nicolas cage, the greatest entertainer of our - or perhaps any - generation (a POLL)

seeing it tomorrow; will pack goodies

and yes, chong is in it

He rules in it

how scary are we talking? i desperately want to watch this but my wife does not like anything too horror-adjacent.

not v scary but it gets pretty gory

when I'm down I love to revisit the pachinko ad where everyone is having bad luck but Cage, it cheers me up every time

it's disorienting but yeah not outright terrifying, outside of uhhh....well let's just say, what are your opinion on fingers

Muttered this on FB last night about it:

The basic framework of the story is pretty much the Lovecraft; Stanley’s dark humor is absolutely in full effect in many ways. The changes to make the story more immediately dramatic are a mix — couple of obvious moves here and there I wasn’t completely on board with, and it there’s a key change it’s that the alien presence is more active at various points instead of it being a slow, steady degrading (but again, drama for the story). Cage doesn’t start fully Caging until about an hour in — one particular moment garnered a spontaneous round of applause, which I didn’t expect, but then again, wasn’t sure how many people are just there to see Cage do Cage. Gorgeous looking film at many points, and Colin Stetson once again has an amazing score. In the Q&A from last week’s premiere they showed, Cage and Stanley talked about how _Ordinary People_ was a reference in ways on the family drama front, and I can see it. Lots of fun references here and there and there is one key reference that gets a specific visual echo right at the end which I enjoyed — suffice to say I want to hear Nathan Carson’s reaction to it (great adaptation BTW). Oh one big thing I did NOT like was that in the end credits one of the featured songs was some track by fucking Burzum. Whoever’s idea that was, it was shit, and if either Stanley or Stetson picked it, I’m gravely disappointed if so.

triple-bill this in between Fast Color and Annihilation, yeah

in terms of Cage-iness, it's very fun that he's a normal calm dad until he gets infected with an alien brain virus that turns him into ~Nicolas Cage~

although tbf this is to some degree also the premise of Mom & Dad (2018)

when I'm down I love to revisit the pachinko ad where everyone is having bad luck but Cage, it cheers me up every time

I love these commercials so much. There's a compilation on YouTube of all five which I have probably watched over a hundred times. They capture the essence of Cage so perfectly, there are a couple which basically encapsulate an entire Nic Cage movie in 30 seconds

so this is kinda "Close Encounters of the Third Kind meets The Shining as directed by Jodorowsky, starring Nic Cage and a team of alpacas". If that doesn't sell you, you're not gonna enjoy it.

About a half hour too long, the fx is occasionally corny as fuck and i found the sound design really annoying (quit it with the whistling already!) but it's generally a blast visually, especially for the last ten minutes or so, plus lots of lovecraft jokes if that's your thing.

Beyond that, my audience was roaring at every Cage-ism and I mostly was too. You'll definitely want to pregame.

absolutely awesome and p much as good as Mandy

v funny, v hyperaccelerated, v surreal and v v eldritch

Watched Deadfall over the holidays, to which that series of descriptors also roughly applies.

absolutely awesome and p much as good as Mandy

lol no

In no way in the same league as Mandy but fun nonetheless.

It helped that my expectations were only moderately high - it surpassed them at every turn. The two films will absolutely come to be regarded together I think. This one had more of a focus on ecological destruction and familial anxiety and subsumed the antagonist into the protagonist, and perhaps Mandy had the stronger and more original vision, but they're both superbly-executed odes to different eras of kickass fantasy horror idk

I haven't seen Annihilation yet - maybe that's next

former ilx0r m1ccio is running a bracket poll of Cageflix on twitter during lockdown, if anyone wants to play

I hope that Sono/Cage movie wrapped before COVID hit.

i think it's been 18 months since i watched every cage movie and i am pretty sure i am now like 10 behind

like trying to visit every page on the internet

Juria316
5 months ago
I love how Nicolas Cage has become a genre.

