Happy Birthday Nicolas Cage

you beautiful, fucked up man.

Cagey New Year!

If this year taught us anything, it is that Nicolas Cage is basically the new Gandhi. Think about it: the encroaching poverty, the recognition as a champion of world peace. The dramatic hairstyles. We are not suggesting that Nicolas Cage will definitely win the Nobel Peace Prize next year, all we are saying is that should clear some shelf space in the refrigerator carton he will be forced to live in after his creditors take his remaining assets (although, good news on that front: the investment company Red Curb is only suing Cage for owing 3 million dollars, instead of the 36.7 million originally reported, so things are definitely looking up, except perhaps to those who'd hoped such staggering debt would lead to Wicker Man Two: Electric Beargaloo). Of course, no matter what happens in the coming months, we will be watching and reporting, but in the meantime, we offer you this present for the New Year: a blog wherein Nicolas Cage's face is superimposed on other people's bodies. It provided us not only with the picture above, but also these other indelible images of classic cinema, Cagefied. Enjoy!

Nicolas Cage Shoots a Little Girl in the Chest

Your Global Citizen of the Year in action.

(Clip from the upcoming movie Kick-Ass)

Pretty Funny, but where are the jokes about the Canadian Rowing Championship?

The Nicolas Cage Movie Plot Generator

(from http://www.cracked.com/funny-118-nicolas-cage/)

Back in the Cage

John Travolta: But I thought you were--

Nicolas Cage: ...in a coma? Nothing like having your face cut off to disturb your sleep. Read the newspaper lately?

-Face/Off

If you have read the newspaper lately, you have no doubt noticed that Nicolas Cage is taking up a disproportionate number of column inches. It began earlier this fall, when financial troubles forced him to put a number of his properties, including a German castle and haunted New Orleans mansion, on the market, in an attempt to raise the millions he owes the IRS in unpaid taxes. According to Cage, the situation is the fault of his former business manager's "unsound investments," which are frankly strong words coming from a man who spent $500,000 to buy a Lambourghini from the Shah of Iran and $276,000 on a dinosaur skull bought at auction after a heated bidding war with Leonardo DiCaprio.

But economic hardship and laughably ridiculous purchases are not the only reasons Cage has been in the news: his starring role in Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans won him rave reviews, and inspired a particularly insightful essay by Manohla Dargis, in which she offers a brief history of his career and concludes:

I have begun to wonder if the narrative that many of us have grafted onto his career — the early if erratic promise, the mature successes, the dire midlife choices — does him an injustice... He has made a habit of failure and frequently pimped out his talent. And yet, as “Bad Lieutenant” shows, he remains the same Nicolas Cage of his early, later and most critically lauded career: the man of a thousand facial tics, a student of all accents and a master of none, a star who, for better, worse and sometimes both, gives us reason after reason to go the movies.

And if that wasn't praise enough, last week the United Nations gave Cage the Global Citizen of the Year Award and named him a goodwill ambassador, citing his extensive charity work establishing rehabilitation centers for former child soldiers and campaigning for international arms control. In what is almost certainly in the top ten greatest statements ever released by the UN, executive director Antonio Maria Costa said: "The Lord of War has become a messenger for peace, the Bad Lieutenant has turned into a good cop, and the inmate from Con Air has become a champion of prison reform. Nicolas Cage's characters have exposed us to some of the darkest aspects of human nature. Now he is championing one of the most noble - the quest for justice."

It is this concatenation of events that has acted to wake CAGED from its nearly year-long coma; slicing its electronic face off to rouse it from its blogging slumber. There is much work to be done-- babies to steal, wars to fight, and women to hit while wearing a full-body bear suit. But we must not not falter! Though the road may be long, we must rev up our ghostly, flaming motorcycle, take a swig of whiskey, and drive onwards. Ever onwards.

(Not to even mention the recently released Sorcerer's Apprentice trailer, which just looks so fucking nuts.)

171964172009

Today, somewhere on the planet, Nicolas Cage will turn 45.

GetCaged wishes him a happy birthday and urges readers to celebrate by checking out the Knowing trailer, to which this post is an homage of numeric portentousness.

