If Raising Arizona starred Ryan Gosling

So I finally did it last night: I showed my younger son my favorite movie of all time.

If you read this post, you'll remember I showed the whole family the first ten minutes of Raising Arizona on my birthday last year, almost exactly six months ago, though of course my wife had already seen it multiple times. (And congratulations to RA on its tenth tagging on my blog. Double digits baby!) 

The only one out of the two kids who showed any interest in a full viewing was my younger son, then 11, now 12. In fact, he had mentioned it again when the movie came up for other reasons, without me prodding him or forcing the issue for my own benefit. 

And in truth, maybe there was a little trepidation on my part about completing the full viewing. When you show someone your favorite of anything, you are exposing yourself to their ridicule if they inevitably don't like it as much as you do, though even if he hadn't liked it, my son is sensitive enough that he surely would have cushioned the blow. 

In fact, his response might have been a cushioning. I have no reason to think he didn't like it, but during the credits I did have to ask what he thought, without him volunteering it. He said he thought it was good, with that little uplift in your voice that suggests the statement is genuine, but maybe only to a certain extent. He did make some interesting follow-up comments, even an analysis about whether Leonard Smalls is supposed to be H.I. McDunnough in the future, given that they have the same tattoo. This led to a discussion of symbolism vs. realism in films, which is the sort of conversation I want to have with my kids about film, if they'll have it.

The other thing that caused me a little trepidation about the viewing is stupid. In linking back to one of the other times I tagged RA on this blog, I had been on a coincidental streak of watching my favorite movie almost exactly every four years, which had been pretty organic to that point. Left to my own devices, I might not have watched it again until 2028, as those four year stretches were aligned with presidential election and summer Olympics years. This viewing caused me to deviate from that, but really, I want any of my viewings to be organic and not to think too much about them. There was no point to wait another two years to show my son Raising Arizona, not when he had already asked about it more than once. 

The thing I thought was interesting enough to write about today, though, was what he asked me about Nicolas Cage very early in the movie, during the opening ten minutes he'd already seen, in one of the shots when H.I. is lying on his prison bunk, thinking about Ed. 

"Is that Ryan Gosling?" he asked.

At first I thought this was pretty funny, though my response did not illustrate that. Although I knew my son didn't know the exact year Raising Arizona was released, he had to know, just by looking at it, that it was not a recent movie. I said "No, Ryan Gosling would have been about five when this came out." (Actual age: six.) 

"Oh right because it came out in like 1980," he responded.

"1987," I said. Gosling himself was born in 1980.

But then I got to thinking how interesting it was that he had seen Gosling in a then 23-year-old Nicolas Cage. (And how weird it was, in retrospect, that the Coen brothers had seen it appropriate to case a 23-year-old in this role, considering H.I. has already served a half-dozen sentences and been paroled a half-dozen times. Wouldn't they at least want someone over 30? Holly Hunter is about six years older than him, so I guess they're both playing her age in this movie.)

Especially since he has become primarily a comedic actor, there's something about Gosling's physicality that indeed does recall a young Cage. Thinking particularly about films that required considerable physical comedy from him, such as The Nice Guys. 

Since my son had asked this question early enough in the movie, I started seeing Cage's performance through the lens of decisions I could see Gosling making as an actor. And this little bit in particular seemed like a perfect Gosling moment:

Can't you just see Gosling doing that?

I was, of course, inclined to do a modern recasting of Raising Arizona, though I suppose it wouldn't really be "modern." Although Cage seemed too young to play H.I., I don't think we want him being played by a 45-year-old Gosling either. 

But actually, if you look at Gosling in Project Hail Mary, he's still wiry and physical. And I think maybe the themes of Raising Arizona are more resonant with actors who are at least in their mid- to late-30s, who really are staring a childless existence in the face, and really can't afford to wait for any hypothetical medical breakthroughs that will allow them to conceive. At 45, Gosling can certainly play 37.

So let's do this. "Let's go get Nathan Jr.!"

Sorry. Let's recast Raising Arizona with Gosling in the lead. And let's be a little flexible with the ages. There's going to be a little "first thought best thought" here too. I can't sit here all day and think about this. 

So we start with H.I. obviously. I think these pictures are an even better indication of just how Gosling fits in this role. They both wear the Hawaiin shirt well, of course, even though my favorite clothing worn by Cage in RA is the shirt he wears during the lunch with Glen and Dot. I realize I've got to filibuster a bit here so that I can align the photos with the text. So this is me doing that. I think I've got it now. 

Ed could be played by Kathryn Hahn. She's actually a couple months older than I am, which means she's 52. But let's not tell Kathryn Hahn she can't play 37. She can do anything, so playing 37 certainly qualifies. These photos are not particularly flattering to either Hahn or Hunter, but I've chosen them to illustrate why I've cast Hahn here. We need an actress who can go big but is also capable of a genuine emotional connection with the audience, and I think that's Hahn. 

If looking for bounty hunter Leonard Smalls, our mind should automatically go to the physically largest presences we have out there. And so in this case I thought of Jason Momoa. I think the thing that makes Randall "Tex" Cobb so scary in this role is that we don't get even a whiff of sympathy from him as an actor; he makes a great evil incarnate. I do think it would be hard to ignore the jovial associations we have with Momoa, who has almost always played a good guy. But I think Momoa can do it. Let's not typecast him and limit what he can bring to the screen. 

Next up is Nathan Arizona. The huckster furniture salesman and bereft father is one of the movie's true comedic highlights, so we need someone pretty funny here too. I struggled with this one, and have no idea if I came up with the right answer. For some reason, Shea Whigham popped into my head and wouldn't leave. I don't actually know how well Whigham does comedy, because that's not how he's usually cast. But looking at how Trey Wilson was cast before RA, I'm not seeing comedies in there either. It could be a Leslie Nielsen thing, that once they discovered he could do comedy, there was no turning back. I can see that path for Whigham. 

The final four characters of note come in pairs, so let's look at them that way.

For jailbirds and bad influences Gale and Evelle Snoats, I'm thinking David Harbour and Michael Pitt. These are based on physical matches, of course, but I also think Harbour has the expansive personality necessary to step into John Goodman's shoes -- or rather, his muddy boots fresh from cutting into the sewer line. With Michael Pitt, I'm seeing the same baby face as William Forsythe, though I really have no idea if Pitt can be funny -- and I should say, traditionally he has not been a favorite of mine. Fortunately, he has less work to do in that regard than Harbour. Although my friends and I have some Evelle Snoats quotes we love -- "You hear that? We usin' code names" is one example -- the heavy lifting here is from the older brother, the alpha, Gale. So Harbour can carry the load and Pitt can follow his lead. Forsythe is the least essential of these actors in establishing RA's tone, and so I think Pitt can fill that role here. 

