My Favourite Non-Nic Films of All Time on the Date of 28th January 2012

Now Nic, though God-like, is of the world and the world is a hard thing to encompass. God knows he tries! This is to say, there are (gasp ye heathens) non-Nic films which inspire, provoke and alarm me, not merely through their notable absence! Such a list is never perfect, but I hope you enjoy these short reviews none-the-same and feel compelled to watch these delightful, remarkable films that I set down before you:

One director per film for now!

1.) Braindead – Peter Jackson (1992)

A film so giddy and boisterous in its execution (ha!) that the viewer is swept along on a corn-syrup river of blood in spite of any aversions they may have! Phenomenally bloody, yet somehow surprisingly sweet, almost gentle in spirit, due to its 1950s setting and good natured, winsome protagonists. It’s a massively foregrounded Freudian tale of a grotesque Bad Mother and the Return of the Repressed, with enough globsome, gristly, ‘orrible stop-motion and puppetry to fill the London dungeons! Structurally, it’s perfect, with the ludicrous scenario escalating to hysterical levels… the action, when it gets going, proceeds up from the basement, up to a final monstrous show-down on the roof of the house, in which a zombie laden party is in full swing. The cinematography is deliciously inventive with lots of those canted close-ups on faces that Jackson would go on to make such great use of in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ films. Also, despite being a zombie film (albeit of a parodic and blackly humorous variety) the whole exercise is infused with with a wonderful light-heartedness and sense of fun. It’s as much about rebirth as it is about death, in the true tradition of the carnivalesque! Also, essentially, endlessly quotable: “Your mother ate my dog!”

A chirpy scene in which our hapless protagonist Lionel attempts to socialise zombie baby Selwyn by taking him for a jaunt in the park. Hilarity ensues:

2.) Alice (Něco z Alenky) – Jan Švankmajer (1988)

Since I wrote much of my MA dissertation upon this remarkable piece of filmmaking I could go cook-a-hoop in revelry over the greatness that the Czech alchemist of puppetry Švankmajer exhibits here. It’s less of an adaptation of ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’, than it is a remembrance, filtered through the neuroses and curiosities of childhood. Almost aggressively non-pastoral in its setting, Alice’s travels instead take her through cramped rooms in a dusty warehouse where the inhabitants of Wonderland crack into wheezing, clackity life. The White Rabbit, a cadaverous taxidermist’s nightmare constantly spilling sawdust out from its belly which it shovels back through its mouth, is a malevolent figure, snipping at Alice with his scissors and terrorising the other inhabitants as a stooge of the Red Queen. Some characters are more charming, such as the caterpillar, self-assembled from a darned sock, dentures and swivelling glass eyes. The sounds that echo through the dark hallways are hyper-real and resonant, as though they issue from the very materials themselves, or from deep in the belly of the building. The pacing is slow and dream-like, as though we were recounting our own memories of Alice under hypnosis. Subtle political sub-texts about the political repressions of later Communist period Czechoslovakia are interwoven throughout the film, but never to the detriment of the text. Importantly, there is no Cheshire Cat to befriend Alice or guide her on her journey – this discovery is all her own and ours too.

Here’s some clackity little skelebobs who want Alice (Alenka) out of the house:

3.) Eraserhead – David Lynch (1977)

Eraserhead and Wild at Heart vie for my attentions, but Eraserhead was one of the first films I bought on vhs back in Sixth Form (and doesn’t include Nic!) when I’d been staying up and discovered Jan Švankmajer late on Channel 4 and an entire world of troubling, compulsive cinema was opened up to me. Eraserhead strikes me as a very pure film, free from the irony that later refracts Lynch’s works into complex, contradictory forms. It is a simple story. Henry, who lives in an industrial wasteland (a grimily distorted version of Philadelphia, where Lynch was living when he conceived of the film) discovers that his girlfriend is pregnant. The baby that is born is a tragic, shrieking thing, deathly ill, needy and nightmarish. Henry is abandoned to look after the baby and the walls slowly close in around him. However, such a simple plot recap does no justice to a film, which plunges us within Henry’s phenomenological experience of this dark world in which he lives. Music – the tinkling, sadly optimistic, jazz piano of Fats Waller – always sounds as though its being played from some deep Victorian underpass. Smoke, steam and smog are ever present, clouding our view of the outside world, which seems dirty, deserted and derelict. Humans are dysfunctional and confusing and scare and bemuse us and our protagonist in equal measure. The horrors of childbirth are felt inside us, as though the film saddled us with the same ungodly responsibilities that are Henry’s own.

The only respite is a cherubic, puffy-faced lady who seems to live in Henry’s radiator, who sings assuringly “In Heaven everything is fine”… never has mumps seemed so comforting and yet so troubling!
WARNING: PLOT REVEAL (erm, sort of):

4.) The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser – Werner Herzog (1974)

Herzog is so entertaining in interview, with comments like chickens “…are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world” and “The trees here are in misery; the birds are in misery… I don’t think they sing, they just scream in pain”, that it is almost easy to overlook his films, but when we do come to them, they are often gentler and more poetic than we might expect. Sure, there is a great deal of Will and Sturm und Drang that rages away against the landscape, but there are also long takes of nature bubbling away in silence as the wind rocks the trees. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is perhaps the most touching of all of Herzog’s works and the most haunting. It tells the sad tale of Kaspar Hauser, a 19th century German man who grew up among extraordinary privation so that he was barely able to speak and walk. Entering into German society at Nuremberg, nearly mute, with a letter that proclaimed him to want to be a cavalryman as his father was, Kaspar was socialised by well-meaning, rationalising men of the Enlightenment, but in doing so caused him as much sadness as they did joy. Herzog tells the story simply and sympathetically, but with a quietly jaundiced eye, though never closed to the wonders of the world. Nature speaks through the film, whispering more sense that do the eminently capable men. Bruno S, who grew up in situations not dissimilar to Kaspar’s own, inhabits the role with a beauty and commitment that is perhaps unparalleled within the history of cinema and his performance, augmented by Herzog’s delicate cinematography, can reduce me to tears.

The beginning of the film, which is sublime. “Don’t you hear? Don’t you hear the dreadful voice that screams from the whole horizon, and that man usually calls silence?”

