Edit: Judge
On March 25, 1996, at 3 p.m. Pacific Time, the U.S. Oscars were being held at Dorothy Chandler Hall in Los Angeles.
When presenting the "Best Actor" award, the guests paused before revealing the answer, and then read a name loudly: "Nicolas Cage, Escape from the Casino." ”
Then, the camera shifts to a young man with melancholy eyes but a joyful face, who passionately kisses his female partner and proudly accepts the title of "Oscar for Best Actor."
This young man named Nicolas Cage had enough capital to be proud, and it should be known that he competed with him not only "Grand Slam Movie Emperor" SeanPan, but also "Hannibal" Anthony Hopkins.
And "Braveheart", which almost swept the Oscars that year, did not even get the nomination for best actor, which was enough to prove that the competition for the performance award that year was fierce.
With his impeccable acting skills, Nicolas Cage perfectly interprets the fragility and loneliness of an alcoholic and downcast screenwriter.
In order to play the role of drunkard, Cage even invited the "drunken poet" Tony Dingeman as his "drinking consultant"
At that time, Cage was undoubtedly the absolute center of the gold dust land of Hollywood.
After that, the starring movies were even more devastating, one more popular than the other, one more than the other.
If you ask who is the best screen lover in the hearts of 90s movie fans, Nicholas Cage deserves it.
Ask who hasn't been seen by his angel Sue in City of Angels!
Cage's series of films made after 1996 have maintained the myth of high reputation and high box office.
Time flew to a dozen years later.
A new name was placed on the head of Nicholas Cage, "King of Bad Movies."
I say "rotten" because Cage's films in recent years have not been highly evaluated.
I say "King" because Cage is really a model worker in the number of movies, and in 2019 alone, he has made 6 movies in a row. "Quality" and "quantity" double guarantee, Nicholas Cage this hat can not run off.
And the singularity of all this happened in 2009, after 2009, Nicolas Cage, the former "Prince of Hollywood", never had a box office hit again, and there was no longer a movie that was praised by critics.
What's going on? What really happened before 2009 to make the public lover turn into the "king of bad movies"? What happened in between, and what are the secrets?
Let's unlock the code together.
In 2009, Nicholas Cage fulfilled his dream of acting career, following in the footsteps of his idol actor, Klaus Kinsky, and collaborating with film master Herzog on the film Bad Lieutenant.
Herzog and Kinsky
In 2009, Nicholas Cage's "banknote ability" reached the peak of his career, according to Forbes, that year Cage earned a huge amount of $40 million, of which the film remuneration alone was as high as $28 million.
In 2009, the rating of the movie starring Nicolas Cage never exceeded 7 points on Douban again.
Cage in 2009 is like a passenger on a roller coaster who has just crossed the top of the arc, and the road to the back is full of falls.
Because his career was too perfect, the high reputation and high box office brought Nicolas Cage a supreme reputation and countless sums of money, winning the little gold man, and then holding the silver. For the money he earned by his ability, Cage was not embarrassed and riveted enough to spend.
Whether it's the ancient castles of Bavaria, Germany,
The nation-famous New Orleans haunted house,
The building, called The LaLaurie Mansion, also appears in american horror stories
Or the $270,000 tyrannosaur skull,
The tyrannical dragon skull was obtained by bidding with Leonardo
Even the shrunken skull, Cage, all in his pocket.
Cage fully explains the phrase "money is the shortcut to freedom." As long as Cage looks good, the banknote mission will be achieved.
But in 2009, everything was different.
In July 2009, the U.S. Revenue Service seized cage's $6.2 million in taxes and seized his mansion in Louisiana. East West Bank then sued Cage about the millions of dollars owed.
Cage lost so much money on his real estate investments because of the 2008 financial tsunami that in October 2009 he took his agent, Samuel Levine, to court, accusing him of fraud and demanding $20 million in damages.