Lastly we get to Dot and Glen, the swingers, absentee parents and crass idiots played by future three-time Oscar winner and Joel Coen wife, Frances McDormand, and the lesser heralded Sam McMurray. And let's just finish off with a couple of SNL alums. We already know Kristen Wiig can do the high volume and wild gesticulations of McDormand's Dot. Jason Sudeikis hasn't in his career played as zany, generally, as McMurray is here, but there's something about the eminently more sympathetic Ted Lasso that shares DNA with Glen. Ted is obviously more intelligent and less selfish than Glen, but they both have a sort of bumpkin gregariousness that makes them appear less intelligent than they really are. (Yes, I think there's intelligence to Glen, in that he sees through H.I. and Ed's lies about how they acquired their infant boy.)

If you're curious about a previous time I did this exercise, check out this post on Glengarry Glen Ross. (Speaking of Glens.) 

And I only just now realized something truly astonishing:

That recasting post was also inspired by Ryan Gosling.

What the hell? I swear I didn't know.

But yes indeed, that post was inspired by seeing a similarity between Gosling and another actor about Nicolas Cage's age, Alec Baldwin. (Baldwin is six years older. I said "about.") Truly astonishing coincidence there.

Does this mean Ryan Gosling is the greatest cinematic chameleon of our era? Because I don't think of Cage and Baldwin as very similar at all. 

Probably not, but does it mean I love watching him?

Hells yes. 

The unlikelihood of a Nicolas Cage beard

If it seems like I'm writing a lot of posts about Nicolas Cage in the past few months, that could be because every film of his I watch (or rewatch) provides new grist for the mill.

Last night it was Pig, and lo and behold, like clockwork, here comes the post.

Cage has a different appearance in Pig, one you can get an idea of from the poster here. He's got shoulder length hair and a grizzled beard that involves several months' worth of growth, not to mention about six decades' worth of grayish white.

When I say "different," I mean we haven't seen it much before -- and there's a reason for that.

When you make seven movies a year, you don't have time to grow your hair or a beard.

Not unless all seven of those roles require that look. 

Logically, this should be a fake beard and fake hair. If it is, it's an incredible makeup job. Cage gets knocked around in a couple scenes in a way that suggests the makeup wouldn't hold up, though that's obviously not a real obstacle for a professional makeup team. The thing that really gives lie to that idea is that Michael Sarnoski's film doesn't seem like the type to do anything artificially. They'd have Cage grow the beard because he should want to, because it's the type of film that deserves it. (Which doesn't mean I didn't find it confounding on some level. But this is not a proper Pig review.)

One thought that occurred to me is that this could have been the first movie Cage made after COVID, which would have allowed him to grow his hair long. In fact, if you are Nic Cage, you should grow your hair long out of sheer speculation, as someone could want that exact look for the film they are making. If the first job you get doesn't require that look, no problem -- you just shave.

But in checking Wikipedia, I can see that principal photography for Pig occurred in September of 2019, when COVID was just a toxic twinkle in our collective eye. 

Now, what would really be useful would be if there were a way to quickly cross-check production schedules for various movies, like an IMDB for pre-production only, with timelines showing the proximities of one production schedule to another for various actors. Wouldn't be a great business model for a website, but it would be useful in this case.

I suppose I could sort of manually do it. In 2021 Cage has also had Willy's Wonderland, and Wikipedia tells me that principal photography was in February 2020. So no conflict there.

Okay, this is interesting. Cage's other 2021 film is Prisoners of the Ghostland, which appears to have been shot immediately after Pig in November of 2019. In this film Cage appears to have a more closely cropped beard, indicating that indeed, he could have grown it out for Pig and cleaned it up for Ghostland.

His movie before Ghostland was The Croods: A New Age, in which I don't remember him having a beard. (I'll let that sink in a moment.)

Okay now it's all coming together. In 2020 he released Jiu Jitsu, in which he has a beard. That was shot in June of 2019. So the beard is definitely real. 

I guess the big surprise about this is not the beard itself, but the fact that Nicolas Cage was willing to make fewer than seven movies a year the past few years. 

Seven is only a slight exaggeration. In 2018 and 2019 he had six films in each year, but he slowed down his pace after that, apparently excising most of the straight-to-video releases he would shit out after a week of work on each. COVID could certainly have played a role in only two 2020 releases and only three in 2021 -- in fact, it almost had to have. But so could greater selectivity.

He may have spent most of what he's earned throughout his career, which is the reason he has to keep working at this furious pace. But the last couple years -- and specifically, the growing of the beard -- suggest that at last, Cage may have reached a point in his emotional growth and his personal finances where he can just say "I've got a beard, take me as I am." And my guess is there are plenty of people willing to do that.

I do expect that the beard period is over. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is listed for 2022 and is currently in post-production, and in that movie, Cage plays himself. 

If you cast Cage to play himself, you most likely want the clean-shaven version so it is more iconic Cage. But who knows, maybe "himself" will have a beard from now on, and if that's the case, maybe it's a good thing for all of us.

Silent Cage

At this point in his career, I figured filmmakers had already done everything with Nicolas Cage that they could possibly do with Nicolas Cage.

Then I saw Willy's Wonderland.

On the surface, it is among the least surprising uses of Cage. It's about a badass loaner who has to fight a bunch of singing animatronic characters from a children's theme restaurant. It's dripping with grunge and the exploitation quality that has characterized the best uses of Cage in recent years (such as Mandy). 

But within that there's a small detail that stands out, and though this may qualify as a minor spoiler, it's worth telling you if it gets you to overcome your valid wary preconceptions and watch Willy's Wonderland:

He never says a single word.

That's right, director Kevin Lewis willfully deprives Cage of one of his main cinematic tools, one of the main reasons people want to cast him in the first place: his voice.

Cinema is first and foremost a visual tool, and Lewis understands that -- he's got deceptively strong abilities with editing and with arrangement of characters within a shot. If the movie looks "terrible" sometimes, that's by design. It's supposed to look like a piece of dirty grindhouse garbage. 

Part of his visual instinct is the understanding that a character like "The Janitor" -- that's the only way Cage's character is known, conscripted into cleaning up the titular restaurant after he doesn't have the cash to pay for four flat tires on his car -- needn't be verbal to make an impression. In fact, Cage has got the presence to make plenty of an impression, and can communicate everything that needs to be communicated through nods and discomfiting stares. 