5.) A Room for Romeo Brass – Shane Meadows (1999)

A very hard film to place generically, which shows through in its not-quite-right dvd cover, which suggests that it’s merely a boisterous coming of age tale with eccentricities – this barely tells the story, which is far sadder, richer and more complex than that. It is about the friendship between boys, but also how this is warped and elbowed out of place by a man who is very, very troubled. The three – the two boys and the man – form a friendship for a while, until anger and jealousy starts prising them apart. People in the film do their best. Parents are ineffectual and teachers dose asleep in bedside chairs. Friendship does find a way through, but it’s a difficult struggle and it leaves you feeling both touched and drained, because what one has seen has been very beautiful and very ugly all at once. A deeply under-appreciated film, I think, possibly because it has such an usual tone and the solutions it provides are deliberately compromised and uneven. Paddy Constantine, as the man Morell, provides a performance which is hilarious, endearing, heartbreaking, loathsome and wretched by parts, while still very much showing us one, distinctive, utterly individual, deeply flawed human being. Not a hero, or an anti-hero, just human.

Here he dances for the boys or maybe for himself:

6.) The Fly – David Cronenberg (1986)

Never before or since has a film been so relentlessly gloopy, icky and gristle laden and still remained utterly, imploringly romantic. That Cronenberg could make such a convincingly tragic film out of such B-movie source material is a testimony to the way that he can see the latent content within what might seem crude, shlocky or pornographic on the outside. A lot of sci-fi films merely sketch their premise, gesture towards its implications and throw in a lot of special effects… The reason The Fly is so brilliant is that its a remarkably intimate film, mostly taking place within our doomed hero’s apartment as he undergoes his wretching, disfiguring body transformation. Cronenberg teases us with the idea that this might be an evolutionary leap which endows Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) with superhuman power and indeed, for a while, his human dna splicing with that of a fly provides exactly that. As he becomes more abject however he feels his humanity slipping away from him. What makes the film so effective is that we aren’t presented with a binary, like with Jeckell and Hyde, but with a decent man slowly becoming brutal and inhuman, struggling against the insectoid impulses that are buzzing ever louder within his brain. As Seth asks his girlfriend, “Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I.” Cronenberg’s script is gloriously witty and inventive. “A deep penetrating dive into the plasma pool” indeed!

The oarsomely 80s trailer… Be afraid, be very afraid!

7.) My Winnipeg – Guy Maddin (2007)

Like Cronenberg above, Maddin is a Canandian, but one forever in thrall to his native Winnipeg, which holds him in a cold, sleepy grasp, which he never seems able to escape. Returning once again to his home city, Maddin seeks to question this return in a phantasmic documentary filmed, as is his wont, in the style of the 1920s avant-garde, that floods us with truths and half-truths about the city with the highest sleepwalking population in the world. Peppered through the films like bad seeds are recreations of the most potent childhood encounters with his mother, played by camp icon Ann Savage, which are ludicrous, ecstatic displays of gothic melodrama. The film flits into colour for its most impassioned sequences, but mostly remains in a crisp black & white, occasionally fogging over with the remembrance of things past. My Winnipeg is very funny in parts, but none the less personal for it. The critics who claim that Maddin is a charlatan do not feel their past as acutely as we who love him do.

The extremely popular series LEDGEMAN in which Maddin’s mother starred:

8.) Coraline – Henry Selick (2009)

Adapted from the modern day fairy story by Neil Gaiman, this is a cavalcade of stop-motion wizardry that barely lets up! This represents the culmination of Selick’s considerable talents displays through his career – the spindlestick, balletic, lightfooted animated form of Jack Skeleton from ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ is resurrected in the bulkier form of circus mouse trainer Mr. Bobinski; the cubism-inspired facial designs of ‘James and the Giant Peach’ and his early ‘Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions’ provide the subtle slanting of Coraline’s face and the oddly cocked heads throughout film; the carnivale darkness of ‘Monkeybone’ is lightened, but does not lose its colour. It’s an adventurous film and certainly strong stuff for young children. A great deal of the film’s power to unnerve derives for Selick’s sophisticated play with the notion of ‘anima’. Much of Coraline takes place in an uncanny, ‘other’ world, like her own home, but not. Here, everything is simulcra conjured up by the evil Other Mother to snare Coraline and transform her into an eyeless ghost child, along with the unfortunates she has already trapped. Since this world is not real, the landscape can morph and fragment into pixels; a character blows his hand away like so much dust; by the end, any vestiges of this world have fallen away and we find ourselves in the void of white space. The film makes the best use of 3D I have ever encountered in the cinema. Coraline’s real home is flattened in its drabness, while the exciting “other” home is given dramatic depth-of-field, as though sprung to three dimension life (despite its hidden, essential flatness). There is a great density of thought on display here – so much has been thought through so thoroughly and I have barely touched upon the sheer craftsmanship of the animation, tastefully augmented with GCI, that just delights and enraptures me again and again as though I too were a little child braving the film.

Frankly almost every scene strikes me as remarkable, but I’m particularly fond of the ghost children:

9.) Being John Malkovich – Spike Jonez and Charlie Kaufman (1999)

Speaking of density of thought, Being John Malkovich is like a hypertext, so rich it is in symbolic and thematic meaning. As soon as you have clocked it as a meditation on the nature of celebrity, it reveals itself as concerned with the very nature of self – a multifaceted thing for sure, displaced and mediated by advertisement, creative acts, love and celebrity itself and we are brought back full circle. It is a hard film to get a grip on intellectually, yet a clear film to follow narratively, despite complexities. This may be due to the fact that the performances are all so clear sighted and individualised through their mannerisms and demeanours. We have the pretentious, self-pitying puppeteer; the cruel and manipulative office worker; the animal loving wife; and finally Malkovich himself. Purportedly, Malkovich was a bit disturbed when he first read the screenplay about a portal being discovered that allows journeyers privileged access into his head. What had he done to piss screenwriter Kaufman off, he wondered! Yet, he enters gamely into the role, sending himself up as a precious, slightly schmucky actor, who is misrecognised by almost everyone he meets. He then has to perform himself being puppeteered by, firstly, another human being lodged within his brain… then finally, about 50. The fact that he pulls this off is one of the great feats of cinematic acting.