In order to pay off his debts, Cage was forced to sell the haunted house he bought in New Orleans in November 2009. A month later, in December, his ex-wife Fulton sued Cage over a financial dispute, further exacerbating Cage's plight. To pay off his debts, he even auctioned off the first Superman comic he had treasured for years.
2009 was like a brush, brushing Cage from beginning to end, brushing off his gold dust and brushing off a bunch of debts.
In the next decade, Cage's life was firmly held by one sentence - "filming to pay off debts".
And these movies made to repay debts are affectionately called "debt films" by netizens.
Everyone misses Cage in the 90s
The huge debt meant that Cage had to make films non-stop.
The ratings are already a definitive indication that Cage's films have sucked so badly that you can see "bad movies" in almost every movie starring Cage after that.
For example, for the movie "Judo Star",
Some netizens commented: "Why is there always someone committed to making the old movie stars late." ”
This rare movie is about the earth being invaded by aliens, and the protagonist's team discovers that the machine guns and cannons are useless, and only judo can break the other party's dog's head, so a fist-to-fist story begins.
As the most famous actor in the film crew, Cage's natural role is also the most important, playing a kung fu master in the movie. As the strongest fighting force on the human side, Master Cage is wrestling with his teeth in addition to smoking and pretending to be forced. Sprinkle 102 minutes, the drama is over, and the money is earned.
Don't doubt it, it's the best performance you'll see in this film
In order to pay off his debts, Comrade Cage traveled thousands of miles to the East and became an old friend of the Chinese people. In his Sino-AMERICAN co-production "The Desperate Escape of the White Ghost", he starred as male number two, a crusader who mistakenly broke into a coup d'état in the ancient Chinese court.
If everyone is interested, Tao will talk about The Chinese and foreign co-productions on another day, which is very interesting
It is worth mentioning that the male number one Hayden Christensen, you know, he is the actor of Annakin Skywalker in the "Star Wars Prequel Trilogy".
This film not only seamlessly stitches the Crusaders and China's ancient dynasties together, but also achieves linguistic unity, and realizes the miracle that the whole world speaks "British".
And the movie box office word of mouth double hit the street, Douban angrily cut 4.3 points, only better than 4% of action movies.
But for Cage, it had little impact, because the money was in hand.
"It's here!"
There is also the recently released movie "Willie's Amusement Park".
The ratings are also sparse
In the film, Cage plays a newly hired amusement park caretaker. Unexpectedly, in this amusement park, all the dolls are possessed by evil spirits and have been slaughtering the men and women in the town. In order to stop all this, the local sheriff had to make a deal with the evil spirits, and every once in a while sent a living person to guard it for the evil spirits to eat.
I didn't expect it... This new guard was even more ruthless than the evil spirit.
In the movie, Cage did not have a single line, and acted with physical and facial expressions throughout the whole process, truly realizing "zero lines, full film remuneration".
"Is it coming?"
According to statistics, before 2009, before the debt crisis broke out, Cage starred in an average of two to three movies a year. After that, that number doubled. After opening the "bad movie mode", Cage's salary also plummeted, from the peak of $20 million, all the way to about $3 million, and even $1 million for films, Cage also came to refuse. Not only the remuneration, but also the quality of the film has dropped again and again.
So in the past, the laurel of the king of bad films, Cage seems to be sitting firmly. But is Cage, who specializes in bad movies, also a bad actor?
The answer is, NO!
The film sucks, but it can't be watched without Cage.
In 2018, Cage said in an interview with the Guardian: "If I don't act, I will self-destruct." ”
In my opinion, Cage is not only an actor, but also an artist. Early in his career, awards and box office have said it all. But from the debt crisis to the present, Cage has never given up on himself, and each role is still carefully studied.
Maybe the movie is bad, but Cage is definitely not a "bad thing".
For example, on the movie evaluation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film "Grand Island", whose freshness score only gets 0 points, all the actors and directors in the film do not know what they are doing, and only Cage is trying to interpret his role.
Heaven rewards hard work, and hard work will eventually be rewarded.
