Thread of Anticipating KNOWING with Nic Cage

raising arizona

it's been too long, Nic. time to come home

the thing is he is STILL a weirdo, pop culture just caught up with him

i mean the dude is covered in ghost rider tattoos and named his son after superman -- i don't know what you all expect of him but i expect things like ghost rider and knowing and face off.

Wait, he named his son Superman?

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/10/04/204816.php

YEah thats what I suspected it'd be... hahahah ohhhh sheet.

Be cooler if it was Brando that did that instead of Cage

so i watched this, it's pretty bad but some of the effects are impressive. and yes, highly suspicious ending (including **SPOILER** the subtle white light 'winged' alien beings).

this is a movie i can hang with being spoiled tbh

ok then, light non-specific spoilers

saw this last night. it's not a 'highly suspicious ending', you might as well call this 'Left Behind Part 5: The Wall of Fire' and the main reason I stayed to watch the credits was to check to see if Peter and Paul LaLonde were creative consultants.

the earliest scenes set up Cage's 'loss of faith' as the central reason for his depression, the reconciliation with his preacher father is the redemption, the final apocalpyse is transcribed directly from Revelations and the final shots of the paradise planet are a cross between the illustrations of children playing with tigers in fields of wheat & rolling valleys you can find in any Jehovah's Witness literature and 70's science-fiction space art.

the only leap you have to make is that angels are actually extraterrestrials, which will leave behind some of the devout, but... not many when the rest of it is done as faithfully & reverently as this

I didn't think it was as non-stop packed as Ally did, and Cage is pretty reigned in actually. but each of the disaster scenes are top notch spectacle, and the final 15 minutes are, well they're religious

also, I know Beethoven is Beethoven, but any inclusion of the 7th allegretto in a science fiction movie officially constitutes a direct reference to Zardoz, especially when used to soundtrack THE END OF THE WORLD

yeah, left behind is exactly what it brought to mind for me too, to the extent that i could swear i saw kirk cameron's face in the apocalyptic flames consuming the planet

ahahaha yes and i thought of zardoz too

mostly in the 'this is so dated feeling' sense

it's not loony like 70's SF, the direction is just typical 90's paranormal horror films before the final 15 minutes

33% of the audience last night were three black couples all sitting together who seemed to be expecting a suspense film, at the credits, this 6'6" guy stood up and yelled 'hallelujah' in a sarcastic voice. on the way down the escalators the six of them were laughing about how terrible the ending was until one of them started singing gospel and they all joined in with harmony parts and they sounded amazing

zoinks at comments: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/03/a_roll_of_whose_dice.html#more

ebert admits he was primed for this film by the 1400+ comments still being added to his posts on that ben stein film

wish i had not read synopsis before seeing. w t f.

http://7.media.tumblr.com/H4BeKQxFjllglnexYc4dEGN8o1_500.jpg

I am so glad I watched this in the cinema

hallelujah!

should have been named Pebbles From Heaven

Well, that was all very... odd. Not much to add to what's already been said, other than that it seemed a little ill-advised for the angels/aliens to disguise themselves as members of the Gestapo if they want little kids to trust them.

Watched it last night and can't really muster up anything other than "what everybody else said." Agree with da croupier on what the title should have been.

I watched Angels & Demons right after it and concluded that both movies would have been improved greatly if cast & crew had simply switched projects (Nic Cage as intent Illuminati hunter directed by Proyas w/heaps of Catholic symbolism. Tom Hanks & Ron Howard discovering and facing the end of the world)

Was reminded of this short story (which would actually make a pretty good disaster movie)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconstant_Moon

giant moose on fire & hitting the tree w/the baseball bat while shouting "u want some of this" were wicker man level

the plane crash was o_O

lolling @ cankles "also free complimentary bunnies w/ur apocalypse"

yeah wtf

also this movie feels like 4 hours long. on some jean eustache trip

LOL WTFF
how did this movie even happen
i wish it was about subway crashes because it could've used a few more of that scene and a few less of every other scene

YOU WANT SOMMA THIS?!
ahahaaaaaa

thought last scene wld be keyboard cat tbh

Hahah that would have been icing on the cake for sure.

I have no idea what was going on in this movie because I couldn't get past Cage's complete lack of sideburns.

Gotta watch out for those types.

It's different when not connected to long flowing hair!

thread should be moved to ilc imo

i mean I LOVE CRICKET: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX

SPOILERS!!!