I wouldn’t normally direct people to the endings of films, but this is my favourite ending of all time. It takes a silly idea and makes it richly poetic and haunting. To quote Adam Cadre; “Being John Malkovich is a story in which the protagonist gets physically and emotionally beaten up for an hour and a half and then is essentially sent to hell for eighty or ninety years. And it’s complex enough to convey that horror through beautiful shots of an innocent little girl swimming.” I can’t find the exact clip and one should really watch all of it, so here’s Cartel Burwell’s (my favourite film composer) music from it:

10.) Crimewave – John Paisz (1985)

A recently discovery which I am so glad I have made. It is the closest thing to a film I would make if I had the time and resources. It tells the story of a quiet man, Steven Penny, played enigmatically by Paisz himself, who is trying to write the greatest colour crime move ever told, but is having problems with the middle. The film repeats itself through interpolated sequences of his botched attempts. The film is manic, yet filmed in a very understated manner with long, still takes and a manner that recalls kitschy educational documentaries from the 50s. Increasing its charm manifold is the eager-eyed, slightly stilted and cheery performance by Eva Kovacs as the screenwriter’s perpetually inquisitive neighbour. Their friendship is one of the loveliest things about the whole wonderful mad enterprise. I get giddy just thinking about the film.

Here is how it opens. Once upon a time…

Obviously 10 is an arbitrary number. One a different day Fassbinder’s Effi Briest (1974) otherwise known as something like ‘Fontane’s Effi Briest or Many of Those Who Have an Idea of Their Capabilities and Their Needs and Still Accept and Conform to the Ruling System in Their Heads by Their Deeds and Thus Strengthen it Thoroughly” would have made the list as I love its way of interrogating the late 19th century novel from which it is adapted. The cinematography is rigorously beautiful and makes the greatest use of mirror shots that I, for one, have ever encountered. Also, Fassbinder was wrong to criticise the glorious Hanna Schygulla for her sympathetic and nuanced performance, which brings real life to melodrama in the most memorable of ways.

Others worthy of laudation: Heavenly Creatures, Repulsion, Videodrome, Mulholland Drive, The Elephant Man, Aguirre: Wrath of God, Fata Morgana, Woyzeck, Hausu, Dead Man’s Shoes, Once Upon a Time in the West, Ghosts Before Breakfast, Nosferatu, Tartuffe, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Barton Fink, Deep End, Ghost World, Tetsuo: Iron Man, Closely Observed Trains, Faust (Svankmajer’s and Murneau’s), Little Otik, Annie Hall, The Shining, Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket, Weekend, Le Mepris, Chinatown, Susperia, Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, Bigger Than Life, In a Lonely Place, Chinatown, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Cat Soup, Mind Game, Angel’s Egg, Ikiru, Rashomon, A Canterbury Tale, A Matter of Life and Death, Jules et Jim, Idioterne, Withnail and I, The Falls, Zed and Two Noughts, Prospero’s Books, Night of the Hunter, Metropolis, Brazil, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Sedmikrásky… I could go on.

Moonstruck (1987)

Hand in glove/ The sun shines out of our behinds/ No, it's not like any other love/ This one is different - because it's us

I have never been assaulted by the moon, but this lack of familiarity with lunar pugilism did not stop me from enjoying Moonstruck; a film we at Cage Wisdom offer up to you like a fatted calf to Diana at the Festival of Torches! No more shall our blogging prowess wane sunken in the sky like an anaemic disc of that skin that forms on milk, but instead shall rise engorged like a giant white mosquito, ready to buzz its way back into your affections.

Moonstruck is a dreaming; its plot a wispy, fleeting shadow play of semi-articulated nigglings, that moves between scenes of varying import without nay a care in the world! While my dreams dramatize David Bowie’s hit 1990s come-back single “I’m Addicted to Paracetamol” (Euro-pop crossed with bursts of Prince style funk guitar with Bowie at Ashes to Ashes baritone range) Moonstruck focuses not on Bowie (Labyrinth, 1986) but Cher; that long-legged, long-faced, arch and slinky Priestess of Inscrutable Allure. Cher plays Loretta Castorini, who IMDB informs me is a book-keeper, although I don’t personally recall any book-keeping montages. That said, even the wikipedia page for book-keeping has an embedded excel spreadsheet, so I assume that any montage sequence was so intensely boring that I filed it away along with Ceefax and all the other sludge that sits at the bottom of my brain stem (admittedly, Ceefax does have its sedentary charms). Loretta has been recently widowed and this is played delicately by Cher, with a guarded confidence that makes her seem vulnerable. She very open in bantering with friends and family, but plays her Queen of Hearts close to her chest (I mean she is not forthcoming about love). Her boyfriend, Johnny “The Calamari” Cammareri is not a bad man, but neither is he an interesting one. Now, it might be said that Cher should do as Fanny Price in Mansfield Park and choose moral conventionality over more enticing derelict fare… however, when the man who is proclaiming the counter argument that, “We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die” is Nicolas Cage… well old Johnny Calamari is going to be rolling snake eyes.

I haven’t seen much in the way of romantic comedies so I went into this like a lamb in a newly-pressed sailor suit, but what I got the impression of from this film, is that romantic comedies is all about opposites. Am I on the right tracks? Well, Moonstruck seems to me to be primarily about two differing conceptions of romance – romance as a means of discourse and romance as passion. Loretta and much of her family and indeed her boyfriend Johnny are stuck within the mode of discourse. They talk things through and express their affection for family through ritualistic gestures, like cooking oatmeal. This is sturdy and reliable and helps to strengthen the family unit, but talk can also lead to miscommunication and rituals can become empty and formulaic. The most repeated refrain within the film, especially within Loretta’s Italian-American family, is “I don’t want to talk about it.” When Johnny proposes to Loretta near the start of the film he grumbles about dirtying his suit and then reveals he hasn’t bought a ring… and there is nothing more unappealing than a man getting dirty without his ring on display. This is what Cage Wisdom endorses! (it might be noted that, I, Adam am writing this review without Jay).

Like poorly judged innuendo, these romantic gestures are inarticulate without passion, yet passion on its own without a mode of appropriate discourse, is equally emasculated. After Johnny proposes to Loretta he jets off to his mother’s death bed (ah! The maternal bed instead of the marital bed! Oh romantic comedies, what are you like?), requesting before he does so that Lorreta contact his estranged brother Ronny and make peace. Yet Ronnie works in the basement of a pizzeria (I really hope it was a pizzeria and I’m not just a horrible racist) where he is employed as a dough shovelin’ man. My understanding of how this is portrayed is that it is the 80s Brooklyn equivalent of working as a navvy on the Victorian railroads. It is hot, doughy, manly work that has a similarly high fatality rate. Ronnie got lucky and got away easy, with just a hand gone, but some guys… well let’s just say that the incident was only resolved through involvement of the Neapolitan police.

