My favourite actor is Nicolas Cage. Nicolas Cage is brilliant. That is to say he's not necessarily always brilliant as as an actor, but as a cultural phenomenon, he takes some beating. He's worked in a huge variety of genres, in high-brow art films to trashy B movies and with some of the greatest living directors of our time, from Scorsese to De Palma, Herzog to Stone and of course, Francis Ford Coppola.
I've been a fan of his for a long time. It's hard to say which of his films first grabbed my attention. Was it a disturbing and far too early first viewing of Face/Off? Was it a subdued family viewing of Matchstick Men? I'm not sure, but somewhere along the line I fell in love with the living wonder that is Nicolas Cage.
It occurred to me earlier this year that I had not seen a great deal of Cage's considerable oeuvre. I saw the need to change that. I have compiled an Amazon Wish List of Cage's films. It's fairly comprehensive, though not entirely. I plan to purchase around three Cage films a month (fortunately most of them are pretty cheap), watch them and write about them. That's about it. I might throw in other Cage-titbits from time to time too. Perhaps I can try and engineer a Julie and Julia situation and meet my hero, though hopefully if I do there'll be considerably less tedium.
The first three films I've bought are Vampire's Kiss (Robert Bierman, 1989), Snake Eyes (Brian De Palma, 1998) and Too Tough to Die: A Tribute to Johnny Ramone (Mandy Stein, 2006) to which Cage contributes. I hope to be writing about these films very soon. I have no intention to watch the Cage Canon in any particular order, though I'm hoping my trio of choices will roughly fit into 'Good Cage', 'Bad Cage' and 'A Bit Left-Field Cage' categories. I hope you enjoy reading this blog.
Jack
PS
Here's Cage's filmography as stated by Wikipedia. If there are any films you'd like to request I watch sooner rather than later or if there's anything that should be on this list but isn't, please let me know.