I thought this was pretty good! I mean, the whole story made absolutely no sense at all... If the aliens knew what was gonna happen 50 years ago, why did they come up with such a ridiculously complex plot to save a handful of kids (I take it there were two kids in all of those space ships in the end, even though the two main kids were all we saw) right before the end of the world? Why not just slowly ship folks away during those 50 years, so they could've saved more people? And why come upt with such silly way of passing the information instead of just, you know, telling the truth right from the beginning? But if you get past all the plot holes, the movie was quite entertaining to watch. I hadn't been spoiled about the plot, so it was genuinely cool to watch a movie were you really couldn't guess what's gonna happen next (no way did I see the movie ending with the destruction of the whole Earth). And Proyas is still great at coming up with arresting and scary cinema; those accident scenes were genuinely disturbing, and the finale looked absolutely gorgeous!

I think the Nick Cage is the best actor for these kind of films, because he can be totally earnest throughout the silliness. If the movie had had a nudge nudge wink wink, "you aren't really supposed to take this seriously" postmodern vibe, it would've just gone up its arse, and it would've been so much worse. You need to take it seriously for it to work, and Cage is perfect at portraying that seriousness. I mean, in the climax point of the movie the guy scrubbing paint away from an old cellar door to find out the cordinates scribbled to it by a school girl, which will lead him to the exact spot where space aliens will appear to rescue his son from the complete destruction of the Earth by the Sun, and when you write it down like this it's the stupidest thing you've ever heard, but when you're watching it on the screen you're there with him, and you totally believe in him, with all your heart, because he's Nick fucking Cage, and youre like, go Nick go! Scrub that paint! Scrub it!! Yeah!!

Because he's that good.

"go Nick go! Scrub that paint! Scrub it!! Yeah!!"
Nic can inspire this in Face/Off but not in this movie. He's pretty muted for a guy who is a) in that situation and b) Nicolas Cage.

Well yeah, he needs to be muted! He shouldn't go over the top, because it's a serious film and he needs to be serious. That's the point of it.

but somber Cage is like a bird with clipped wings -- let him fly, for god's sake!

I loved that not only did the story not really make any sense, but Cage even basically says "what was the point of me following all these clues if I couldn't do anything!?" And this is like a half hour before the end of the movie, and there's no real twist or anything from that point onward, just everything you pretty much have already been told is going to happen playing itself out.

I mean, you can say "newsflash: Hollywood is stupid," but it honestly amazes me how a movie that costs $50mil and went through years of development and rewrites could get on the screen without meeting even the most basic requirements for there to be any kind of logic to the progression of events or the protagonist's role in the story.

i just assumed it was a labor of love for nic and/or proyas (sure smelled like one) but wow yeah apparently this film had a lot of cooks.

I don't remember this too well, but were the clues for him? I thought they were for the kids, and it was just by mistake that he happened upon them, too. The story does kind of make sense if it turns out the aliens are not predicting the disasters, but actively facilitating them so they can steal their babies under cover of apocalypse, and if this is the case the movie missed out on a grand opportunity to have Cage punch out a guy in an alien costume.

shit if you're an alien angel the fuck do you need to blow up the world to steal a baby for

then again these guys did seem to enjoy taking the long way around ("let's just stare at 'em in leather jackets with our mouths open")

I guess you could interpret it that the schoolgirl 50 years ago got all the information accidentally, being mentally attuned with the aliens like her granddaughter was, and that she or Nick Cage were never meant to have any use for those clues. It looked like the aliens were gonna grab the kids they'd chosen anyway, so all the clues did was to make Cage find out what was going on. It still doesn't make sense why or how the aliens would've predicted all those other accidents, and why this information was what the schoolgirl got from them, even if it was an accident.

Yeah, even if Cage is just the guy whose son is the 'chosen one' and he happens to figure out the clues (which were utterly useless to him or anyone else and were figured out at the last possible minute) -- nothing that happens with him or the kids actually facilitates the aliens being able to take the kids into space. Cage was leaving the boy alone to walk up to the aliens' car, wander to them in the forest, etc. the whole damn movie, it's not like he had to be tricked into delivering him into their hands!

Another favorite moment -- Cage picks the "91101" sequence of apparently at random out of the middle of the long string of numbers, AND THEN thinks oh hey September 11th 2001!

btw you can maximize your fun while watching this movie if you assign names to the aryan aliens -- i decided very early on to call them Franklin & Beauregard

I mean, the aliens already knew what was gonna happen 50 years in the future, and they probably already had an intricate plan to save humanity back then, so the schoolgirl just accidentally caught a glimpse of that plan. The aliens never intended her or Nick Cage to find out.

(xx-post)