Ronny “could never love anybody since he lost his hand and his girl.” He blames the bad hand he got in life on his bulky yet well-meaning brother; claiming that Johnny distracted him with his mouth and tongue and blasted vocal chords and the next thing you know, his hand was trapped in the machine. Effect follows cause. Now, Loretta quite reasonably points out that this wasn’t really Johnny’s fault and that really not speaking to your brother for 5 years because he spoke to you at an inopportune time, might be construed as a little grouchy. Well, Ronnie, like many great early Cage characters, ain’t a man of much sense! He proclaims as much; “I ain’t no freakin’ monument to justice! I lost my hand! I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand! Johnny has his bride!” Of course, by the end of the film Johnny will no longer have his bride, but I’ll leave it a mystery as to whether he’ll still have his hand…

As this enraged, though admittedly factual outburst reveals, Ronnie is the first character we encounter who doesn’t like jabbering on, unless it’s underlined by a good angry point at something or there is a table nearby to be knocked over as punctuation. Cage has stated in interview that he wanted to play Ronnie like the Beast in Jean Cocteau’s adaptation of Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête, 1946). Cage is clearly not talking about hairiness, but about the grace within the beast and a strength that must be tempered by love. As first, Ronnie is all resolve and no gentleness, like a Lion Bar, but by the end of the film he’s become a Snickers – still retaining some of his previous bite, but with a less demanding nougat base to traverse. The peanuts might still get stuck in the teeth on occasions, but importantly it’s not a bar that looks out of place within the family home (it might even make it as far as the child’s lunch box, on a parent-teacher day, for instance). By the end of the film this unkempt dough chucker, who I believed upon seeing a screenshot before the film to be a werewolf, has settled down to a bowl of oatmeal with the family.

Due, I suspect, to a genuine fondness on the part of screenwriter John Patrick Shanley for the stereotype of the Italian-American who lives with their squabbling but affectionate extended family, Loretta’s paternal home is the hub for much of the film’s main action and where we meet the eccentrics, romantics and melancholics who comprise her family. An interesting facet of the film, which contributes to its pleasant tone of inconsequentiality, is a tendency to cut from the main storyline and our heroes Cage and Cher, to the romantic tribulations of family and friends. While the main thrust of the plot is predictable, it would be remiss for me to reveal the plot developments concerning these other character, which often caught me more by surprise. Particularly moving was the plot concerning Loretta’s mother Rose, played by Olympia Dukakis in a role that justifiably earnt her an Acadamy Award, Bafta and a Golden Globe (OK, so only Nic’s performance in Vampire’s Kiss really deserves all three, but nonetheless it is a very fine performance). She is a woman who has given up her dreams for her family and in doing so repressed a personality far richer and deeper than that of her husband. This weariness doesn’t swamp her tenderness for her family, but somehow they hold each other in place – as though neither could quite exist without the other. There are also moments in which she seems very beautiful and I think the film succeeds in wanting you to see her sexually and emotionally satisfied, which is a worthy feat considering that she’s a secondary, not primary character. What is made clear by the film, is that mature love is no less turbulent or fascinating than young love. Cher’s character herself is already into her late 30s at the time of the film. Thus, while the film may be breezy, is doesn’t feel fickle or insidiously superficial. Loretta’s elderly grandfather (Louis Guss) who trots around the film with a legion of dogs, remarks that there is no-one to hold affection for him, reminding us that the old still lust and desire (one of the unsung verses from The Flaming Lips’ Do You Realise?, concerned this perhaps; a song that reminds us of things that seem banal when merely known, but meaningful when truly realised. The Flaming Lips clearly considered themselves too cool to include a verse about the romances of the old. Shame on them).

In mentioning the song I realise a useful segue because one of Wayne Coyne’s most remembered lines from that song is “Do you realise that everyone you know some day will die?” Literally, everyone! EVEN CHER! This is the kind of sentiment that the film reminds us of in its ruminations. The film of course starts on a bereavement and death never wholly leaves the picture. One of the repeated pieces of wisdom is that men chase women in order to escape death. Embodying this is a schmucky lecturer who I was going to write looks like Marty from Fraiser, until I discovered that he is Marty from Fraiser (John Mahoney) but with different inflections and characteristics! Having sufficiently grasped the concept of acting, I turned my attention once more to Cage.

As said, Ronnie is not one of them ‘word-speaking’ men, until his mad, exemplary little monologue at the end of the film that woos Loretta. When Loretta first means him, he cuts her off and his speech is punchy and tumbles out of him like meaty acrobats. He speaks in awkward proverbs and slicks back his hair. Surrounded by the incantatory Italian language, Ronnie’s broader, more Americanized accent makes him sound grounded in a fundamentally different way to the other characters. While the other characters are tied to the family home through conversation, ritual and exchange, Ronnie is cut-off in his subterranean furnace room, like the Phantom of the Opera. As ever with Cage, the devil in the woodpile is emasculation and Ronnie starts the film with a wooden hand that caused (or so he believes) his fiancé to leave him. Whether the loss of a hand should stand as a true signifier for lost manhood, Ronnie proclaims and menaces and kicks out in the first half of the film in the pre-emptive knowledge that this is precisely how the loss of his hand is going to be read. Behind this bravado we know there’s a soft heart though because while Cage’s body is all muscles and gesture, his eyes are always soft and apologetic, even at his most raging. It may sound glib, but I was genuinely impressed by Nic’s ability to maintain his eyes like this across the film… I feel his ability to continue an expression or an action across a film, like a heraldic tag that follows a character, is what helps him create such strong archetypes.