And surely it's also a gimmick. Lewis is smart enough to know that Nicolas Cage not talking for the entire movie is a selling point in and of itself. I mean, I'm hoping I can sell you on it here. 

Cage does come close to speaking on occasion -- he does verbalize sometimes, as when he is letting out cries of rage and exertion while beating to death one particularly stubborn animatronic monster. But no words actually emanate from him. 

It's possible there would be an exception somewhere in his career, but more than likely this is Cage's first ever wordless performance. "Crazy Cage" -- that quality that has made him a top name for a project like Willy's Wonderland -- often requires the ranting and raving of a man going off his rocker. 

However, Kevin Lewis realizes you can also get "Crazy Cage" just by having him repeatedly whale on demented animatronics until the black oil that serves as their blood is spattered all over his face and clothes.

Willy's Wonderland is no Mandy. Don't take this recommendation as more than it is. 

It's a movie worth seeing, though, for more than just the novelty of Cage never speaking. It's not the first time a movie has tried to make children's characters sinister -- in fact, it's probably not the 100th time -- but I don't specifically remember a movie set in a ghoulish Chuck E. Cheese's, so it's got that going for it as well. 

The two extremes of Nicolas Cage

Without really meaning to, I watched two Nicolas Cage movies this weekend, and they represented the absolute diametric opposition of the two poles of his career.

The first was on Friday night, when I sat down for my fifth viewing of Adaptation for my I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things bi-monthly 2021 series on this blog. I won't write much about the actual movie here, because I'm planning to cover it in its own post alongside Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for this series' only two-movie month.

But as a role for Cage, it represents the height of his smart decision making. It's an eccentric, unique, infinitely creative script that requires him to play two characters and stretches him to the absolute limits of his technique.

In the other movie, he's not even required to play one character.

That's 2014's Left Behind, which I watched on Saturday night, and which is not only not original, it's a remake of a movie that was already not very good.

I actually liked Vic Sarin's 2000 movie Left Behind, starring Kirk Cameron, more than any self-respecting critic should. I don't dismiss Cameron's proselytizing movies out of hand, and in fact quite liked Fireproof, about a firefighter trying to save his marriage. I see that I gave his rapture movie 2.5 stars on Letterboxd -- a rating given in retrospect years after I saw it, mind you -- and that's probably generous. But I've made a point in my career of calling a not-terrible movie a not-terrible movie, and the original Left Behind was not-terrible in ways that I thought were worth acknowledging. (I think that's just because I had never seen a rapture movie, and the movie had some things going for it just for being the first of its kind).

Vic Armstrong's 2014 remake -- why do all Left Behinds have to be directed by a guy named Vic? -- does not have that same advantage. And the Vic and Nic show is godawful.

Now, Cage always brings a modicum of skill, even when he's sleep-walking through a movie. But this is not a good performance and this is not in any way a good movie.

A few of the terrible things:

- Jordin Sparks plays the wife (ex-wife?) of a football player who steals a gun from a raptured sky marshal and waves it in everybody's face because she believes the rapture was a scheme by her husband to get back his disappeared daughter. This of course does not explain all the other people on the plane who have disappeared. This is not a good look considering that this is also the film's only significant Black character. (There's a really oversized Black dude who gets raptured, but he's only in it until the rapture, and only as the film's lame attempt to show us that Black People Are Also Nice. But then there's also a Black preacher who does not get raptured because he is not a believer, even though he's a preacher.)

- The most disagreeable character in the whole film is a little person, who is constantly angry at everyone else on the plane for the ways he perceives them to be condescending to him because of his height. In reality, I suspect most little people got over that a long time ago.

- Most of the acting. Especially unfortunate is the woman who is some kind of drug addict, who wears her sunglasses at night on the plane and looks like she's being electrocuted most of the time.

If you've noticed that all three of these mentions are of things that occur on the plane piloted by Cage, that's because this plane is in flight for almost the whole movie -- which may be what happened in the original movie, but I feel like it landed before then and got the hilariously named Buck Williams (there played by Cameron, here by Chad Michael Murray) on the ground earlier to start doing some action hero type things, rather than being stuck on the plane where he really has no agency and is not particularly involved in the resolution of events. So ultimately, it becomes more of a "plane in danger" movie than a rapture movie. (Interestingly, the word "rapture" is never spoken, kind of like the characters resisting the use of the word "zombie" in a zombie movie.)

Of course there's also a part on the ground where Cage's daughter (Cassi Thomson, should have been a more recognizable star/better actress) runs around amidst all the panic on the ground. One of the funniest indicators of the movie's general ineptitude is that a good 45 minutes after the rapture moment, when this character (Chloe by name) is making her way back to her house to see if her raptured brother or mother are still around, she sees a school bus go over the side of the bridge, empty of both children and the driver. So, um, did this driver get raptured 45 minutes after everyone else? And if so, why was he still driving around with a busload full of leftover clothing from raptured children?

Her mother is played -- until she is raptured -- by Lea Thompson, an actress I used to dearly love, who I initially assumed lost her way and became a crazy Christian over the years. (The internet tells me she has not made her religious views known, though Chad Michael Murray is a True Believer.) It was interesting to see her appearing in a role just about 30 years after 1985, when Back to the Future came out, and when she played a version of herself who was 30 years older than she was then. I'm glad to say that the real 53-year-old version of Lea Thompson looks better than the 53-year-old version imagined in that movie, though I guess we get two versions of that Lorraine, one good and one bad.

Cage is not a crazy Christian, that I'm aware of, so his involvement is for the same reason as his involvement in seven out of the eight movies he makes per year these days: a paycheck. 

I hope it was a good one, because with every Left Behind he makes, he's a little less likely to appear in whatever the next Adaptation may be. 

A history of violence

Nicolas Cage has pondered violence and its consequences in two films so far in 2014 -- and they are not actually as far apart in quality as you might think.

Okay, Joe is a lot better than Rage. But Rage is also a lot better, in its own weird way, than your typical Nicolas Cage paycheck movie.

Both movies have something to say about how you can't fully leave a violent past behind you. Really. Even Rage.

Having made my introduction and let you decide if you're intrigued enough to continue, I will now also tell you that I'm going to SPOIL both of these movies in order to make my points. You've been warned.

Joe, described as David Gordon Green's comeback from the purgatory of dumb Hollywood comedies (what, no one saw the terrific Prince Avalanche last year???), has also been described as a comeback for Cage. In truth, Cage makes a movie like this every three or four years, something that reminds us that filmmakers at their peak still want to collaborate with the man, and he them.

