BEFORE: I figure in another week my summer exile will be half over, first I have to call in for jury duty on Friday, which might mean MORE time off, or maybe I'll get lucky and I won't have to show up anywhere, just call in for a few days. It's happened before, but I've also served in person before, so I can't really make any job plans until I know for sure if I have to show up and serve next week. Hey, at least they pay $40 a day for jury duty. I've also got an appointment to get my hearing aid fixed, then a dental check-up the week after that. At least I've got time this summer to attend to these things, even if I'm not raking in the cash.
I also had some time yesterday to back up my computer, something I never seem to have time for on a regular basis, and also go through some old photos on my computer and dump a bunch of duplicate photos that the application seemed to have created. You know how you delete a bunch of photos from your phone, but they're not really "gone" for like 30 days? It's a great feature, until you realize that your phone also backed up all those photos you didn't want to your computer, just to be on the safe side. And I usually take two or three photos of something just to be on the safe side, so between the multiple photos I take of things, and the extra duplication that all the multiple back-ups created, I had thousands of duplicate photos taking up space on the computer - and that's just on the Photos application, I also had the photos in regular folders and posted on Flickr. So do I need so many copies of every photo? I do not. So it took a few hours last night and this morning, but I went on a tear deleting dupes, and got the total number of photos from 18,000 down to about 12,000. The problem seemed to start when I got my iPhone 8 while we were on vacation in Vegas in 2019.
So, I spent half today remembering vacations and meals and events at the theater - I didn't need to keep about 99% of the photos I took for work, because the important ones are stored in the event notes on the school's system, and I don't need hundreds of pics of chairs, tables and stanchions taking up space on my computer. I just kept the photos of celebrities that I wasn't supposed to take. Then I went back through all the pandemic photos, and finally pictures from that Vegas vacation - and then when I got to 2018, I found a lot of photos of things I don't remember doing or eating, so I guess my memory really only goes back so far. If I have a little more time this weekend I can go back further and try to remember the before-times, but the chances aren't looking good, my brain memory can only hold so much, too. Anything that happened to me more than five years ago is difficult to remember - but hey, that's why we take photos, right?
Nicolas Cage carries over from "Arsenal". This film hit theaters last year just a short while after I did my big Nic Cage marathon - because of course it did. But I don't think I would have gone out to the theater to see it, I had too many other films to see in theaters. I'll be damned if I can remember what they were, though. ("Spider-Man: No Way Home", "House of Gucci", "The Batman", "The Bad Guys", "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness", "Jurassic World Dominion", "Thor: Love & Thunder", and "Minions: The Rise of Gru"). Damn, that was a year, wasn't it? I may only be good for four trips to the theater this year.
And I want to send a very rare (these days, anyways) birthday SHOUT-out to actress Shannon Horgan, who appears in today's film. Life was actually a bit easier when I planned my chain around actors' birthdays, and the linking was great if it happened, but it wasn't required.
THE PLOT: Movie star Nicolas Cage is channeling his iconic characters as he's caught between a superfan and a CIA agent.
AFTER: Of course, this film is over the top and quite ridiculous, not based in reality at all, probably - at least, I hope not. As a biopic it's not QUITE as over-the-top as "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story", but of course that one was all spoof and parody and not meant to be taken seriously. But in a similar vein, this film uses the real career of Nicolas Cage as a jumping-off point and then says, "OK, where can we go from here?" and Cage plays a fictional version of himself, as a mega movie-star who's got a messed-up personal life (don't they all?) and is also very neurotic and insecure at heart (aren't they all?).
When he fails to land a role that he really wanted, he decides that he's going to quit acting - that'll show 'em! - and live the life of a "housecat". Before retiring, he's got to settle his debt with the Chateau-Marmont, where he's been living for six months, so he accepts an offer to attend the birthday party of a Spanish billionaire who made his fortune in the olive business, or something. At the same time, an arms dealer kidnaps the daughter of a prominent Spanish anti-crime politician - but those two events can't possibly be connected, could they? Wait for it...
