Tag: Pedro Pascal

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Nicolas Cage as Nic Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

What do we talk about when we talk about a “Nicolas Cage movie”? Are we thinking about his trilogy of classic teen films Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Valley Girl, and Rumble Fish, which was directed by his uncle Francis Ford Coppola? Is it Moonstruck, a perfect romantic comedy where Cage operatically romances Best Actress winner Cher? Is it Raising Arizona, one of the greatest comedies ever made where he delivers a Charlie Chaplin-level performance? Is it Cage channeling the spirit of Elvis in David Lynch’s gonzo road picture Wild At Heart? Is it Cage doing his own stunt driving as Memphis Raines, the car thief in Martin Scorsese’s Gone in 60 Seconds? Is it his heart-rending performance as a suicidal alcoholic in Leaving Lost Vegas which earned him a Best Actor Oscar?

No. When you say “Nic Cage movie”, you mean Con Air, the beloved, but brainless mid-90s action film. You mean National Treasure, the even more brainless 2004 action film. You mean Left Behind. You mean Running With The Devil, Kill Chain, Primal, and Grand Isle, all direct-to-video films Cage made in a single year. 

You gotta hand it to Cage. There aren’t many artists who have an entire subgenre named after them, even if said genre is “half-assed action films where Nic Cage goes nuts.” It’s a tribute to the actor’s massive talent that he’s always the most interesting thing on screen. 

But with massive talent comes the unbearable weight of legend. So what if Cage got in a little over his head when he was making $20 million a film, had four divorces (one of them involving Lisa Marie Presley), ran up some big debts, and spent a few years taking any part that came across his agent’s desk? As Nicolas Cage says as Nic Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, you don’t criticize any other professionals for “working too much.” The great Alec Guinness took roles in films he thought were stupid, like Star Wars.

Nic Cage and Pedro Pascal

Okay, bad example. But the point stands. Great actors work. Cage’s outsized personality spawned an even more outsized legend, and director Tom Gormican somehow convinced the actor to let him play with it by writing a film where Nic Cage plays himself. The full frontal Cage-on-Cage action holds the promise of explosive weirdness — think Being John Malkovich meets Ghost Rider. 

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent starts promisingly enough, with Nic Cage having a Hollywood power lunch trying to get a part that would revive his career. On the drive home, Cage is visited by Nicky Cage, a younger version of himself from the Wild At Heart days who urges older Cage to stay true to his “nouveau shamanic” acting style. (Yes, that’s a real thing.) Alas, Cage doesn’t get the part, with his agent (Neil Patrick Harris) delivering the dreaded reply “They decided to go in a different direction.” The despondent Cage gets whiskey drunk at his estranged daughter Addy’s (Anna McDonald) 16th birthday party and embarrasses himself and his most recent ex-wife (Sharon Hogan). 

It’s the last straw for Cage. He decides to retire after taking one final job: $1 million for a personal appearance at a birthday party in Mallorca, Spain, for a reclusive billionaire named Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal). 

When he arrives in the tropical paradise, Cage finds that Javi is a super-fan who really just wants the actor to read his screenplay, but the two get along pretty well. Then, Cage is kidnapped by two people claiming to be CIA agents (Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz) who tell him Javi is really an international arms smuggler who is holding a politician’s daughter hostage. Cage must go undercover to save the girl and betray his biggest fan — in other words, a Nic Cage movie breaks out. 

Nic Cage in a face off with his Face/Off guns.

Maybe my expectations were too high, but if you’re going to come at me with a title like The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and have Nic Cage playing himself in some kind of self-reflexive meta funhouse situation, you’d better be prepared to throw open the doors of perception and ride a zebra through them. Gormican repeatedly walks up to the edge of weirdness, but never commits to the bit. Case in point: When Nic and Javi try to overcome writer’s block by taking LSD, we see them acting weird and paranoid, but we do not see what they’re seeing. The whole thing just feels timid, especially in a year that brought us the psychedelic masterpiece of Everything Everywhere All At Once. 

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a light, feel-good victory lap for Cage and fans of Face/Off, but it’s not even the most meta film the star of Adaptation ever made. Instead, it is like most other Nic Cage films of the last decade: a half-assed production in which Nic Cage is the most interesting thing on screen. 

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

WTF WW? Wonder Woman 1984 Crashes the Invisible Jet

Gal Gadot takes out the garbage in Wonder Woman 1984.

