Honeymoon in Vegas - A normal Nicolas Cage and an attractive Sarah Jessica Parker... Yeah.

This is getting weird. Honeymoon in Vegas marks two movies in a row that I've actually enjoyed. Not that I haven't already seen some good (and precious few great) movies over the course of this project, but these last two were just simply sit-back-and-watch enjoyable. Zandalee was, obviously, more intense than this, but still...

Anyway, Nicolas Cage plays Jack Singer, a private detective whose mother made him promise, on her deathbed, never to marry. He's a normal guy, with no real accent, regular hair and clothes... It's unnerving almost.

He works at a desk, but not once does he scream his way through the alphabet at a therapist...

Anyway, some years later, his girlfriend is slowly getting tired of his apparently oft-repeated official position on marriage, and they start to drift apart, at which point Singer realizes that if he's going to keep his beautiful, intelligent, sensitive woman in his life, he's going to have to break the promise that he only really made to his mother after she was already dead. Would it even still count at that point? Who knows? So the pair fly to Vegas to get hitched. Oh yeah, and that aforementioned beautiful woman? Played by Sarah Jessica Parker.

This is, believe it or not, the same woman who led Jeremy Clarkson to deploy what is perhaps his greatest simile ever.

Anyway, in Vegas they meet a pro/sleazy/dangerous gambler who takes a fancy to Bessie, and proceeds to arrange things so that he gets to spend the weekend with her.

It's actually a genuinely good movie. It also has Pat Morita in it, playing a Hawaiian taxi driver named Mahi Mahi.

He must've waxed off his facial hair...

The point is, you should go see it. Cage does a good job with his role (he still gets to go a little nuts and have just a bit of screaming, which provides a nice sense of continuity with the rest of his roles) and the whole thing moves along with the kind of predictability and Hollywood rationality that makes for a decent 90 minutes of relaxed movie-watching, as long as you don't take yourself too seriously.

Moonstruck - the Italianest movie ever made, saved by the limitlessly talented John Mahoney

I'm trying to think of a way for a movie to be more Italian than Moonstruck.

Let's try a thought experiment. I'm going to show you a few pictures, and you're going to imagine that all of the people in these pictures make up both the cast and the production crew of a movie. We'll see if imagined scenario can produce a movie that is more Italian.

Here we go.

Nope. Still not Italian enough.

If I'm honest, by 35 minutes into this movie, it'd already firmly established itself as the first true test of mettle in this project since Best of Times. Quite apart from the fact that the whole thing plays out like a Mel Brooks-level parody of Italian-American culture, the writing is genuinely terrible.

'Terrible?' you say? Yes. Terrible. So terrible that even if the acting was spectacular to the max, it still would have fallen flat.

And the lead actor in this movie is Cher.

Just as a for-instance, to give you an idea of what the dialogue in this film is like, here's what Cher's character (Loretta Castorini) says to Nic Cage's character (Ronny Cammareri) by way of pillow talk, on the day they met.

Oh, did I mention that Ronny is the brother of the guy (Johnny) who Loretta got engaged to the day before? And Ronny and Johnny haven't spoken in five years since Ronny lost his hand in a bread-slicing accident at work after being 'distracted' by Johnny, following which Ronny's fiance left him? Yeah, all that happened. Nic Cage has a wooden hand in this movie.

See?

Anyway, so as Cammareri (Ronny, not Johnny - who is in Sicily watching over his dying mother) takes Castorini to bed (immediately after he's flipped over the table around which they were pounding whisky in the middle of the day), here's how Loretta responds to Ronny's question "what about Johnny?":

"You're mad at him, take it out on me. Take your revenge out on me. Leave nothing left for him to marry. Leave nothing but the skin on my bones."




It goes on like this.

And yet, at about the one-hour mark, something positively amazing happens.

John Mahoney comes back. You may not know him at all. Or you may know him as possibly the best part of the '90s sitcom, Frasier.

But if you decided to subject yourself to Moonstruck, you will forever know him as the guy who pulled off the only thoroughly uplifting, genuine, captivating and talented bit of acting in the entire film.

Up to that point in the movie, he seems like a one-off character - a guy who gets a drink thrown in his face by a much younger woman in the background of the proposal scene that kicks off this monstrosity. But then he's back, and he and Mrs. Castorini (played by the also-surprisingly-awesome-for-the-movie-she's-in Olympia Dukakis - mother of Loretta who's dining aloneIdon'tevencareenoughtogointotheactualplotofthisstupidmoviethatledtothescene...) are sitting together after he gets another drink from another pretty young lady, and he talks about why he chases women.

And it's the only time in the movie that you forget you're watching actors. It's amazing. It's so inexplicably amazing that it's almost worth watching this garbage just to enjoy Mahoney in it. There's no fake Italian accent, there's no accordion music in the background, nobody mentions Italian food, and he just is this character. I could go on. It's just amazing. I think, just for what he's managed to accomplish in this film, that Mahoney has become one of my favourite actors. Instantly.

Anyway, as you may have guessed, I don't like this movie. Up till now, this project hasn't felt like work - it hasn't actually felt like an accomplishment to get through it. This took work. But it's done now. What a crappy movie.

And we're almost out of the '80s, too.

Alright, so here's the danger of writing the review on the fly: it turns out there was an almost-halfway-decent resolution to this otherwise steaming pile of crap, and it did involve a single line that made me genuinely laugh out loud. For the first time in this "comedy", mind you, but I felt that it deserved a mention, in all fairness.

Okay I'm done now.

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***

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?

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.

Valley Girl - Of Nic Cage and montages

And here we are: the first fully-fledged Nicolas Cage feature film.

This pretty much sums up the general feel of the movie. Unsurprisingly, this scene is part of a montage

Valley Girl is a now-fairly traditional tale of the down-and-out inner city kid ("Randy," from Hollywood) who through some accident or other (crashing a party, in this particular case) falls for a posh out-of-his-league girl ("Julie," from the Valley).

Our hero, the Hollywood punk.

It's a story that has become cliche - rich girl falls for strange, aloof and 'wierd' outsider, only to be berated by her friends into picking 'the right guy' and then in the end her feelings win out so the outsider gets the girl.

I don't know enough about film history to know where this falls as far as when this story became worn goes, but it's very, very familiar now. Thirty years ago, however, I don't know.

Anyway, as a story, it's not bad, although there are, I must say, an awful lot of montages in the movie.

The acting's not bad in general. Cage (and this is the first time he's billed by his stage name) wears mostly the vacant expression that he has, fairly or otherwise, become known for, but even here, there are moments where he pulls off fairly subtle exchanges with other characters that makes you (or, at least me) think that it may have been the director's choice in order to underscore his aloofness or whatever rather than Cage's own interpretation of the character.

Anyway, if you're interested in any of the following:

A) flashy neon clothes,
B) New Wave tunes,
C) Valley girl lingo,
or
D) Nicolas Cage,

you're probably going to want to see this. But just so you know, if you're allergic to outdated technology, people talk on phones that have cords, someone actually suggests a genuinely productive use of a single dime, and people play a record (that one happens while girls are dancing around together in their underwear... that happens, right?).