Obvious choice in retrospect

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/may/04/nicolas-cage-joe-exotic-tiger-king-miniseries

Saw Pig, the Nicholas Cage looks for his pig movie, tonight and I was pretty floored. Don’t miss this one…

It could be summarized as John Wick meets The Truffle Hunters. But by the third course act it's really much more.

Got Snakes on a Plane vibes from the trailer but Nic Cage seems like the kind of actor who could actually pull this off

I think he did. Certain elements of the Portland culinary underworld, as presented in this movie, strain credulity. But Cage's performance works in this setting.

Question for anyone who knows more about restaurants than I do: is molecular gastronomy still a thing? I was under the impression that it had died with El Bulli, in part because of Noma and the hype around foraging.

I want to see Pig but I don't go to theaters anymore. Once it pops up on Amazon or Hulu or someplace I'll definitely check it out.

is molecular gastronomy still a thing?

In the context of Portland, no. I don't think it ever took hold here to begin with.

is molecular gastronomy still a thing?

It's been two years since I've been to a top-end restaurant, but imo what happened is that those techniques have been more broadly absorbed by top-end "fancy" restaurants. Even top-end places that don't advertise themselves as molecular gastronomy may use aggressively modern elements/techniques within whatever else they are doing.

is molecular gastronomy still a thing

Absolutely, but I think so many of its attributes and trappings are just common practice now that it's not really called that.

The real culinary frontier is elemental gastronomy.

liked this a lot. seemed like all that stuff was just a vehicle to say "none of this is real," as Cage's character doesn't know or care what's happening in that world anymore. restaurant scene was great - "old world, uh, traditions."

It's kind of a shame that Cage has been in this cycle of ott kitsch and gun for hire shit, as I keep hearing nothing but good things about this.

Got Snakes on a Plane vibes from the trailer

I didn't see the trailer but this is definitely not that kind of movie. Watched it last night, it's excellent and very touching, and I like the extremely weird implication that there's some underground of chefs running a fight club (this whole scene was kind of incongruous with the rest of the film but it added a nice surreal touch). Cage seems a lock for an Oscar nomination.

ok I guess I really do need to see this, leave it to Cage to make something like this actually good

pig is such a soulful and beautiful film

Brad OTM.

I went to a free viewing of Mandy and I can report it's still amazing even the third watch through

more people in every trade/artform could stand to be told "none of this is real"

pig is such a soulful and beautiful film

Ha, yer such a mark. It's one of your best qualities, mind you.

I watched it this past weekend when it popped up on Hulu; it was... better than I expected. But come on; it's set in a world every bit as fantastic as JOHN WICK or ROAD HOUSE, and Cage as nearly silent avatar of What Really Matters is totally absurd. There's not one Dead Wife but TWO! But I'll give it this much - the movie sells it so well you only laugh afterward. Scott Seward called it "a dumber Nomadland for Chuck Palahniuk fanboys" and that's dead on.

"a dumber Nomadland for Chuck Palahniuk fanboys" can not possibly be "better than you expected"

It has the virtue of being completely original and mostly successful at bringing off its premise; it's the intersection of film and ILX's quiddities-of-the-NYT thread. Maybe the year's sharpest political film.

watched and very much loved Pig over the weekend

if it was a dumber palahniuk he’d have been fucking the pig imo

I didn’t buy a lot of bits of the script but Cage sold the dialogue like he meant it. He’s made to emote and act out some really iffy concepts and somehow sell them, imo

Ha, yer such a mark. It's one of your best qualities, mind you.

one of your best qualities is your complete inability to see beyond your narrow-ass tastes so thanks

y’all just namechecking palahniuk just because there’s an brief underground fight club scene in the movie? idk, think better

Pig

it totally depicted the outrageous rituals and trend-chasing that defines any kind of scene without resorting to straight realism, which is distinct from the fictional world of assassins in john wick and the deep interrogation of masculinity in fight club but then again maybe these different things are all the same