Contrariwise from castration, Ronnie’s wooden hand also shows that he has suffered for passion, unlike his brother. The other testament to Ronnie’s alignment with passion over discourse is a prime piece of character development: “I love two things. I love you and opera.” This passion leads to the most compelling romantic sequence in the movie in which Ronnie and Loretta attend the opera together to watch a performance of La Bohème. Waiting outside for Loretta in his suit and tie, Ronnie looks suddenly very young. Though there is still a toughness about him, his excitement for the opera makes him child-like – both husky and goofy. At the opera we see that Ronnie is able to conduct himself as a Prince, not the Beast, and so is able to enter into the world of discourse through the world of passion. For Loretta, who has been a fast-talker throughout the film who calls the shots, this position is now reversed, as she attends opera for the first time and struggles to comprehend what is being sung. Through being forced into a state of inarticulacy she can now engage with the opera on a purely passionate level and by the time the arias draw to a close, there is a close-up of her face as the tears run down her cheeks – the most interest the camera has shown in Cher’s face up to this point (a shame, as I felt it should have better honoured her face’s immutable slightly confrontational quality… Cher is like an inverted Shelley duVall). The scene also reminds us that the film itself is  an opera – passion and music. In the backdrop on the stage is a fake painted moon; though as the inimitable Lula of Cage-a-lot Castle raised in an online discussion, perhaps the moon on stage is the real moon and the romance of Loretta and Ronnie the opera.

The camera is suitably gentle for a film like this – choosing long-takes and unobtrusive pans and cuts that lead us quite softly and sometimes poetically from scene to scene. My favourite cut in the film was from the moon seen from one perspective, to the moon seen from another perspective, from another part of town. This large moon often forebodes the action of Moonstruck, as though the moon were drawing these characters apart and together upon romantic tides. Characters talk about the moon a lot during the film. It is described as being “the size of a house”, which seems absurd until you remember that a house can be much larger than its bricks and mortar and the families in Moonstruck feel very expansive. It is also described as “white as a snowball”, in evocation of the purity of the moon. Indeed, the moon is very white after Ronnie and Loretta’s first night together. Despite the amount of discourse that goes on about the moon, it seems to rule through passion. Stories are told about amorous encounters under the full moon, that seemed fated and are fated to happen again. We see various colours of the moon – red, white, pink, orange, cream – all boding perhaps different things. The moon and the home (or together as captured in the moon “the size of a house) become the narrative nexus of the film, that return us to and connect members of the family. The use of That’s Amore on the soundtrack makes this seem like a specifically Italian (American) phenomenon. This is the “luna belle” that Loretta’s grandfather speaks of, getting his dogs to howl at the moon.

Flannery O’Connor, who surely puts the ‘wisdom’ in Cage Wisdom, has no place amongst all this softness (forcing her into this review would be like trying to cram a crow into a dress), but I have another 50s American short story writer who does, John Cheever. Those magical nights where the moon is white and fat in the sky and lovers are tugged towards each other as in A Midsummer Nights Dream, are the nights Moonstruck wishes to capture. Since this is an elegantly written film, tactfully directed, with two great leading performances, there are moments in the film that succeed in transporting us to such a night; “a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.” Thanks John.

It’s Been a Long Time Baby

Adam here, having escaped from the mire of insurance sales and primed to bound back into Cage’s saddle! From hibernation we at Cage Wisdom blink our beady eyes and from our grubby mitts issue a collaberative effort between myself and Justin Bailey, artiste extraordinaire! You can see more of Justin’s remarkable art and hip-hop remixes at:

http://justinbailey.tumblr.com/

This dude is rude!

The Family Man (2000)

The first of Nicolas Cage’s  The Something Man trilogy, this film has no Spongebobs of regret, or bee-arded ladies. It’s lacking in spectacle, but thankfully also lacking the nasty cynicism of The Weather Man and the ludicrous misogyny of The Wicker Man.

Instead, it has a sentimental Christmas storyline, adorable pie-faced children, and a comforting predictability that means it doesn’t matter if you fall asleep towards the end (I did).

As the film’s tagline amusingly puts it,

“A fast-lane investment broker, offered the opportunity to see how the other half lives, wakes up to find that his sports car and girlfriend have become a mini-van and wife”.

Something about the way this is phrased makes me think that the sports car turns into his wife, like some kind of Cinderella pumpkin deal, but sadly that’s not the case.  Way back in ’88, Cage’s character Jack Campbell went into investment banking instead of staying with his girlfriend (Téa Leoni) and now is an equipped, capable, connected alpha-man who sings arias to his suit and tie of a morning. When he gets landed in the life that could have been, he finds to his horror that alternative-him is a goofy and lovable bowling enthusiast who works in a car showroom and seems to share a circle of clueless but loyal dude friends with his namesake Jack Singer from Honeymoon in Vegas.

The whole switcheroo begins because Cage’s character tells a black man who is robbing a corner-shop at gun-point that he ‘has everything he needs in the world’. When Cage wakes up in his new life, and blunders around, confused and in tracksuit bottoms outside his former office, it is this man who takes him for a ride around the block, and explains that this experience is comeuppance for his pride:

‘But how…?’ you and Cage wonder simultaneously, as the man suggests that Jack is not the first to have this experience.

‘I’ll explain everything’ replies the man in the car with a reassuring smile, ‘Just get out and we’ll go for a walk and I’ll tell you what’s going on, how about that?’

‘Yes please, that would be nice’, reply the audience and Cage meekly, but no! – it was a trick – he drives off and neither Jack nor the viewer will ever know the mysterious man’s reasons for rehabilitating capitalist swine through the medium of alternative universes. Perhaps it would have been wiser to have given no explanation at all for the shenanigans (see Groundhog Day, 1993) rather than confusingly presenting it as a magical lesson about the values of family from your friendly neighbourhood mugger. If nothing else, it would have avoided getting the film represented on TV Tropes.

But anyhow, all of this is not what the film is about. The film is about family. But what are family? Family are the people who dance adorably in the shower, demand chocolate milkshakes and pee, laughingly, in your face while you’re trying to change their nappy.  They are your mothers, your sisters, your cousins, your children, your family pets, your buds, your bros.  The film posits that a life without a family is not a life worth living. Try as you might to pin little paper arms to the sides of Benjamin Franklin on a $100 bill, money cannot give you a hug. As such, this is probably not a film best watched while playing a single-player game of Monopoly in your Mayfair apartment, but a film to watch tucked up in bed with a loved one, as we did.

Dubious

The film is competent enough to elicit the fuzzy feelings, but not remarkable enough to prompt life-changing decisions. Despite any wistful feelings the film stirred in me, I’m still working in a call-center and I doubt that many businessmen threw off their suits and ties and made embarrassing phone-calls to old sweethearts after the credits rolled. Perhaps this is due to the numerous compromises the screenplay allows Campbell, undermining its integrity a notch.  Not only does Campbell get to keep the woman of his dreams, he also gets to keep his job as a  high-powered executive. Admittedly, the two adorable children of the alternate reality are disappeared into the ether once Campbell is returned to his own reality – prompting the question as to whether they go on living in some time and space unknown to us or are spirited away like a forgotten thought experiment. Makes you think!

