BEFORE: Day 6 of the Nicolas Cage chain, delayed two months but it's really happening, at least for a couple more days. It looks like this one might have a spooky element to it, but I just can't bring myself to hold off on it until October, besides it doesn't seem like it would link with anything there. So there you have it, the decision is made, it's part of March & April's Nic Cage-a-thon.
It's last call for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" line-up, final day to improve my stats, and tomorrow's focus is back on the winning films of the 1960's:
3:30 am "War and Peace" (1966)
10:45 am "The Night of the Iguana" (1964)
1:00 pm "The Sandpiper" (1965)
3:15 pm "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1966)
5:45 pm "Days of Wine and Roses" (1962)
8:00 pm "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962)
10:30 pm "A Patch of Blue" (1965)
12:30 am "The Hustler" (1961)
3:00 am "Midnight Cowboy" (1969)
5:00 am "The Virgin Spring" (1960)
Is it me, or is TCM throwing in a little bit of actor linking, here on the last day - there are three films in a row with Richard Burton. Coincidence? It's not his birthday, nor is it the anniversary of his death - and Liz Taylor died on March 23, not March 31. Hmmm, I'm stumped. They must have just had those three left over and lumped them together? Anyway, I've seen those three fillms, plus four more: "Days of Wine and Roses", "To Kill a Mockingbird", "The Hustler" and "Midnight Cowboy". Yeah, I haven't just been screwing around these last 14 years, I've been working hard at watching all the classics! So 7 seen out of the last 10 brings me up to 148 seen out of 340, which is 43.5%, and that's where I'm going to finish. Not too shabby, not at all.
THE PLOT: Joe meets a mother who can contact spirits when suffocating. Her daughter is dying when Joe helps the mother spiritually contact the daughter and save her. Unfortunately the spirit in the daughter's body is now that of Joe's dead wife.
AFTER: Well, if there was a lot to unpack yesterday between climate change, famine, the economic collapse of the U.S.A and rampant government corruption, communication with the deceased might almost seem tame by comparison. That's tonight's theme, as trucker Joe (same name as Nic's character in "Bangkok Dangerous") meets Julie, a fellow trucker who's a mom trying to pull her daughter out of a coma after a motorcycle accident. Because of an experience she had when she was younger, the mother believes that if she can make herself pass out, she can communicate with the dead, send her consciousness into the spirit world and bring her dying daughter back. It's like a white-trash version of "Orpheus", sort of. But for some reason she needs somebody to choke her for this to work, I'm not sure why she just can't put a plastic bag over her own head and just have someone standing by to poke a hole in the bag before she dies. The whole thing's a little crazy, sure, but I'd try the plastic bag thing before getting a friend to choke me, there's just too much that could go wrong.
Sure enough, something goes wrong, the spirit that comes back into Julie's daughter, Billie, isn't Billie at all, but claims to be Joe's dead wife, Mary. Mary is quite confused for a few days, but since she recognizes her former husband, who's hanging around while she recovers, so she plays along and pretends to be Billie until she can figure this whole thing out. Joe, meanwhile, loses his trucking job because it turns out his employers don't like it when he takes an extra three days to get his load to Biloxi. That truck full of ice cream is pretty much useless after three extra days in Alabama...
The theory is that Joe choking Julie produced unforeseen results, what with the spirits of the dead floating all around him, and apparently using him as a channel to come back to the world of the living. But is that what happened? Couldn't it be that Billie just didn't recover fully from the accident, and is delusional? Couldn't it be that Joe had sex with Julie, then he spotted her younger and much hotter daughter, and just tried to get with both of them? Look, Joe, if you want to do that, FINE, no judgments here, so there's no need to make up stories about the afterlife and spirits coming back. Just admit it, you fell for the mother and then also tried to have sex with her daughter, who was like totally into that, to get back at her mother.
It honestly sounds like the kind of lie that a guy would tell his girlfriend, after she walked in on him having sex with her daughter. Right, the spirit of your ex-wife is residing in that body, and you just couldn't help yourself, could you? Yeah, it seems pretty crazy for somebody to say all this out loud, and it's even crazier when Julie believes it. But you just have to figure, this can't end well.
Sharper-eyed Nicolas Cage fans than myself have pointed out that Cage's character here seems like an amalgam of other characters he's played before - this is the fourth time he played a character named "Joe", for example, as in the movie "Joe". He similarly wore snakeskin leather in "Wild at Heart", and played someone from Alabama in the movie "Con Air". Also there are connections to his character in "Ghost Rider" that I won't divulge here, because spoilers. But I'm thinking now of a guy I once saw at New York Comic-Con (back in 2014) whose costume was a mix of all the famous Johnny Depp roles - part Tonto, part Jack Sparrow, the blades of Edward Scissorhands, the shoes of the Mad Hatter and the cigarette holder of Raoul Duke. I called him the "Depp-licant" but later revised his handle to "Super A-Depp-toid", based on a Marvel villain who had all the powers of the Avengers at once. What would a mash-up of all of Nicolas Cage's characters look like, and what would he be called? "Cage Match"? The "Adaptation Adaptoid"? "Racing with the Honeymoon in Leaving Las Vegas"?
Other than that, this is a very ridiculous movie that just picks up the "life after death" ball and just tries to run with it. I could be wrong, but this may be the first ever film with a love triangle between a man, a woman and his dead wife. But hey, if the afterworld is so great, and all of your friends and dead relatives are there, then why are we all trying to stay HERE as long as possible? Because deep down, we know that story is a bunch of B.S. Right? Oh, and there's an epilogue that's clearly meant to "explain" why Joe is the person who he is, based on an incident from his childhood, but I'm just not seeing how that event justifies anything that happened after it (only earlier in the film).
Also starring Franka Potente (last seen in "The Bourne Supremacy"), Penelope Mitchell (last seen in "Hellboy" (2019)), Garrett Clayton, Hopper Penn (last seen in "War Machine"), Lydia Hearst, Nailim Sanchez (last seen in "Gerald's Game"), Gwendolyn Mulamba (ditto), Richard Pait, Brit Shaw, David Lee Smith, Phil Baker, Eric Scarabin, Cameron James McIntyre, Paris Bravo, Brannon Cross, Brett Murray, Johnny Otto.
RATING: 3 out of 10 lines from "The Exorcist" quoted while having sex
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