Peggy Sue Got Married

Peggy Sue Got Married is a little like the result of a drunken tryst between Valley Girl and Back to the Future, combining as it does aspects of both films (teenage love triangles, an idealized vision of postwar America, time travel, etc) with the symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome, most notably erratic behavior and speech impediments. The film opens with a middle-aged woman at her high school reunion, ruminating on the current state of her life-- she is in the process of divorcing her husband "Crazy" Charlie Bodell (Cage), an unfaithful appliance salesman whose moniker derives from his commercials, those peculiar eighties ads in which a loud sportscoat-and-bowtie wearing man boasts of his own psychosis, a mental illness as yet unrecognized by the DSM which manifests itself in the desire to sell goods below wholesale cost-- and wondering if things would have turned out better had she made different choices in high school. This kind of thinking naturally summons the Fairy Responsible for Granting Rhetorical and Ill-Advised Wishes, the Fulfillment of Which Teaches Important Life Lessons, Ultimately Revealing the Ill-Advised Nature of the Wish and Instating In The Wisher A Newfound Appreciation of the Status Quo (cf. Freaky Friday, It's a Wonderful Life) and she promptly faints and wakes up as a seventeen year old in 1960. After a requisite period of confusion during which she, like all unwitting time-travelers before her, stumbles about asking "What am I doing here?" and mystifying other characters with her oblique hints of the future, she dons her poodle skirt and begins to revel in the chance to relive her teenage years. Seeking to avoid the years of infidelity and misery that Charlie presages, she dumps him and begins pursuing the school's lone beatnik, a turtleneck-wearing, Keruoac-quoting poet who does everything short of breaking out a pair of bongo drums. She remains unwillingly drawn to Charlie, however-- sighing wistfully to her friends "He IS cute, isn't he?" in what is probably the movie's high point, a scene where Charlie and friends (one played by then unknown actor Jim Carrey) sing an acappella quartet while dressed in gold lame jackets and doing choreographed jazz hands--  and on prom night she winds up sleeping with him, an act we know will lead to her pregnancy and her and Charlie's subsequent marriage. As she irrevocably sets herself on the path to the future she has already had, she wakes up back at her high school reunion after a period of unconscious. As she asks herself that hoary question, "Was it all a dream?" she sees Charlie is anxiously sitting nearby, and the movie closes with a hint of potential reconciliation.

Playing Charlie, Cage is breaking type: he is the rich, baby-blue convertible driving, popular boyfriend that his characters usually steal women from, seducing the girls with his bad boy charm and leaving the boyfriends with naught but their popped collars/football trophies/Harvard diplomas to keep them company. If this movie is the child of Valley Girl, Cage is Tommy Jr.  Cage's performance, however, reached a level of controversy Michael Bowen's could only have surpassed had he played Tommy as a blackface-wearing nun-rapist. To portray Charlie, Cage insisted on sporting a bleached blond pompadour and set of false teeth, and throughout the film he talks in an exaggerated nasal whine, giving a performance described as "stylized," "off-the-wall" or (as he himself put it) "Jerry Lewis on acid." This approach alienated both fellow cast members and the producers, who put strong pressure on director Coppola to fire him, which, either through familial loyalty or genuine artistic support, he refused to do, sticking by Cage and comparing his affected voice and dental inserts to Marlon Brando's cotton-stuffed mouth in The Godfather. Co-star Kathleen Turner was particularly displeased, repeatedly telling Cage "You're ruining the movie!" and summing up the situation in her 2008 memoirs: "Oh, that stupid voice of his and the fake teeth! Honestly, I cringe to think about it." Cage does not offer much in the way of his own defense: 

I started doing this way-out voice, and people were rolling their eyes and saying 'What the hell is going on?' Kathleen Turner was frustrated with me. Here she is in this great star vehicle, directed by a great director, and her leading man comes along with buck teeth and ultra-blond hair, talking like Pokey from The Gumby Show. I can understand why she was pissed off. Can you blame her? I was basically working without regard for anyone on the movie, just doing whatever I wanted and hijacking the movie, for better or worse."

It was in fact for the worse, at least for the sake of the movie, which critics nearly unanimously praised all aspects of except Cage's performance. The strained relationship between the stars did not go unnoticed, as the New York Times review of the film bemoaned the "lack of any sense of rapport between Miss Turner and Mr. Cage" (a rapport which has only worsened through the years, as Cage recently sued Turner for writing in her aforementioned memoirs that while filming Peggy Sue he had been "arrested twice for drunk driving and, I think, once for stealing a dog. He'd come across a Chihuahua he liked and stuck it in his jacket.") However, although his eccentric performance did not win Cage many friends on the set, he was cast in his next two films, Raising Arizona and Moonstruck-- arguably two of his best movies and certainly ones that elevated his career to a new level-- on the basis of his turn as Charlie. In the end, he got a lot from doing this movie, even if not a chihuahua.