This article is written by the writer @Schulik
Movies are a filter of life
Uncle Cage is "crazy" in the new film again, but this time it really doesn't work...
As we all know, our old friend Nicolas Cage has been holding the title of "King of Bad Movies" for many years, making countless enthusiastic netizens wonder if he owes any usury?
But the uncle is the uncle, and Teacher Cage can actually kill his own other way in a lot of bad movies, and fight several times.
For example, in the psychedelic thriller "Mandy", he successfully played a madman who avenged his wife; in the Cthulhu-themed "Color of the Stars", he used a deep and introverted temperament to shape a head of the family, and both films received praise.
This year, as always, he starred in two films that seemed to want to scream "absolutely desperate", one of which was the literary and artistic quirk film "Pig" (aka "Fast Pig Killing") about the journey of saving pigs;
The second is what we're going to talk about today — Prisoner of the Phantom Nation, which was the first hit in Sundance at the beginning of the year.
The reason why this movie has satisfied the appetite of fans is not only because Cage has once again dedicated his strange and chaotic acting skills that he has cultivated for many years, nor is it just a chaotic stew with elements such as steampunk, neon, and wasteland, but because he is cooperated with the famous Japanese weird coffee director Yuan Ziwen.
Yuan Ziwen, who is rising in the Japanese film industry, has been making a number of widely acclaimed crime movies for decades, which Xiao Wan has previously recommended.
However, since five films with cold reputation were made in one go in 2015, the hat of "Jiang Lang Cai" has also been naturally worn on Yuan Ziwen's head.
Still, he's been able to coldly present one or two critically acclaimed films (like last year's "Red Postbox on EscherStraße"), which is one of the reasons why Prisoner of the Ghost Nation is highly anticipated.
But unfortunately, the first time Yuan Ziwen and Uncle Cage joined forces, the final quality of the film was shocking.
This movie has a Douban score of only a pitiful 3.8, what a concept, this is almost the lowest score of all the movies of Cage and Yuan Ziwen!
Speaking of the film, Prisoner of the Ghost Nation tells a very standard genre story, in which a great evil man is released from prison and entrusted with an impossible task because of his outstanding abilities - to rescue Mr. Mayor's beloved woman, and when it is completed, he is pardoned, and if he is unsuccessful, he is buried together.
This standard to somewhat boring opening is simply the prelude to a second-rate game in which the protagonist begins to receive his gear, enters a new village halfway through, receives guidance from NPCs, and then moves on to the next game scene.
In search of a woman named Bernice, he came to a deserted place where people seemed to have no life, and they stopped the clock from moving outside the city day and night, so that they could stop time so that they would not become real ghosts.
In this "ghost place" he quickly found Bernice, this time the film only started a third, some people will wonder, so quickly to find the female number one is not too funny? But the director is so willful.
As the plot progresses, he realizes that Bernice is not being held hostage, but has voluntarily fled. In the town run by the mayor, she had no place at all, and the women here were nothing more than playthings.
This retro town is full of all the Japanese-style symbols, just to satisfy the vanity of the violent mayor.
Cage, who has changed his mind, chooses to take Bernice back to the town and uses a samurai sword and gun bomb to solve the town mayor who has lost his heart, and everyone is happy.
It seems to be an ordinary genre film that is not ugly, and the depiction of an awakened woman beginning to rebel against patriarchy is actually a good play of Yuan Ziwen, but why does the audience just watch it like a needle felt?
If we carefully review Yuan Ziwen's previous masterpieces, we will find that in his films, all people are incomparably complex and multi-faceted, and they constantly dissect their hearts in the structural difficulties of their original families and society, no matter how fancy the picture is and how worthless the plasma is, it is just a visual display of such a complex group portrait.
But in this movie, almost everyone is hollow.
Yuan Ziwen used his bad tastes to construct a Japanese town that alternated between modern and ancient, alternating elements such as kimonos and ukiyo-e with modern banks and fancy weapons.
These images are eye-catching, but if there is no complex enough depiction of human nature as the core, the final effect of mixing together can only be a mess.
The hero completes the mission and the atonement plot mode is easy to remind us of the B-movie god of the last century, John Carpenter's "The Great Escape to New York" and "The Great Run in Los Angeles".
In these two dystopian masterpieces, Snake, starring Kurt Russell, travels through the wasteland, never losing his personality, and inspiring countless subsequent games and movies.
However, Cage in "Prisoner of the Ghost Country" does not have such a personality to speak of, he is neither brave nor intelligent, the only thing he has is the embarrassing joke of the "burst egg moment" left by the bomb on the crotch.
The audience can't empathize with him, and it is difficult to appreciate him, coupled with the exaggerated and sloppy type elements of the big stew, the word-of-mouth decline is also conceivable.
Looking back more than a decade ago, Yuan Ziwen was still a waste wood director living in a four-and-a-half-stack room, he went to the United States alone, entangled in the complicated creative procedures of the big studio, I don't know if at that time, he wanted to make a "cheesy" movie like "Prisoner of the Ghost Country".
Further on, in 1995, Yuan Ziwen filmed a grand art movement organized by himself on the streets of Tokyo with an 8mm camera, and he waved a generation of sorrows and cries to the camera, but named it "Bad Movie".
It is a pity that more than twenty years later, "Prisoner of the Ghost Country" did not become his "bad movie", but became a bad film in every sense.
Looking at Cage, he doesn't really need any so-called "turnarounds", and since the 90s he has been almost a world-renowned actor.
Today, to continue to become a new cult idol under the baptism of B-grade films, it is difficult to achieve it by hard work alone, and he needs more opportunities.
In 2019, he said that he wanted to work with A24 director Ali Esther (Hereditary Doom, A midsummer night terror) and praised him with "Bergman-like lenses", which proved his artistic taste.
Although we do not know whether this cooperation can be completed, at least the future Uncle Cage is still worth our expectations.
Note: Some of the pictures in this article come from Douban and the Internet, if there is infringement, please take the initiative to contact us.