It would be a shame though if the children were just dust in a sun beam as they’re a cute couple of grubs! Technically, they’re a triple of grubs, since youngest child Josh is played by twin brothers, Jake and Ryan Milkovich, two pudgy cherubs who surely caught their first break in a painting by Botticelli. Older sister Annie (Makenzie Vega) is also endearing and the interactions between her and Cage are remarkably unstilted… while Vega’s clearly a talented young actress, I am also reminded by interviews with Cage’s co-actors over the years where they speak of how accommodating he is on set and the lack of distance he places between himself and the less experienced actors. As Campbell’s initial wariness gives way to affection, Vega and Cage act off each other in a way which I found charming and convincing. I also liked that Annie thought that Campbell was an alien who had replaced her father. That’s the kind of thing I believed when I was little! “The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one they said… until they come!”

Cage plays the role appropriately low-key, a fact testified to by the fact that the only meme produced by the film is a mediocre animation involving Cage demanding cake, which has to date received a pitiful 2 million views. This is all to the good, mind, as the film hinges on relationships, not merely a central performance. Leoni is chipper and sexy when not harangued and though we don’t get to see much of her inner-life, she’s robust enough not to be just another manic pixie dream girl.

Critically the film has been compared to A Christmas Carol (2001 – dates differ but ’01 is Cage’s version) and It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) due to its festive didacticism through a what if? story-line.  However, it is neither as phantasmagorical, nor its narrative as tight as its two peers and one wonders whether the Christmas time setting was tacked on in order to deliberately elicit the comparison. Still, you’d have to be a real hardnose to meet this film head-on with cynicism. It communicates a real enthusiasm for family which is schmaltzy but earnest and when you’re watching such a film deep in the arms of a loved one you meet it on its own terms.

Con Air (1997)

The best round of “Nicolas Cage charades” I’ve ever seen was my friend Chris miming out ‘Con Air’. From his mime one might have guessed that ‘Con Air’ is a film about money-grubbing charlatans (Con) and wafty nymphettes (Air) set in a casino-cum-windmill (Con Air).  A sort of Nicolas Cage Moulin Rouge, perhaps. If one was also very literal minded one would also be of the impression that Con Air is totally silent. A hushed, quiet sort of affair.

…

This is why you should never trust charades. Con Air is the guy you’re sat next to on the plane who wears aviator shades and belches out the alphabet while playing electric guitar.  And you should thank your lucky stars that it’s a relatively short flight of 115 minutes because he is not the kind of guy who is going to simmer down after 20 minutes with an in-flight magazine. No, now he’s ripping off his seatbelt, joining the Mile High Club, singing the National Anthem, punching out the pilot, taking the controls. He stinks because he wears vodka as aftershave. Con Air is a film universally hated by Quakers the world over, which is why I, and not Jay, am reviewing it.

‘Con Air’ is the slang name affectionately given to the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System in America, which flies convicts between penitentiaries. Convicts are seated together, restrained, sometimes harnessed or gagged and members of rival gangs kept separate. Onto such a flight steps Cameron Poe (Cage). A decent sort of bloke who only did what he did (manslaughter) cause he was protecting his blonde-haired blue-eyed wife (Monica Potter). At the time of the offense she was pregnant, but now she has given birth to a doe-eyed lil’ bundle of aryan innocence (Landrey Allbright) who writes her daddy letters in crayola while he’s in the slammer. Cameron just wants to get home to see his little girl! He’s even bought her a stuffed bunny he’s going to give her when they meet for the first time! Too bad then that Cameron is strapped into a flight with some of the loathesomest, hardest-bitten crooks and perverts the wrong side of the Mississipi fault-line. The unlikely ringleader of these thugs is Cyrus “The Virus” Grisson (John Malkovich), a sort of fey and eloquent (by Con Air‘s standards) Charles Bronson, who hijacks the plane, potentially jeopardising Cameron’s family reunion. It’s up to Cameron in the air, and U.S. Marshall Vince Larkin (John Cusack) on the ground, to seize back the plane with maximum machismo and aplomb.

Con Air is not a thinking man’s film, made more for gawping at than for studying. As such, from hereon I’m going to do as the film does and keep the review mostly pictorial, cutting in with glib and sassy remarks along the way!

Here’s our golden lion, his hair blowing in the air with the sweet waft of freedom! The chest hair that so enamored Jay in her review of Honeymoon in Vegan, is on partial display here. Any grey around the stubble or temples testifies to a worldliness that has yet to become weariness, as evidenced by Nic’s blue-eyed gaze towards the sky. This jailbird is lookin’ to be a freebird.

An over-credits training montage shows Nic, like a steam-powered Mr. Motivator, tauten his body into perfect beefy right-angles. The lanky Nicolas Coppola of the 80s has died, to be resurrected by a taxidermist, who’s stuffed him as full as a three-piece-suite. If you squeezed those deltoids – say, in the affectionate embrace of love – they wouldn’t yield an inch. To quote Rumsey Taylor of the inimitable notcoming.com, “motherfucking shit is he ripped.”

But since this is Nic, you can be sure that the steak isn’t served without a side-dollop of sensitivity. Not only is Cameron Poe built like a brick shithouse made of vikings, he’s got the heart of a champion to match! Here we see him contemplating his own handiwork after time spent with the ‘Big Boy’s Book of Origami’.

Now I’m not going to criticise an 8-year-old for lack of effort, but it seems lil’ miss Poe was working to a word count. An ambivalence about the homecoming of her father suggested by the insincere platitudes (I can’t wait) and the cursory hearts will become only more apparent when we meet the little girl. However, for now, this is our primary narrative impetus and the reason for Nic to get rude with dudes and sort shit out.

This represents Poe’s secondary motivation, to look out from his fellow inmate and diabetes-sufferer Mike O’Dell (Mykelti Williamson). Considering that O’Dell suffers from diabetes, it might seem peculiar that the friendship between the pair has been built upon the exchange of sugar-rich coconut puffs, but then we don’t know whether O’Dell’s diabetes began before or after his incarceration. Some heavy product placement fees must have been paid to convince Jerry Bruckheimer that ’snoballs’ and ‘snoballs’ alone can overcome man’s basic inhumanity to man.