It's very much in the mold of a movie like Jeff Nichols' Mud, in which a loner is trying to outrun his violent past. The title character in Mud is actually on the run, but Cage's Joe is just at the level of not seeming able to keep himself out of trouble -- even when he's made very noticeable strides toward pure, respectable legitimacy as the head of a crew whose job is to poison trees so the lumber companies can clear them. He'll be actually on the run if he can't control that hot temper. When he sees a teenager (Tye Sheridan) in jeopardy, it's enough to mix with the already combustible elements of his personality to point toward something fatal, for somebody.

Rage, on the other hand, feels a lot more like Cage's other choices from the past ten years, where he agrees to star alongside a handful of other nominally recognizable actors for a salary that is well over half the film's budget. If he's made this movie once, he's made it a thousand times. The salary-to-budget ratio may be even more lopsided in this one, as such elements as the lighting and the editing come across as particularly shoddy. Even the credits, something that shouldn't cost much at all, are remarkably dull.

In Rage, Cage is a former hoodlum who has taken himself out of the game and become the head of a respectable construction empire. Even though he's been retired from crime for 15 years, the logical suspicion is that his teenage daughter's kidnapping can be tied to evening an old score. So he calls on the services of two old criminal associates to knock some heads with him, and turn the criminal underworld of Mobile, Alabama (I guess there is such a thing) upside down in trying to find her.

There, now the real spoilers to follow.

The interesting thing about Rage, which sets it apart from your typical Cage fare, is that he does not succeed. At about the movie's 30-minute mark, they find the daughter's body. I suppose something like that might have been assumed from the movie's title, but I did not assume it. In your typical Cage kidnapped daughter movie (say, Stolen), he recovers her in the final scene, while also sending the kidnappers to some kind of water grave (or maybe impaled on a fence post). Not here. She's dead.

Rage shifts to more typical territory after that, where Cage scorches the earth to stir up long-dormant animosities between crews as the body count rises and rises. When each of his friends succumbs, I got more a sense of this movie's freedom from the strictures of your typical escapist action movie. This is not heading anywhere triumphant.

Then it happens: We learn that the death of his daughter had nothing to do with the Russian mob, as had been suspected for most of the movie. Except in the following way: A Russian gun he stole from a mobster he killed years ago (a Tokarev, which provided the movie's original title) was used in the killing, And that's because he kept it in a box in his closet, where his daughter knew about it. When she showed it off to two male friends to impress them on a night of drinking, it went off. Terrified and consumed with guilt, the friends trashed the house to make it look like a kidnapping, and relocated the body so it would not be found right away.

After all, when you had a history like Cage had, you'd believe that kind of narrative, wouldn't you?

I was all prepared to dismiss Rage until this point, but the revelation about what really happened genuinely surprised me. Of course, the dangers of too-accessible guns is not an entirely original message for a movie, but I did not expect it to be the message of this movie. I expected Cage to kick righteous ass in the just pursuit of the genuinely malevolent people who kidnapped and killed his daughter. Instead, he should have just been pursuing himself. He thought he got away with that unauthorized mob hit all those years ago, but it actually came back to roost for both him and the two friends who helped him pull it off -- in a poetically just fashion he could never have imagined.

It's all too fitting, then, when the movie ends with the Russians finally taking their vengeance on him for this recent spate of unprovoked violence. He has a poignant final call with his wife, in which he contemplates how his life would have been different if someone hadn't put a knife in his hand just before he committed his first kill. Then they sneak into his house and end him.

Look, it doesn't make this a great movie, but it does make it one of the most poorly constructed movies, from a technical standpoint, I've ever sort of liked. (Did I mention the awful lighting and editing? Yikes.)

I do find myself wondering if this movie might have been taken a bit more seriously if it had kept that original title Tokarev. See this post for a fuller discussion of that idea.

Thought I'd forgotten about Joe? So did I there for a moment.

Joe seems to require a bit less ink from me as it's unnecessary to try to convince you to see it. (Heck of a job I did, convincing you to see Rage by spoiling the entire movie.) But it explores the same theme of violence never staying buried, with a similar outcome.

The title character of Joe is also now a legitimate businessman after spending a life in and out of bar fights and prison. However, he still holds various slights close to the surface, and therefore isn't able to stay out of scrapes, even in his relatively clean current existence. He's got an ongoing beef with a local scumbug (played by a dead ringer for Peter Sarsgard), and just can't refrain from smashing the guy's head into the bar whenever he sees him.

What really gets his goat is not that various small-time big shots are still provoking him -- that's to be expected to some degree -- but that the cops are continuing to profile him based on previous bad behavior. They are quick to think the worst of him, to confuse him for the former incarnation of himself, so he makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy by leading them on high-speed chases and cold-cocking the occasional sheriff's deputy who assumed the worst about him. Was that sheriff's deputy truly wrong, Joe?

Like Cage in Rage (I should have told you that character's name -- Paul Maguire), Cage in Joe keeps getting just enough rope from the cops to hang himself. It's as if these cops are allowing both characters to be delivered to some preordained fate by leaving them unjailed for offenses that should have been easy incarcerations. This is how Joe is free to attend the skirmish that will be his last, but will also kind of be his redemption. Hearing that the teenage boy he's taken under his wing, who has been getting regular beatings from his father (a dead ringer for Ed Harris), is now trying to save his sister from his father's attempts to prostitute her out to Joe's rival for some booze money, Joe insinuates himself into the situation instead. In fact, it's an act of mercy on Joe's part that seals his fate, as he releases a tangential player -- and gets shot in the gut once that tangential player gets his gun from his truck. In real movies like Joe, a gut shot actually kills.

It would be tempting to wrap up this piece with some kind of overarching statement about violence and the state of Cage's career, but instead I'll end on a joke:

"Will Nicolas Cage have a hard time leaving violence behind him in his next movie?"

"Nope, he'll just get Left Behind."

Too Tokarev to be true

When I saw the posters up around Melbourne for a new Nicolas Cage film called Tokarev, I was understandably encouraged that it was another step away from the career purgatory that has occupied him for much of the 2000s, but has lately been repudiated in the form of such films as Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Kick-Ass and Joe. Sure, the poster made it pretty clear it was a genre film, but with a name like Tokarev, it had to be something interesting ... right?

Even seeing it pop up on our Fetch box -- in other words, our version of OnDemand -- on or around the date of its theatrical release, I was not discouraged. After all, that's becoming an increasingly common practice, and may just be an indication that a movie is sort of a tough sell. With a title like Tokarev, I imagine it would be.