Mark Cousins’ Women Make Film provided some much-needed solace when it aired this autumn on Turner Classic Movies. The 14-hour documentary series traced the overlooked contributions of female directors from Alice Guy Blaché to Greta Gerwig. Using the frame of a virtual film school, Cousins narrated clips from literally hundreds of films, demonstrating how the directors achieved effects like controlling the flow of time, or how to use sex scenes to advance the story.

For the action section, Cousins presented one of the most iconic moments the superhero genre ever produced: Wonder Woman’s charge across No Man’s Land from Patty Jenkins’ 2017 film. It is the perfect encapsulation of the character’s appeal. The men are hunkered down in their trenches, insisting the problem can’t be solved. They’ve tried nothing, and they’re all out of ideas! Wonder Woman quickly assesses the situation, straps on her armor, and gets it done, exposing the men’s macho posturing as mere vanity.

WTF WW? Wonder Woman 1984 Crashes the Invisible Jet (2)

In the context of a highlight reel from legends like Ida Lupino and Agnès Varda, the scene more than holds its own. Jenkins starts out intimate, with Gal Gadot as Diana Prince doffing a drab cloak to reveal her colorful armor, then expands steadily to reveal the sweep of the battlefield, and the strength of the forces opposing our hero. The hail of bullets Diana deflects with her shield stand in for every cruel and cutting remark offered by a sneering man to every woman who knew what they doing but couldn’t get anyone to listen to her.

Where the hell was that Patty Jenkins for Wonder Woman 1984? The much-anticipated sequel comes after a horrible, superhero-less year. We could use a little uplift right now, at the end of four years of Trump’s macho misrule, and who better to deliver it than the symbol of female competence and virtue?

Gal Gadot was up for the challenge. The genetically superior super-being is a quintessential movie star, able to hold the screen by just being there. Her first turn at Wonder Woman proved that, while she may not be Meryl Streep, she’s got the chops to deliver some light comedy and pathos along with the Amazonian gravitas. After an opening flashback in which young Diana competes in a kind of Themysciran ultra-quidditch, Gadot makes her entrance in full super-mode. Some crooks in the employ of Trumpian TV rich guy Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) are busting up a jewelry store which acts as a front for international antiquities smuggling. Since we’re in 1984, the action takes place in a mall. Wonder Woman intervenes to throw out quips and tie up bad guys while preserving Reagan-era shopping enjoyment.

Emotionally balanced career woman Diana Prince enjoys a relaxing day at the mall in Wonder Woman 1984.

We last saw Wonder Woman in 1918, but since she’s a demigoddess, she hasn’t aged a day. Being an emotionally balanced career woman rather than entitled basket case like Batman, Diana’s got a day job as an anthropologist for the Smithsonian. It’s rewarding, but she faces the classic problem of an immortal living among mortals: loneliness. Her true love Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) sacrificed himself for the greater good at the end of the last movie, so despite Diana literally being the perfect woman, she sips her pinot alone.

Diana makes a new work friend in frazzled archeologist Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), and the two are called on to find the provenance of a mysterious artifact rescued from the mall robber’s haul. It’s a crystal bound with a metal band, inscribed with Latin that claims to grant wishes. Diana finds the artifact has real power when she inadvertently uses it to bring Steve back to life. When Barbara wishes she could be “more like Diana,” she is shocked to gain not only the ability to walk gracefully in heels, but also super strength and nigh-invulnerability.

Gal Gadot and Chris Pine answer the question, ‘Are they really going to bring the Invisible Jet into this movie?’

It’s about here, as we enter hour two of a film that is two minutes shorter than Apocalypse Now, that the writers of Wonder Woman 1984 discover what Dungeon Masters have known for years: If you introduce an artifact that grants wishes, you have to use it sparingly, or your narrative will quickly fly off the rails. While Diana enjoys some well-deserved (and, to be fair, well-acted) canoodling with Stevie-boy, Maxwell Lord charms the still-naive Barbara into giving up the wish crystal. He then wishes to actually become the wish crystal.

Pedro Pascal as Maxwell Lord, about to confess he has no idea what he’s doing.