Cage himself was paid in snoballs and it is remarkable that he could retain his olympian body shape while gorging himself silly upon the pink muck™.

Admiring a car with a gratuitous number plate in an obscenely wide-angled shot, is Vince Larkin, played by John Cusack, pasty-faced heart throb of sappy 80s romance movies. Larkin is the white-collar bureaucrat whose job it is to get the hijacked plane safely back to land while preserving his moderate left-wing ethos as far as possible. What he will learn over the course of the film is that to save the day and thus save oneself from emasculation (that terrible threat of Nic’s mid-to-late career that haunts his characters like the spectre of lanky Nicolas Coppola) is to be as much like Cameron Poe as possible. To this end he must learn to use a gun, steal a car – as pictured above - and get real mad. It will be a tough journey as immediately apparent from some comparitive screengrabs.

This is how Nic escapes from danger, like a hulking one-track terminator. Witness the squinty determination. His well-oiled body is a lean, mean, running machine. There is no doubt of his self-control and incomparable manliness.

Oh dear! Arms a-flailing, sensible hair ungainly tussled, shirt clean no longer, Cusack looks a sorry sight. We are less likely to think heroism, than we are office party gone awry.

Even when Nic vaults over a fuck-off metal pipe, he keeps his arms perfectly straight, forming a perfect 90 degree angle. His fingers are splayed perfectly apart and his whole body is taut. Not less than a fingernail is under complete subordination of the will. Where there isn’t meat and sweat, there is hair and denim. He’s grappling with the air itself.

This is Cusack tackling a very similar move. I would laugh if it were funny. The mouth gawks open into a moronic grin while his akimbo arms recall ‘I’m A Little Teapot’ performed in the heat of battle. Moreover, he’s clicking his heels together like some lucky charms leprechaun. His hair is also distinctly non-awesome when compared to Nic’s. The man is a shambles.

Nic can even get blown up and looks like he’s the one who’s fucking up the explosion, rather the explosion fucking up him. He makes it look easy to strike a Superman pose while being hurled through the air. Nic Cage surrounded by money with an explosion behind him looking like a mad blue-collar Superman is the American Dream.

Less a blue-eyed boy than a black-eyed beast. With hair sprouting from every crevice and his own and other men’s blood staining his bulging deltoids, Nic grimaces like the Incredible Hulk having his chest waxed. Whether or not you like Con Air, in shots like these it reaches some kind of monumental apex of the action film.

Cusack can but concede defeat, puffing his chin out like a diminished bullfrog. His left hand falls limp by his side, while his right hand is clamped in the rigorous clasp of the victorious Cage, who manages to do all this with a pink bunny rabbit stuffed under his arm.

I was going to write a great deal more on this rabbit, but someone got there quite magnificently before me, so I shall like Cusack graciously concede defeat and supply you with the link, leaving you with the image of Nic driving a tractor away from an explosion. Happy Easter!

For an analysis of the pink bunny motif and a picture of Poe’s lil’ daughter looking thoroughly troubled visit: http://www.hellonearth.com/movies/conairpix1.html

Honeymoon in Vegas (1992)

After watching Honeymoon in Vegas last night, I had a dream that I myself was Nicolas Cage, and I was wearing a kilt and brazenly showing off my muscular calves to a troop of admiring schoolgirls. Of course, Cage doesn’t wear a kilt in Honeymoon in Vegas – he wears an Elvis costume, completing the Elvis diptych begun in 1990′s Wild at Heart.  It’s the Elvis costume, coming only in the last 20 minutes of the film that puts Honeymoon in Vegas in the passion portion of the venn diagram, and Cage seems to be having a ball when he gets to improbably win back the woman of his dreams through a sky-diving Elvis extravaganza.

Cage plays Jack Singer, a man who is emasculated in the first five  minutes of the film when his mother, lying on her deathbed, makes him promise that he will never get married because ‘No girl could ever love you like I did!’ . In Peter Jackson’s brilliant film Braindead, hero Lionel’s mother utters a very similar sentence to him; the difference being that she says it at the end of the film, rather than the beginning, and that Lionel’s mother is a 15 foot tall reconstituted zombie, opening the cavernous maw of her womb to slide her rebellious son back in once and for all.

"No-one will ever love you like your mother, Lionel!"

Jack Singer foolishly promises the coddling harridan that he will never marry, and so embarks on a fearsome battle against the frenzied ticking of his girlfriend Betsy’s biological clock.* When a casino sleazeball resembling an evil Gene Wilder falls in lust with Betsy, Singer’s emasculation grows tenfold, and his subsumed aggression is released in staccato hand gestures and erratic bouts of shouting. There are traces of Vampire’s Kiss in Cage’s performance – in a scene in which Betsy reveals that she is going for a weekend in Hawaii with the sleazeball, Cage pleads, prowls and menaces to Sarah Jessica Parker’s admirable unconcern.

The slightly unhinged performance is given a virility by Cage’s abundant body hair, generously smothering his chest and arms in unusual profusion. Not in this film are the burnished bronze expanses of The Boy in Blue and Ghostrider, here Cage is hairy as a modest bear. At times, he seems to put on a New York accent to fit in with his humorous gambling cronies, butt of many a fat joke throughout the film’s 90 minutes. It’s hardly consistent, but perhaps helps to lend Jack Singer’s claim that ‘I’m an everyman!’ some kind of credence. In any case, the New York accent disappears entirely when he puts on the Elvis suit, flexes his hip and delivers his lines in the drawl familiar from Wild at Heart. It’s in the Elvis costume that Cage seems to come alive, he’s magnetic, even sexy – perhaps the more so in contrast to his previous costumes in the film, all patterned shirts and long beige cardigans that make him look like a Chris Ware caricature of Nicolas Cage .

The ending is a top-class crazy random happenstance, but kind of delightful anyway. Cage somehow makes it work; who wouldn’t (you find yourself thinking) forgive their selfish, gambling-addicted, commitment phobic boyfriend if he laconically fell out of a plane, gazing soulfully up at you from under his flirty Elvis eyebrows?

And who wouldn’t (you begin to ponder) forgive Nicolas Cage his odd blunder when he sky-dived over Vegas, dressed as Elvis Presley, lit down on a landing pad like an illuminated celestial moth and gazed into your bemused yet delighted eyes, languidly inclining his head as if to say: ‘I’m all yours audience, all yours’.