So did the studios. In the world's most unsurprising discovery, which I made just a couple days ago, the film is not called Tokarev in the U.S. It's called Rage.

Yawn.

I have never actually seen a movie called Rage, but I've "seen" movies called Rage. They are never very interesting. They are never as interesting as movies called Tokarev.

But wait, Vance -- it's the same movie!

True. But the title actually does have an impact on our perception of a movie, doesn't it? Doesn't it?

Take the panic I felt a couple weeks ago when I learned (erroneously) that they were changing the title of my favorite movie of the year so far, Edge of Tomorrow. Set aside the fact that you can't change the title of a movie after it's already hit theaters -- there was credible evidence to suggest it might actually be happening. The new title would not, however, be All You Need Is Kill, the name of the original graphic novel, which is the actual title of the film in certain Asian markets (and which I actually don't like much as a title -- makes it sound like a cult movie). Instead, the new title would be Living on the Edge.

It would have been the same movie, sure. But I just couldn't get behind loving a movie called Living on the Edge. In fact, that title might have been enough to keep me from seeing the movie in the first place.

Thank goodness my information turned out to be wrong.

I find we can be very protective of what we think of as the "right" version of a film's title. A lot of the time this has to do with how we first came to know the movie. For example, there may be reasons why Leon is a better title for the Luc Besson movie than The Professional, but I came to know the movie as The Professional and therefore reject any attempt to retroactively refer to it as Leon. Of course, it wouldn't actually be retroactive, since the French title of the film is Leon. But I didn't know it was called Leon until I'd been aware of the movie for at least a couple years, at which point it was too late for my brain to make the adaptation.

I get similarly grouchy when people want to refer to Paul Thomas Anderson's first film as Sydney. It's Hard Eight. It's not Sydney, even if that was its original title.

In both of the above examples, I'm kind of taking the reverse position from the one I'm taking in the Tokarev/Rage debate. I'm arguing in favor of a more general title and against one that's more specific -- a name -- but says less about what the movie is about. Rage may describe what the movie is about more -- may, but probably doesn't -- but it lacks the attention-getting specificity of a title like Tokarev. Actually, Rage probably does a worse job describing the movie, since Tokarev is not the name of a person, but rather, a type of Russian gun that I understand figures prominently into the plot.

But am I being too idealistic here? Did I really think there was ever a chance that the name Tokarev could stand in the American market, and have any chance of delivering any money to the movie?

And maybe it was not wrong to change the name. I'm having trouble accessing any Australian box office figures for Tokarev, but they can't have been good. That could be one of the main reasons it appeared so early on Fetch, even though its Fetch release would likely have been strategized long before any hard dollar figures would have been available on the film's performance.

It's also possible that Australia and other countries were serving as a test market for how Tokarev would perform, and only after that was the name changed to Rage in the U.S. After all, the movie opened sometime back in April or May here, and only just got its U.S. release a couple weeks ago. Actually, I guess that's not the case because it opened online in the U.S. back in May. Online? I can't keep track of release strategies for movies anymore.

Anyway, the title change leaves me at a loss for how to perceive this movie. As Tokarev, I was almost certain to prioritize seeing it before the end of the year. Even if it was just your standard Nicolas Cage paycheck movie, the fact that it bore the title Tokarev -- that someone considered it eligible to carry such an uncommercial title -- gave it potential to be ... something else. Something more.

As Rage, though, it truly isn't worth my time.

As for any real prospect of Cage leaving movies like Rage behind him, and going for more movies like Tokarev, well ... he's got the Left Behind reboot coming out this fall, so you do the math.

Everybody works ... sometimes

You hear the phrase "working actor" thrown around in Hollywood, but it's almost never used in a strictly complimentary sense.

Oh, if you were a nobody and had forged your way to the point that you could pay all your bills on acting gigs alone, the term "working actor" would certainly be a badge of honor. But if you're already famous and someone calls you that, it means that you probably can't afford to be selective, maybe because you've made bad financial choices that have left you working paycheck to paycheck, or you can be selective but simply choose not to be. It means that you're an actor for hire, either out of necessity (that guy in the first sentence of this paragraph) or indifference to how you're perceived (Nicolas Cage). You'll appear in anything, regardless of whether it dovetails with your sensibilities or represents you in a way consistent with the persona you're cultivating.

"I just like to work" is the phrase you imagine being put forth by people like Nicolas Cage, Samuel L. Jackson and Eugene Levy, to name three guys whose choices have always told me that they aren't too snooty about which jobs they'll accept. And while the first two are genuine stars, someone like Levy probably would be a much poorer man today if he weren't gleefully appearing in every straight-to-video American Pie sequel ever made, of which there are currently 37.

Either way, it's still "work" -- the thing you have to do, rather than the thing you want to do. At least that's the connotation of the word "work" in most contexts.

But the ones that always seem the most puzzling are not the movie stars, who you might think are addicted to the spotlight, or the character actors, who need to eat. The puzzling ones are the ones you might think of as "thespians," as actors who are always making good choices and clearly always thinking about whether their choices reflect who they see themselves to be. Sometimes even they appear just to be taking work because it's their job and they need to keep on doing it.

The reason I'm writing about this is I saw two movies on Friday night that featured actors I would describe in that way -- conveniently enough, one of them in a Nicolas Cage movie. The first movie I saw in the double feature was James McTeigue's The Raven, which featured acclaimed Irish actor Brendan Gleeson as the prospective father-in-law to John Cusack's Edgar Allan Poe. The second was the aforementioned Cage movie, Stolen, directed by eternal hack Simon West. The cast includes none other than John Huston's son, Danny, an actor who always seems so damn regal that you might confuse him for a Brit.

Both movies were terrible, immediately sinking to the lower depths of my 2012 rankings. And both films certainly seemed beneath those two actors. Gleeson can probably be forgiven a little more readily than Huston, because at least The Raven seemed like a possible prestige movie. Huston couldn't have had any illusions about the quality of Stolen. Nicolas Cage's name alone should have tipped him off to the likelihood that it was a soulless enterprise.

But actors like to act, and Brendan Gleeson and Danny Huston are both actors.

Which got me thinking about other very good actors who have appeared in very bad films -- and not just films that should have been good, but went bad in the execution. Of course, when just looking at the script, it can be hard to tell the difference.

So I decided to go through the lower third of my Flickchart and see the great actors who stick out of those bad movies like sore thumbs. Which produced the following, in no particular order:

Anthony Hopkins in Bad Company (2002, Joel Schumacher). The same way that Cage's involvement in Stolen should have been a tipoff to Huston, whipping boy Shumacher's involvement in this film should have steered Hopkins far away from it. There's a strange incongruity between Hopkins and Chris Rock as well, but it was fair to hope that Rock's success on stage and TV would finally translate to film for once. Didn't happen.

