brain.

The question that I had by the end was whether it really was Birdy who was psychologically traumatized by the war, or whether his retreat into bird-dom was tactical, and salvatory...

The movie is poignant enough to get through the quite silly bits without finding them too silly, and well-written enough that you do tend to believe that: A) Al really is trying to stay friends with a guy who thinks he's a bird, and B) Birdy is a guy who thinks he's a bird.

Yes, there are silly parts. Yes, that's Matthew Modine and Nic Cage wearing pigeon suits.

Also, Nic Cage gets into a few fights, and (assuming that groin-kicking an extra doesn't count as a 'stunt' and it's really him) even gets to work with the most (apparently) trusting aspiring actor in Hollywood:

I quite enjoyed this movie.

And following the recently established tradition, here it is in one-pixel slices:

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!

Racing with the Moon - Co-starring at last

1984 started on a reasonably high note for our hero, appearing in his second film with the already-established Sean Penn, this time in a co-starring role, playing Nicky, lifelong bud of Penn's Henry "Hopper" Nash.

They race beside steam locomotives. For fun. Because the 1940s were hardcore.

The two are lower-class teenage pin monkeys in early 1940s California, waiting their call-up to go off to war. Nicky is something of a screw-up, horny and hot-headed, while Hopper is more of a sappy romantic, who falls for Caddie, a girl the pair assume to be "a Gatsby girl" who lives in a giant mansion.

Nic Cage - pin monkey

It's a good movie (carrying on the tradition being established early that even if you dislike Nic Cage - which is grounds for findings of clinical insanity in some countries - you have to admit that the movies he's in don't suck) with decent writing and a fairly decent, if a bit well-worn, plot.

The story's well-told, the characters have credibility and the spin they put on the standard poor-boy-meets-rich-girl story is appreciated.

Hustling pool - useful when characters need money, and buddy films need tense, friendship-testing moments.

1984 was a pretty busy year for Cage, with Racing with the Moon the first of three movies.

Also, what's becoming increasingly clear with each movie is that American squeamishness is a relatively new phenomenon - so far, every actual movie (the ABC pilot not included) has had at least one scene of nudity in it.