I’m not sure why the standard “I wish for unlimited wishes” gambit wouldn’t have worked, but I’m just here to observe and report. Lord’s poor wishmanship leads to a situation where he can’t wish things for himself, but must force others to wish things to him. It turns out that the wish-granting magic balances the universe by taking away something of equal value from the wisher. Ain’t that always the way? Lord’s play is to use that “take things away” power as leverage over the wishers. This leads to a shockingly ill-conceived scene where Lord cons an Arab leader out of his oil by restoring his ancestral caliphate. It really is 1984, Iranian hostage crisis xenophobia and all!

Meanwhile, Barbara has lost the humor and humanity that made her Diana’s only friend as she becomes Wonder Woman’s arch enemy Cheetah. Wiig is, of course, an incredibly gifted comic actor. She and Jenkins seems to be going for something similar to Michelle Pfeiffer’s transformation from Serena Kyle to Catwoman in Batman Returns, but it never gels. It doesn’t help that Cheetah’s final costume makes her look like a stray from Cats.

Kristin Wiig as Jellicle supervillain Cheetah.

From there, Wonder Woman 1984 steadily loses coherence as it slogs towards an uninspired climax. Jenkins’ intention seemed to have been to resurrect the positive spirit of the Richard Donner Superman films, a worthy goal to counteract the hopelessness of 2020. Indeed, there are shades of Superman II. The price Diana pays for bringing back her lost love is the loss of her invulnerability. Like Superman, she must chose between human love and the super powers she will need to save the world. But Donner’s great gift was for the clarity he needed to tell the elemental story of Superman and Lois Lane — aided in no small part by Mario Puzo’s screenplay.

Somewhere along the line, Jenkins lost the plot. Wonder Woman never loses all of her power, never has to taste to taste human vulnerability and solve problems only with her wits. Jenkins can still conjure up a good set piece, such as the Fury Road-inspired riff where Diana and Steve drive a taxi to take on a column of armored vehicles. But it lacks emotional resonance because the movie can’t find the courage to commit to the bit. Wonder Woman fans deserve better.

WTF WW? Wonder Woman 1984 Crashes the Invisible Jet

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

The Mandalorian

Under that fashionable armor is Pedro Pascal as The Mandalorian bounty hunter.

Star Wars has always worn its influences on its sleeve. Its most direct influence was, of course, the cheap Flash Gordon matinee serials of the 1940s. But George Lucas was a fan of all kinds of movies, like the samurai epics of Akira Kurosawa, such as The Hidden Fortress, which gave its plot to A New Hope; and World War II air combat films such as Twelve O’Clock High and The Dam Busters, which Lucas plundered for the Death Star trench run. In the prequels, he expanded his palette ever further, mounting Ben Hur’s chariot race with rocket pods in The Phantom Menace and a sword-and-sandals gladiator match in Attack of the Clones.

Hovering in the background, as it does in most American action movies, was the Western. The famous double sunset shot from A New Hope is a copy of a single-sunset shot in The Searchers. Put a hat on Han Solo’s vest and gunbelt combo and he becomes a cowboy. Now, with the premiere of the first ever live action Star Wars TV show, The Mandalorian, the Western aspects take the forefront.

The Mandalorian, created by Iron Man director Jon Favreau and a team which include The Clone Wars’ Dave Filoni, is set in Star Wars’ equivalent of the frontier, the Outer Rim. The title character comes from the same warrior culture as Boba Fett, who apparently prize armor couture above all else. Pedro Pascal’s titular Mandalorian With No Name has yet to even take his helmet off, but he’s already hit a few choice Western tropes, like breaking a wild horse (in this case, a toothy biped lizard-thing), a rowdy bar fight that turns deadly, and a gatling-gun enhanced town square shootout. The details, such as the hero’s pitchfork-shaped energy weapon, which references the original Boba Fett cartoon from the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, put it in sci fi drag, but at its core, the show is basically Bounty Law from Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

Werner Herzog as The Client.

The House of Mouse has a lot riding on this Lucasfilm production, which is the flagship show for its new Disney+ streaming channel. It’s clear from the cinematic sweep of the pilot that no expense has been spared. Pascal is appropriately stoic, and he’s surrounded by colorful characters. Chief among them is the legend Werner Hertzog, whose appearance as a former Imperial official who offers a big money job to the Mandalorian is used to establish the post-Return of the Jedi setting. Taika Waititi appears in the pilot as the amusingly literal bounty droid IG-11, and Carl Weathers is our anti-hero’s agent. So far, the show’s biggest problem is its lack of a decent female character, which is unfortunately consistent with the Western blueprint.

