BEFORE: Day 5 of the (unofficial) Nicolas Cage Film Festival, but this is his 6th appearance this Movie Year - he's moving up quickly in the annual rankings, but will he overtake Bruce Willis, who's had 9 appearances so far? Stay tuned and find out...I was going to end it on April 1, but now after re-adding "Bangkok Dangerous" it looks like I'll be going into overtime - but still on track to hit my Easter film on the right day.
Nicolas Cage has ONE Best Actor Oscar, for 1995's "Leaving Las Vegas", and was nominated a second time for "Adaptation" from 2002. (It's always a bit confusing, he won in 1996 for a film that was released in 1995, so do we say he won a 1996 Oscar? Just me?). Surprisingly, he has NEVER won a Razzie Award, not for Worst Actor or Worst Supporting Actor BUT he's been nominated 7 times, for everything from "Ghost Rider" to "Drive Angry" to "Season of the Witch" and "Snowden". Keep trying, Nic, you'll get there. But that's the only award where you win by losing, I suppose.
Just two days left in the month of March, so for the next-to-last time, here's the line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" for tomorrow, March 30, with winning films from the 1950's:
6:00 am "Destination Moon" (1950)
7:45 am "King Solomon's Mines" (1950)
9:30 am "Calamity Jane" (1953)
11:15 am "The Big Country" (1958)
2:15 pm "Giant" (1956)
5:45 pm "East of Eden" (1955)
8:00 pm "The Greatest Show on Earth" (1953)
10:45 pm "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1956)
1:00 am "The Glenn Miller Story" (1954)
3:13 am "Crashing the Water Barrier" (1956)
I think I can only claim three of these, "Giant" and "East of Eden", of course, since I did a James Dean thing years ago, and "The Man Who Knew Too Much" because I did a Hitchcock chain. I keep meaning to watch "The Greatest Show on Earth", because it's one of the few Best Picture winners I haven't seen. Maybe next time. Anyway, another 3 seen out of these 10 brings me up to 141 seen out of 330, which is 42.7% with one day left.
THE PLOT: A dystopian thriller set in the year 2030 that sees the world in a permanent state of economic recession and facing serious environmental problems as a result of global warming.
AFTER: As I always say, if you want to hide a book, try putting it in a library - or if you need to hide a leaf, but it in a forest. If you want to hide Nicolas Cage's acting ability, or lack thereof, you're going to need a whole bunch of actors who are worse than him, generally speaking. This film kinds of proves the concept, because he is definitely NOT the worst actor in this mostly ridiculous movie. The lead actress is definitely worse, and the actor who plays the head villain is so over-the-top that he made Nic Cage looked nuanced, which is darn near impossible. But by far the worst actor is the teen who plays, well, the teen kid. He made the most common mistake that kid actors make, which is to read every line as if it is a line, and this just leads to overthinking it, emphasis gets put in the wrong place, and then everything that actor says just sounds a bit off, and then I'm always aware that this kid is TRYING to act, instead of just saying each sentence like one would in normal life. You really have to stop thinking so hard when you're learning to act, teens - try just saying the lines like a real person, if you can do that, you're already like 80% to where you need to be. Stop acting and start just being.
They gave Cage a lot of ridiculous dialogue here, since this is set in the future he talks to his personal computer assistant, telling it to open File #6145533 and then delete the record with the following I.D., and so on. All this while he's driving across the wasteland that was once America, on his way to find more people in the Neutral Zone who are worthy of deportation to New Eden. As we all know, films set in the future tend to reflect current events of the time they were made, like that "Don't Look Up" film which is not so subtly about global warming. This film was released in 2017, so it was made during the Trump administration, and you can bet that somebody took the news of the day and projected it forward - the line that sticks out is when one character says "It's easier to create fear than it is to build a wall." It also helps to know that this film was made in Canada, based on the premise that by 2030, climate change and political agendas will have robbed America of all its resources, and the U.S. needed to find a way to rid itself of any citizens who were deemed useless or inefficient. Also, probably, there's a wall that got built somewhere, even though that didn't really end up happening in real life. Wait, did it? I think maybe Trump did build a wall, but only for like a couple of miles of border, and it wasn't a very good job. Damn, that seems like a long time ago, but really, it wasn't.