Upon his arrival in Mallorca, the actor is recognized by a CIA agent, who pretends to be a fan, gets a selfie with him and plants a tracker on him. After forming a bromance bond with the Spanish billionaire and agreeing to read his screenplay, Nick gets contacted by the CIA who tell him his new friend is an international gangster who's probably got that politician's daughter held somewhere in his compound. So the actor gets enlisted to find the girl while agreeing to stay over in Spain longer and collaborate on a screenplay for a new action movie with his new buddy Javi. Sure, because what action movie star doesn't feel that they're one step away from doing real spy work after appearing in so many movie shoot-outs and fight scenes?
There's a typical three-act structure here - Nick and Javi bond over their love of movies (mostly his movies) in Act 1, but Act 2 puts them at odds with each other, thanks to the CIA and the real gangster the two new friends almost kill each other, and then in Act 3 they team up to take down the real villains in typical "Mission: Implausible" style, with Cage putting on prosthetics to impersonate a different Spanish gangster and going undercover. What good fortune, that Nick's ex-wife has experience as a movie make-up expert, and also that Javi had Cage's ex-wife and daughter brought to the island! Note - the real Nic Cage has been married five times, but never to a make-up artist. And he does not have a teen daughter named Addy, he has two sons and a baby daughter as of 2022. This follows the trend of other films like "Space Jam: A New Legacy", where you wouldn't expect to see Lebron James' REAL wife and son in the movie, for many reasons, one of which is to not divulge too much about a celebrities family to the audience.
Look, all things considered, this film could easily have been a lot worse - they could have had Nic Cage entering some kind of multiverse and jumping between digital recreations of movies he's been in, or trying to gain the abilities of characters he's played to save the world, like some kind of "Every Nicolas Cage Movie Everywhere All at Once". Hey, that's not a terrible idea, but it would be hell to license the rights to footage from all the movies he's been in, which are all probably owned by different parties. Sure, things get out of control when Cage and his new friend take LSD and then go driving through the hills - and if you think an actor could go up against the real Spanish mob and come out on top, then you must be high on something yourself. But it's all in fun, and as I always say, that intent tends to go a long way.
Oh yeah, there's also a younger, more impulsive version of Nic Cage that only exists in his imagination, but he can see young Nick and have conversations with him, and ask him for career advice. Yeah, I can believe that - surely he must be taking advice from some inner source, especially if his agent is nothing but a fawning "yes man". Some kind of CGI is used to re-create this younger-looking Nic Cage, and a similar technique was used to depict Cage's character in the "Flash" movie - also, it's not the first time this week that an actor appeared on screen twice at the same time, playing different characters. The "split-screen" effect was also used in "The Flash" and "The Devil's Double". (Earlier this year, I also saw it in "Glass Onion", in addition to "Everything Everywhere All at Once")
Hey, any movie that shows appreciation for "Paddington 2" is worth a watch.
Also starring Pedro Pascal (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Sharon Horgan (last seen in "How to Build a Girl"), Lily Mo Sheen (last seen in "Everybody's Fine"), Tiffany Haddish (last seen in "The Card Counter"), Ike Barinholtz (last seen in "Moxie"), Alessandra Mastronardi (last seen in "Life" (2015)), Paco Léon, Jacob Scipio (last seen in "Without Remorse"), Neil Patrick Harris (last seen in "The Matrix Resurrections"), Katrin Vankova, David Gordon Green, Demi Moore (last seen in "My Best Friend's Girl"), Anna MacDonald, Joanna Bobin (last seen in "Gunpowder Milkshake"), Luke McQueen, Laszlo Szivos, Ricard Balada, Jaime Ordonez, with archive footage of Monica Potter (last seen in "Bulletproof"), Shirley MacLaine (last seen in "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists")
RATING: 7 out of 10 therapy sessions
No comments:
Post a Comment