WLR #12

Longlegs

Directed by Osgood Perkins

Why Nicolas Cage? Why this man, of all people? WHY!? Maybe not even why anymore—it’s how. How has Nicolas Cage, with his bottomless well of self-regard, managed to repackage embarrassment and sell it back to audiences as ‘range?’ Somewhere along the way an insufferable subset of film enthusiasts convinced themselves that Cage’s willingness to fling himself headlong into absurdity was evidence of depth. Of bravery. They mistook his inability to feel shame for versatility. What we have instead is a man who functions not as an actor but as a public spectacle, like those car dealership blowups—a farce whose sporadic good performances come not in spite of his ridiculousness, but because of it. Look at his best films—Raising Arizona comes to mind. It works because the Coen’s treat him like the cartoon character he is. They exploited his pathetic, manic energy to benefit the bigger picture. And then, Leaving Las Vegas, where the force of his self-indulgence is so strong it somehow catapults him to critical acclaim, a drunken stumble into an Oscar.

The fact that Cage remains part of the conversation is a mystery, and one I find personally irritating. He’s the most egregious nepo baby Hollywood has to offer. A Coppola by blood and yet, notably, one who never quite managed to be good enough for Francis or Sofia to touch. If his own family can’t be bothered with him, why should we? Even Spike Jonze—who has coaxed brilliance out of actors others might dismiss—kept Cage at arm’s length. And can you blame him? Cage doesn’t inhabit roles; he smahes them, like a bored child treating action figures like durrr. His output from the late 90s—Face/Off, Con Air, The Rock—stands as a alone, a towering monument to failing consecutively. A three peat so absurd, so insulting it feels like a practical joke on the audience. A reverse Jordan, a man not coming back to dominate the decade but rather to lose again and again, spectacularly.

Instead of retiring to Thailand after that trash, redemption came in the form of National Treasure (it’s not funny, don’t laugh). It did well enough—if by redemption you mean a series of TV-grade films that somehow crawled into theaters and eventually found their true home: inside a substitute teacher’s DVD player on the last day of school. Can you imagine anyone looking forward to the moment when they can pass National Treasure down to the next generation? Of course not. It was never meant to be remembered, just to occupy a couple of painless hours before summer vacation.

After that came more trash. True blue stinkers. Ghost Rider? City of Angels? Gone in 60 Seconds? And yet Cage, ever the fool, keeps showing his face in my cinema, stumbling into one humiliation after another as audiences cheer. In recent years, he’s leaned fully into absurdist performances, licking things, growling, fighting over pigs, indulging in physical comedy so extreme it feels like he’s trying to turn a career’s worth of ridicule into some postmodern joke at our expense. Either that or he’s finally given up pretending he’s anything but a joke himself.

It’s a fascinating move—acknowledge that you’re a punchline and then lean in so hard that people mistake it for genius. Maybe it’s brilliant in it’s idiocy. It almost succeeded, with that one film, the one with Pedro Pascal… Maybe the jokes on me. But I don’t think so. I’ll die on this hill.

This is a man with a hairline in open rebellion and a filmography that reads like a public cry for help. He doesn’t belong on our screens—he never did. And he certainly doesn’t get to rewrite the rules of good taste now just by acting like a monkey up there

Ugh

Touch

Directed by Baltasar Kormákur

What a spectacular little romance. Actually, “little” feels like the wrong word. The film spanned languages, decades, entire continents. But somehow, it kept its focus tight, and felt so intimate, so personal. It believed in romance, without irony of self-consciousness. It didn’t hedge its bets with satire or resort to winking humor. There’s no safety net here, no clever parachute to fall back on. Just a true-blue romance—messy, ambitious, and completely unguarded.

It worked, it really worked.

Three-and-a-half-stars

Robot Dreams

Directed by Pablo Berger

That was the gayest thing I’ve seen in the cinema since Moonlight. I loved it.

Three stars