Helen Mirren in Shadowboxer (2005, Lee Daniels). Speaking of incongruous casts, how about Mirren starring alongside Cuba Cooding Jr., Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Mo'Nique? This was of course well after Gooding was somebody, but well before the other two were. It's also before Daniels proved he was somebody with Precious. You'd think Mirren would have done a double-take if someone asked her to appear as a hitwoman involved in an interracial, intergenerational romance with Gooding, but she apparently didn't.

Kenneth Branagh in Wild Wild West (1999, Barry Sonnenfeld). Branagh hasn't always made Shakespeare, and he's definitely shown some impulses toward crossing over at different times in his career (as a director as well, if you consider last year's Thor). But this was as little like the Bard in quality and subject matter as you can possibly imagine. Of course, the quality problem wouldn't have been known when Branagh was cast.

Martin Landau in B.A.P.S. (1997, Robert Townsend). Considering that he was only three years removed from winning an Oscar for Ed Wood, there seems to be no explanation why Landau would lower himself to appear in this "comedy" (it's not funny at all) about two vulgar black women whose every aspect of their personal appearance is ghetto fabulous-outrageous. I do like the open-mindedness Landau's choice displays -- a sense of fairness that the movie does not remotely mirror in its portrayal of these two awful stereotypes.

Malcolm McDowell, Peter O'Toole and John Gielgud in Caligula (1979, Tinto Brass). The fact that this epic disaster was co-financed by Penthouse magazine should have given some indication what its pretensions toward artistry truly were. Yet all three of these esteemed thespians came on board for one of the most pornographic (not to mention shockingly violent) mainstream movies ever made. I could have chosen to give Mirren her second whammy of this list by including her name with the others above, but I don't think she was established enough yet for us to have expected selectivity from her.

Ben Kingsley in Bloodrayne (2006, Uwe Boll). A rather famous example, at least in the sense that every single negative review of the movie (and almost all of them were negative, many extremely negative) finds space enough to mention Kingsley's inexplicable involvement. Boll is considered just about the least reputable hack making legitimate movies today, so Kingsley's involvement indeed makes one wonder. If he were going to take this, he really should have taken Christopher's slasher movie on The Sopranos.

Nicole Kidman in Just Go With It (2011, Dennis Dugan). I don't know if this really works, because Kidman has made plenty of bad career choices. But at least many of her bad choices have been in genres that at least made sense for her. Her appearance in an Adam Sandler movie simply left me gobsmacked. (Also, I don't know that I think of her as really a "thespian." The terms "great actor" and "thespian" are not quite interchangeable, the latter term indicating more of a tendency to gravitate toward classical subject matter.)

Gary Oldman in The Unborn (2009, David S. Goyer). All of these interchangeable supernatural horror flicks have some kind of legit actor in the role of the priest. I just never expected it to be Gary Oldman in any of them.

Frances McDormand in Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011, Michael Bay). Oh Frances. Frances Frances Frances Frances Frances. (Again, maybe not a "thespian," but FOR SURE someone who should have known better. I wonder if the Coen brothers have some kind of relationship with Micheal Bay, because Coen regular John Turturro also appears in these movies and might reasonably have been listed alongside Frances, except that she should know better more than he should. John Malkovich is also in it, so maybe these three made a pact to collectively surrender their souls.)

William H. Macy in Cellular (2004, David R. Ellis). And another Fargo cast member shows up in a decidedly odd place. I actually thought Cellular was approaching halfway decent, one of those films that manages to get slightly better as it goes along. In fact, it may have just been the arrival of Macy later in the story that gave it its halfway legitimacy.

Since that's exactly ten movies and since I am now starting to approach "halfway decent," that's probably a good place to stop.

I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, though. Keep in mind that I limited myself to movies I've actually seen, as well as movies that I thought were definitely failures. I'd love to hear some of the other examples you have to add.

The Irish Nicolas Cage?

Okay, who's excited for Liam Neeson's slate of upcoming movies in 2012?

That would be:

Wrath of the Titans
Battleship
Taken 2

Don't answer all at once.

Fortunately, I've already seen his first 2012 movie, The Grey, and I can tell you it's pretty good.

The rest of them ... well, if it were Nicolas Cage playing those same roles, don't you think he'd take some crap?

It should be obvious to anyone reading this why Liam Neeson is a cut above Nicolas Cage. But I think we need to take a look at it more closely.

Cage doesn't seem to turn down any roles. Lately, neither does Neeson.

Cage is a former Oscar winner who's acted in a bunch of big-budget crap. So is Neeson.

Cage often plays a character who was wronged and has come to kick some ass. So does our Teflon Liam.

Yet Neeson is teflon -- none of these decisions ever stick to him. No one ever says "What crap is Liam Neeson making now?"

This realization about Liam Neeson occurred to me when I was in the grocery store tonight. The DVD for The A-Team was at the checkout stand, begging someone to buy it for the bargain price of just $19.99.

Now, I actually liked The A-Team. But it doesn't mean seeing that movie there on that rack didn't make me say "Man, that Liam Neeson sure does make some schlock."

Shall we go on? Neeson's period of craptitude may go back to 2009, when the first Taken came out. That's when he developed the reputation of a guy appearing in vigilante thrillers who might want to kick someone's ass ... much like the reputation Cage has. Appearing in Unknown in 2011 surely helped Neeson further down that path, such that when the trailers for The Grey came out, people were joking "Hey, it's that movie where Liam Neeson punches a wolf in the face." Sure, such a moment was actually alluded to in the trailer -- but it doesn't mean people weren't thinking of the Neeson who delivered that "I will hunt you down, I will find you and I will kill you" speech in Taken. Except this time he's making that threat to a wolf.

Like Cage, Neeson has also gotten himself entrenched in a number of high-profile series. While Cage has been the face of such series as National Treasure and Ghost Rider, Neeson has been busy popping up everywhere from the Star Wars prequels (well, just one) to the Chronicles of Narnia movies. And oh yeah, he's also in Christopher Nolan's Batman movies -- he was in Batman Begins, and his fifth film on the 2012 calendar is The Dark Knight Rises.

One difference in Cage's favor is that he's actually mixed in some respectable work in the past couple years. While Cage was praised for Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and Kick-Ass, Neeson hasn't gotten a real whiff of critical acclaim since Kinsey back in 2004. In fact, Cage even has the more recent Oscar nomination, back in 2002 when he was up for Adaptation. Neeson's last Oscar nomination was in 1993 for Schindler's List -- and in fact it was his only nomination. (Even though he ought to have gotten one for Kinsey.)