* All sexism in the sentence is irony accredited.

Guarding Tess (1994)

Emasculated Cage throws a chair

Before watching Guarding Tess we believed that a Nicolas Cage film couldn’t be boring*, but Guarding Tess feels as though it was shot on a succession of rainy Sunday afternoons, with a cast listlessly doing their homework the day before it’s due in…. It feels as though it was written by a white-collar civil servant as he died stuck in an lift, in blood, on the walls. Out of respect they filmed it. To capture the feeling of Guarding Tess without having to watch it, we at ‘Cage Wisdom’ advise you to press play on the video link below and feel the wave of melancholy wash over you as you read the following…

As immediately discernible from the dvd box, in which a suited Cage stands serious behind a wry and ironical looking older stateswoman, Guarding Tess follows some days in the life of secret service agent Doug Chesnic (Cage) in his job of guarding former First Lady of the U.S. of A. Tess Carlisle (Shirley MacLaine). Before we sat down to watch Guarding Tess, we made a few predictions for this “comedy beyond the call of duty”:

1. There will be a scene where Cage has to hold Tess’s handbag in a public place, to emasculating effect.

2. Tess will make innuendos not befitting a woman of her age.

3. There will be a shopping sequence, to emasculating effect.

4. They will walk dogs, and people shall trip over leads.

5. Tess will accidentally hit Doug in the balls with a hand-bag.

6.There will be a serious bit at the end where she actually gets kidnapped by terrorists.

And most importantly…

8. She’ll teach him how to let down his crew-cut and have a good time.

In the event of the film, only 3, 6 and 8 turned out to be true… although to call what transpired the ”good time” anticipated by the overly-optimistic point 8, would be to guild a very boring lilly.

It is a very boring film. At one point we see a two second close-up of a document printing, and the script has the unfortunate habit of having Cage repeat exactly what’s been said in the previous scene to a different character, perhaps to give the audience a chance to reflect on the good times they’ve had. We cut from a comedy golf scene, shot on some desolate windswept moor, to Cage in a cafe aggressively repeating the dialogue to a cornered bystander:  ‘And then I said – I’m not getting your goddamn ball!’,  ‘Uh-huh’ replies the extra resignedly, as they help themselves to another coffee.

The Face of the Audience

Guarding Tess is the American equivalent of the British heritage film, where tiny dramas of social impropriety nudge the narrative forward like a kindly but quietly insistent teacher softly pushing a reticient young actor onto stage. At 25 minutes into the film’s running time the most dramatic incident had been Nic’s ill-judged decapitation of a flower. I employ the word ‘decapitation’ to lend the moment the excitement worthy of it. You see, Nic takes a rose – a rose, that most beautiful of flowers, carrying with it the Heavenly scene of Romeo and Juliet and the musk of those historical houses of York and Lancaster – and audaciously removes its head – that most essential part of the rose – and has the audacity, the waggish audacity, to place it within his own lapel, in obscene defiance of the fact that the rose’s owner – former First Lady no less and furthermore his employer – did not (absolutely, unequivocably not) instruct him to do so. Oh how we laugh at this mad comedy of errors while silently assenting that the rose should have been left in its place. When later in the film Nic woke the ex-First Lady of the U. S. of A. while she indulged her God-given right to a snooze at the opera (but oh how funny of her; how perfectly old-lady-like) I was so appalled I vomited all over my eiderdown.

Guarding Tess continued at this pace to a degree that was almost aggressively boring, as though it were a maiden-aunt or bearded pedagogue chastising us for wanting to play our sexy violent computer games and not being content with our cup-and-ball instead.*

I work in insurance and in my spare time compose hundred-page excel spreadsheets of the words most commonly appearing on ceefax and yet my life is still more exciting that Guarding Tess. It doesn’t even have the doily-dress delights of a proper heritage film where you get to watch Helena-Bonham Carter standing next to furnishings – everyone wears grey, has grey skin and lives in a kind of fortified castle, where esteemed and respected British actors are forced to make sandwiches and provide unfunny buffoonish diversions.

Richard Griffiths, Yes, Richard Griffiths himself sits glumly to one side in the kitchen, the “hub” of the Guarding Tess action, trying not to look the camera in the eye while an under-appreciated chef cooks constant broth for no-one. While it might seem unfair to famous and lauded actor Richard Griffiths to mention that he was in the film Guarding Tess, I do so because people have got into the habit recently of pinning all bad film choices on Nicolas Cage’s lapel. Sure, Cage is in bad films. But you know who else is in bad films? Richard Griffiths. Tom Hanks is also in bad films. Tom ‘the ham’ Hanks was in a film called The Man with One Red Shoe (1985), rivaling any of Cage’s output for hokyness – and yet it’s Cage who must be martyred for the cinematic sins of all actors. I’m not saying Nicolas Cage is Jesus, that’s for other people to say…

Cage does what he can with the wet sack of Sunday afternoons he’s given. For most of the film his acting is muffled, as if he’s in a library, waiting for the Queen to arrive – but sometimes it all gets too much and he just has to shout out a line with erratic ferocity. This culminates in a bizarre scene in which Cage pre-cogs his performance in Bad Lieutenant by 15 years, and shoots the toes off a chauffeur. ‘Where’s the first lady? Where is she?!’ Doug Chesnic demands, as the chauffeur lies in hospital, gun pressed to his little toe. Another Secret Special Agent looks on with faint disgust, as if Cage is a tolerated school friend, too enthusiastic about pulling the legs off a spider.

But for Doug Chesnic this is a victorious moment. Tess always made him leave his gun outside the door when he came knocking, but now the proud gun has been proved right all along. If Chesnic did not have the maverick sensibilities needed to torture a chauffeur as he lies in a hospital bed, Tess could not be victoriously rescued from the hillbilly’s hidey-hole where she’s been stowed away. And if Chesnic couldn’t roll up his shirtsleeves, grab a spade and start manfully digging the former first lady out of a hole, he would be doomed to a life of emasculated chair-breaking (and probably bicycle-wheeling too).

Thank God for the gun, as Cage proves once again that he’s no-one’s fancy man. Grab your clapping-hand hats everyone, it’s going to be all-right.

* I gently remind the audience at this juncture that Adam was absent while I was reviewing The Boy in Blue.

*At this juncture I am obliged to note that Jay much prefers a cup-and-ball to sexy violent computer games.