The opening title card sets the film after a period of economic catastrophe, climate change, famine, a great migration, and a second Civil War. Then society collapsed, manufacturing and food production ceased, and America built walls around itself and its cities. Yup, there it is, the projection of life in the U.S. after Trump broke the country. They clearly didn't predict the pandemic, but everything else seems pretty feasible, assuming Trump got re-elected, I suppose. (And if you think that he did, well, you can just leave now and show yourself out, really I'm fine with that.). At the end of all that, the government created a new agency, and it's not the Space Force, it's the Humanity Bureau, designed to separate out the citizens who were deemed to be a burden on the system.
Nic Cage plays Noah Kross, an agent rising quickly through the ranks of the Humanity Bureau - he drives through the wasteland (formerly known as Nevada) to visit people and interview them, assess their income and their life-goals, then make a ruling over whether they should be allowed to remain as a U.S. citizen or be deported to New Eden. It's kind of like figuring out if you qualify for Social Security, only there aren't as many forms to fill out. And if someone should disagree with the ruling and refuse to relocate, as an agent he's got the power to terminate anyone deemed to be a burden, because then he's saving the government from paying out benefits. Or maybe he's a bit more like an IRS agent, but with a gun. Sure, let's go with that.
But a couple of things happen that cause our hero to suspect that something's not quite right - the former governor of Colorado is marked for deportation, but doesn't want to go, because he claims to know "The Truth" (I hear it's "out there" somewhere...). And then he audits a single mother and her son, also marked for deportation, but he delays a day in filing his report to allow the boy to sing at his school concert, because he'd been rehearsing for months. But this delay flags their file, and Kross's supervisor appears on the scene to determine why the mother and son haven't been relocated yet. Umm, what's the hurry, and what's really going on here?
Kross ends up convincing the mother and son to hit the road with him in a station wagon to escape, and they decide to strike out for the Canadian border. (This is the second film this week with Nicolas Cage trying to reach Canada, the other one was "Running With the Devil"). Remember, this film was made in Canada, so the Canada Tourism Board probably encouraged the depiction of that country as a paradise-like demonstration, while also depicting the U.S. government as dishonest, corrupt and dictatorial. Again, made in 2017, who's to say they're weren't right on the nose? For that matter, who's to say that our border with Canada won't someday be as fortified and hard to breach as the one with Mexico? Only it will probably be CANADA who builds a wall to keep all those dirty, no-good United States residents from entering.
(Remember when Trump got elected and U.S. citizens threatened to move to Canada? How many actually did that, like are there statistics available on this? What about when Biden got elected, how many Republicans moved to Canada then? Or did they just build compounds and become doomsday preppers? Just wondering.)
The defacto family heads to Canada, seeking help from underground rebels along the way, while trying to avoid drones, government agents, and gas station restrooms. Secrets are revealed, plans are made, and they're hoping against hope that at least one of Canada's lakes still has water in it. Fat chance, I suppose, but at least Canada has snow, and that's almost as good as water, isn't it? It's what? Toxic snow? Jesus, this is why we can't have anything nice, first the bees all die off, then the birds and now we can't even have safe snow. Forget it, world over, enjoy the last few years of a viable ecosystem, everyone, by 2030 it all turns to crap. You might as well buy some land in Wyoming or Nevada, drop off the grid, and wait for the end.
Also starring Sarah Lind (last seen in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"), Jakob Davies, Hugh Dillon, Vicellous Shannon (last seen in "Can't Hardly Wait"), Kurt Max Runte (last seen in "The Perfect Score"), Destee Klyne, Nikolas Filipovic, Jett Klyne (last seen in "Skyscraper"), David Lovgren, Mel Tuck, Sheldon Bergstrom, Leanna Brodie, Lorne Cardinal, Melanie Walden, Bill Dow (last seen in "The Big Year").
RATING: 4 out of 10 Geiger counter readings
No comments:
Post a Comment