But there's almost no doubt in our minds that Neeson is the better actor, right? Is it the gruff sense of gravitas he brings to his roles? Or is it just the fact that he doesn't expose himself to the same kind of ridicule Cage exposes himself to by not taking the risks Cage takes?

Don't get me wrong -- the point of this piece is not to prove that Cage is a better actor, or that he is in some way unworthy of the criticism he gets. I have laughed and shaken my head at Cage numerous times, and I believe he has deserved it each and every time. No one's saying Cage is portrayed unfairly. Most often the way he's characterized is pretty dead on.

But it's just interesting to me how Neeson gets a total free pass. I mean, Battleship? Have you seen how ridiculous that looks? If Nicolas Cage had taken that role, we'd be howling. But Neeson takes it and we don't blink. Is it possible that Neeson just fades into the background more easily? Do we kind of "look past" him?

You might also say that Cage has the courage of his convictions: At least he knows his movies are bad. The movies know they're bad, too. Most of the time. Neeson's bad movies seem more serious, like they're trying to be good. (And yes, I thought Taken was bad, even though it was a certified hit for him.)

It's funny, because this impression of Neeson as a fairly unselective actor just doesn't penetrate the first few layers of our brains. I guested on a film podcast last year and Battleship came up. I said something along the lines of "It's funny how we've gotten to the point where Liam Neeson, an Oscar winner, is in the Battleship movie." It's as though Neeson has cast a spell over us that makes us see him as so regal, so dignified. In fact, he's been making the Battleship movie for at least a couple years now, hasn't he?

The thing is, Neeson is not actually an Oscar winner. Even earlier in this piece I listed him as being one. It's only in my subsequent research that I'm realizing he did not actually win the Oscar for Schindler's List. But see, that's kind of the point. Admit it -- when I said Neeson was an Oscar winner, you didn't blink, did you? Neeson makes us think he's an Oscar winner with that smooth voice, that rugged sense of confidence, that idea that there's no piece of dialogue that might best him.

Hold on there. It sounds like I'm going negative on Neeson. I'm not, really. I very much like the man. But again, that's the point -- has he really earned it? Or is he just a really effective snake oil salesman, and what he's selling us is his persona?

Unfortunately, I'm inclined to think that there's a sad reason for Neeson throwing himself so wholeheartedly into his work for the past three years. When Neeson's wife, the darling actress Natasha Richardson, died during a skiing accident in March of 2009, I imagine it must have been incredibly sad for him. Theirs did not seem to be one of those Hollywood marriages built on a sham and bound for collapse. I felt that Neeson must have grieved deeply for her. Maybe he filled the hole by making a bunch of Clash of the Titans movies.

And because he seems like a nice man who would have been a loving husband and father, I don't mind so much that no one accuses Neeson of appearing in a bunch of stuff that's beneath him. If making a thinly-veiled Transformers rip-off that's a big-screen adaptation of a board game involving red and white pegs helps distract him from his loss, more power to him.

But I still don't think I'm going to be in line for Battleship.

You're more likely to see me at Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.

(Hey, I'm curious to see what Neveldine/Taylor might bring to it.)

Nic Cage strips, mewls, pinwheels arms

I saw Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant during college, at home on a break, in my friend's basement. I guess it must have been somewhere in the second half of my sophomore year, because it came out in the fall of 1992. It would have been available on VHS sometime the following spring.

Simply put, we found it laughable. Once we got through that patch when we were trying to go along with it -- fearing that it was a deep movie revealing our shallowness, because we were unable to understand it -- we gave in to mocking it fully. One recurring joke was that every time Harvey Keitel's character would do something bad, one of us would say, "That sure is one bad lieutenant." It's pretty hilarious if you're 19.

My enduring image of that movie, however, is of Keitel standing naked, crying like a wounded animal. In fact, nudity and mewling have become something of a trademark for Keitel, at least as far as my group of high school friends are concerned. He does the same stuff, though not necessarily in the same scene, in The Piano.

But that's a good movie, and this, my friends, is not. And the naked mewling scene stands out as some kind of perfect encapsulation of its ridiculousness. But if he were just naked and crying, that would be one thing. It's the behavior of his body at the time that truly makes a viewer howl. Keitel extends his arms out to the side, Jesus-style, and slowly pinwheels them while making his agitated whimpering. If you didn't see the movie, it looks more or less like this:


Today, a sequel/remake/none-of-the-above is being released, with the ungainly title Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. It stars Nicolas Cage, and is directed by Werner Herzog.

It's the Werner Herzog part that really makes me curious. He's directed such acclaimed (and diverse) films as Grizzly Man and Aguirre, the Wrath of God, which I got interrupted watching the other day and have yet to complete. I'm really interested to see what he does with this material, especially now that I hear some good buzz about the film -- particularly in reference to Cage's performance, surprisingly.

I also love Herzog's reaction to hearing that Abel Ferrara was annoyed that they were branding this as a remake of his original film. Herzog said he didn't even know who Abel Ferrara was, which I found hilarious, because obviously he's being disingenuous just to diss Ferrara, and I've considered Ferrara a fool ever since seeing Bad Lieutenant. Herzog went on to say that the only similarity to Ferrara's movie (which he claims not to have seen) is that there's a morally corrupt lieutenant as the protagonist -- it's not the same character or the same setting. In fact, he said that he objected to the title, having been required to accept it by outside forces, and that the title is "probably a mistake." But just so you don't think Herzog is completely uncharitable, he is also later quoted as saying he'd like to meet Abel Ferrara and was sure they could work out any of Ferrara's concerns over a bottle of whiskey.

I don't think I'm going to go so far as to prioritize a cinematic screening, but consider me a lot more intrigued than I was when I first saw the trailer a week ago, and was getting all prepared to laugh at a Bad Lieutenant film for the second time in my moviegoing career.

I am kind of hoping that there is at least one more similarity to Bad Lieutenant. I think it would be hilarious, as a shout-out to the other movie, if Nicolas Cage has a scene where he is naked, mewling, and pinwheeling his arms. As if that is the trademark move of bad lieutenants the world over.

It reminds me of the joke my friend Mike made that I thought was absolutely hilarious, though again, that was probably the 19-year-old version of ourselves, and it won't translate. I had seen the execrable La Femme Nikita remake Point of No Return, but not yet seen La Femme Nikita. The signature moment from Point of No Return that had been repeated ad nauseum in ads was when Bridget Fonda's character says (to Gabriel Byrne, I think) "I'm through, I'm out!" So I asked Mike what the similarities were between Point of No Return and La Femme Nikita, and he said it's basically the same, except in La Femme Nikita she says "Je suis through, je suis out!" Gold, Jerry, gold.