The pilot ends with the revelation of the biggest Western trope of all: the worldly gunfighter seemingly finding his humanity when forced to travel with and protect a young innocent. It has proven quickly that it can deliver on the thrills front, but the jury’s still out as to whether Favreau and company can deliver depth.

The Mandalorian

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Kingsman 2: The Golden Circle

If you’ve been keeping up with the headlines, you know the United Kingdom is undergoing something of an identity crisis right now. For a while, they thought they wanted to leave the European Union, and voted to do so. But now, once the implications of that epic goal are sinking in, a solid majority wants to remain. Yet they stay stuck on a course that only the worst minority of their citizens seem to want, paralyzed by bickering and a few savvy players with a death grip on power.

Hmm. Sounds familiar.

James Bond was the filmic personification of Cold War Britain. Ian Fleming was a man’s man. A veteran of Naval Intelligence during World War II, he created his super-spy as a projection of the best parts of his self image: tough but cultured, competent and ruthless but principled enough to use his death-dealing powers only for good. And, of course, a tiger with the ladies. In the seething fever swamps of online fandom forums, they would call James Bond a Mary Sue — a walking wish fulfillment that is automatically the best at everything he tries.

2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service and its sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, are Bond for Brexit Britain. Ostensibly, these films are satire of the super-spy genre, but in practice the distance between mocked and mocker is almost nonexistent. It’s only a comedy if somebody gets offended at the puerile sexism.

Director Matthew Vaughn’s basic method is to take the subtext from Bond and Bourne and make it the text. James Bond is a secret agent who dresses well. Harry Hart (Colin Firth) is literally a tailor who moonlights as a secret agent. Bond fights for queen and country, which is to say, wealth and empire. Merlin (Mark Strong) and Eggy (Taron Egerton) serve only pure capitalism. With their impeccable suits and high-tech assault umbrellas, they are the personifications of consumption. Pro patria is now keep shopping.

The familiarity continues with the plot, which starts with Mission Impossible before spinning off into supervillain stupid. Eggy, who inherited the code name Galahad after his mentor Harry took Samuel L. Jackson’s bullet in his face in the first movie, is leaving work after a tough day of tactical tailoring when he’s confronted by a gun-wielding cyborg named Charlie (Edward Holcroft), who has a Kingsman-sized chip on his cybernetic shoulder. After a thoroughly ridiculous black cab chase that ends with a riff on Roger Moore’s submarine supercar from The Spy Who Loved Me, what looks like an easy Kingsman victory turns into catastrophe. Left to its own devices, Charlie’s severed cybernetic arm hacks the cab’s computer and transmits the names of all the Kingsman agents to Poppy Adams (Julianne Moore). She’s the mother of all drug lords who lives in exile in a faux ’50s small town she’s constructed for herself in the jungle. Also, she’s holding Elton John hostage for some reason.

Poppy kills all of the Kingsmen except Merlin and Galahad, forcing them to swallow their pride and seek help from their American counterparts. The Statesmen, whose front-line troops include Agent Tequila (Channing Tatum) and Agent Whiskey (Pedro Pascal), who bears a striking resemblance to Smokey and the Bandit-era Burt Reynolds, are fronted and financed by a Kentucky whiskey distillery. Naturally, they are appalled when Poppy reveals her master plan to blackmail the countries of the world into legalizing all drugs, because they’re afraid she will cut into their profits. The inherent contradiction in Poppy’s plan to legalize drugs by poisoning drugs is immediately exploited by the President of the United States (Bruce Greenwood), but the Kingsmen and Statesmen fight her anyway.

Taron Egerton (left) and Mark Strong star in Kingsmen: The Golden Circle.

To be fair, Poppy’s plan isn’t really much stupider than, say, Drax from Moonraker‘s scheme to take over the world by killing everyone in it with an orbital poison gas bombardment. And for all their over-the-top competence, the Kingsmen aren’t that bright, either. Watching two well-dressed gangs of idiots fight with high-tech gadgets and wallow around in 1970s Bond tropes should be a lot more fun than this. This mutated lad mag of a film wants to be suave, polished, and witty, but is really loud, boorish, and impressed with its own cleverness while insisting you laugh at its dad jokes. I’d say they’ve captured the zeitgeist just fine.