Anyway, I hope Bad Lieutenant 2 has a big weekend and cuts into the box office of that other sequel being released this weekend, which shall remain nameless.

Numbers must always mean something

Warning: The following post exposes me as a huge nerd, and possibly a person in need of getting his head checked. At least it is meant for whimsical entertainment purposes only.

I'm a numerologist. I should just go ahead and say it. I'm a person who likes numbers and what they may signify, even when they don't signify anything.

This is an apparent contradiction for people who know me, because they know I am primarily, publicly, a man of words. But I did do better on the math portion of my SATs than the verbal, and if you're looking for an explanation for my ability to excel in the world of information technology, then my love of numbers probably has something to do with it.

It also helps explain why I love baseball, the most statistics-driven sport, and especially why I love lists. Where an item is ranked on a list means something to me beyond the surface level.

I also love dates. I remember insignificant anniversaries, and I have a subconscious auditor continually running a check for when a friend's birthday is coming up.

And so it is that I get a little geeked for movies like Knowing, which opens tomorrow. It's all about numbers and dates.

Now, I should say I am not geeked for Knowing in particular. In fact, given that Nicolas Cage is the star, I expect it to file right in there with all the other interchangeable high-concept thrillers he's made during the last, oh, 15 years. Next, anyone? And as for this type of movie -- well, The Number 23 should have steered me clear of them for good.

But I did think the release of Knowing provided a good opportunity for letting you in on the latest obsessive list I've been keeping, because it's just the kind of thing that the hero in a good numerology thriller would do. Only, the fate of the world isn't in the balance. But my numerological list is just as ridiculous as theirs, and if you saw The Number 23, you know it can get pretty ridiculous.

As I've mentioned before, I maintain a number of lists related to the movies I've seen. I won't single them out here -- I'm sure they will come up at other times, if they haven't already. But it had been awhile since I'd started keeping a new type of list -- that is, until about two months ago. This latest is probably the most absurd list I keep, but that doesn't make it any less fun to update.

It's a list of the dates I've seen certain movies -- by date. I already had a list of the order of the movies I see, which includes their dates. But I didn't have a list like the following, and let's use today as an example:

March 19: Roger Dodger (2003), The Emperor and the Assassin (2008)

I used the movie order list to help come up with this. It was a little tedious, but it was fun.

You see, I find some inherent interest -- as insane as it undoubtedly sounds -- in whether there are (certainly coincidental) similarities between movies I saw on the same day in different years. The same year doesn't count, because I might have been watching movies according to a theme that day. Or at least you couldn't say it was totally random. If I were counting movies seen on the same day in the same year, you could argue that I skewed the results to be more interesting. And in fact, if you are really skeptical of me, you could say that I will plan viewings in the future to be interesting, now that this list exists. Which is why I'm telling you about it now -- and I promise, never again. (Maybe.)

Now, I should tell you, I've only kept the movie order list since March of 2002. So the similarities I did end up finding -- some of which are really pretty funny, most of which are just stupid -- date back only to 2002.

Without further ado, I will adopt the persona of Walter Sparrow, otherwise known as Fingerling, otherwise known as Jim Carrey's character(s) from The Number 23. You'll get the dates, the movies, and the frantic conspiracy theory on why they're related. Understand the rules? Okay, there's one more: Films seen on that date that don't fit into the "pattern" have been excluded. Believe me, you'll thank me. But not as much as you'll thank me for the warning at the beginning of this piece, which may have allowed some of you with less time on your hands to skip this post altogether.

Okay, let's begin.

January 5: Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd (2004), With a Friend Like Harry ... (2008). A man named Harry is coming to kill me!

January 31: Bandits (2004), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2006). Those Enron guys were bandits alright! (Eh, not so much).

February 8: Lucky Break (2003), Miracle (2004). A higher power is coming to save me!

Feburay 23: The Last Temptation of Christ (2004), The Devil's Rejects (2006). God vs. the Devil!

March 7: Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. (2002) Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2008). Long titles! Names! Colons!

March 9: The Time Machine (2002), Deja Vu (2007). I know I've seen this somewhere before!

March 23: Jackpot (2002), The Bank Job (2008). Money money money!

April 3: Sin City (2005), 300 (2007). Both movies are from source material by Frank Miller! (I do think this one is genuinely weird.)

April 14: Sorry, Haters (2007), P.S. I Love You (2008). Love vs. Hate!

April 18: Big Trouble (2002), Anger Management (2003), Kill Bill, Volume II (2004). If you don't manage your anger, there will be big trouble, possibly resulting in killing! Of Bill! Volume II!

May 12: Super Size Me (2004), 28 Weeks Later (2007). Morgan Spurlock wanted to see how unhealthy McDonald's would make him 28 days later! And 28 Weeks Later is a sequel to that!

July 7: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), Transformers (2007). Machines are coming to get us!

July 19: Eight Legged Freaks (2002), Freaks (2006). Freaks are coming to get us! (Note: These are the only two films I've ever seen with the world "freaks" in the title. You just blew your own mind.)

August 4: Duplex (2005), Monster House (2006). Giant houses are coming to get us!

August 11: Dead Ringers (2006), The Number 23 (2007). Watch out for evil twins! (Plus, I had to get The Number 23 in there again.)

August 21: Still We Believe: The Boston Red Sox Movie (2004), The Bostonians (2005). Boston is coming to drag me back home! (Note: These are the only two films I've ever seen with the word "Boston" in the title -- and I'm from Boston. Mind blow #2.)

August 29: Hero (2004), World Trade Center (2006). Self-explanatory!

September 4: Stargate (2004), Across the Universe (2008). A stargate helps you get across the universe!

September 30: Thirteen (2003), 21 (2008). What did I tell you -- it's all about NUMBERS!!

November 8: Love's Labour's Lost (2002), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003). Beware lost love!

November 12: The Doors (2005), Last Holiday (2006), Last Days (2008). Impending death! For Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Queen Latifah's woman with a terminal illness! How long will they "last"?!

November 22: Elf (2003), The Queen (2006). Beware characters in fantasy adventures!

December 26: Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), Fun with Dick and Jane (2005). Beware Jim Carrey!

And Jim Carrey brings us pretty much back to where we started.

I sincerely apologize for wasting so much of your time.

But don't say I didn't warn you, like a good numerological conspiracy theorist should.

Several times.