In 2018, the film "Mandy" starring Nicholas Cage scored 90% freshness on Rotten Tomatoes (equivalent to a score of 90).
The earliest domestic film fans of this film were smelling the wind at the Sundance Film Festival, and the Douban just opened a score of 9.4, which scared me silly, and then the number of people who came out of the resources to watch suddenly dropped to 5.5. (Horror movies are not very popular in Douban, either because they are given bad reviews for being "too scary", or because they are scolded for "not scary at all")
Hollywood independent filmmakers are now caught in a religious and racial dilemma in terms of thematic extraction, and "Mandy" can be called a black wave in the backwater mediocre films in recent years. The second half of the hour was completely stunned by the director's full sniffing, and the beast barked wildly and was jaw-dropping. Fast cutting and animation interspersed to break the dimensional wall of the American manga, spraying blood and lighting smoke on the head of the two pictures are enough, very hardcore, the real "intracranial orgasm", the big screen may be cool to aphasia.
And we Cage played a man in the movie who was obsessed with revenge because his wife was killed by the cult leader.
Before filming began, Cage had just divorced his wife Kim, who had been married for 12 years, so he could better understand the character's state. For example, in the following paragraph, Cage suffered two serious injuries after suffering from the loss of his wife and physical injuries, and the whole person was grief-stricken and hysterical.
At this moment, Cage's "Escape from the Casino" was possessed
After hand-bladed the demon, Cage even lit a cigarette with a burning skull, which was extremely evil.
While confronting the cult members, Cage also cosified his former character, Ghost Rider.
This time, Nicolas Cage finally got everyone's approval, "Cage is serious, you are all garbage."
Another film to marvel at is the film "Color of the Stars", adapted from Loebclough's novel "Colors from the Stars".
This movie is about "a lone family in a barren mountain, a meteorite falling for the whole family". Not scary, quite funny, thinking that the heroine can make a big move, the result is blackened and ashes. The essence is still to export middle-class anxiety and environmental crisis.
In this film, Cage plays a loving father. He loves his children and does not lose discipline. It also acts as a buffer for the conflict between the child and the wife, keeping the whole family together.
I believe that many families have such fathers
But the disaster still befell this happy family, the wife and son are infected by the alien virus, watching the two people he loves deeply begin to change, the father's psychology has changed.
He went from being a home buffer to a glue that forced everyone to stick together.
Unlike jack Nicholson's mad father in The Shining, Cage never makes the father in the film look like an possessed lunatic.
On the contrary, he is rational, he loves his family extremely, and his emotional drive is his responsibility as a husband and father.
After his daughter escapes, he captures his own daughter and locks her up with his wife, who has turned into a monster. Facing his daughter, who was extremely scared, he gently stroked her cheek and told her, "Don't be afraid, I am not a monster." ”
This morbid love sent his daughter into the mouth of the monster. Cage's performance, which makes all this seem real and reliable, creates a great sense of horror and conforms to the logic of the play, "The person you rely on the most may become the most dangerous person."
For so many years, Cage has ensured that he shoots high-intensity films every year, and when big productions can't be received, he shoots small productions. The family movie could not be received, so I went to act in B-grade films and cult films. In terms of artistic performance, cage-level actors like Cage to shoot B-grade films are naturally dimensionality reduction blows. But the arrival of an experienced veteran artist has brought good news to many young directors who are struggling with cost.
Self-abandonment is easy for everyone who suffers a blow, and under this "easy" situation, perseverance is not easy to come by. Why he is so persistent, I feel that there is no better explanation than the ingenuity of being an artist.
Cage is now 57 years old, and according to our Chinese parlance, he is an old man who is about to enter the flower armor, but he still has no plans to retire. This year, in addition to the aforementioned "Willie's Cabin", there is also a film with Yuan Ziwen, "Prisoner of the Ghost Country", and the movie "Can't Bear the Weight of Genius" that plays himself.
In "Can't Bear the Weight of Genius", Cage even tortured himself to "why do you want to make a bad movie". His plans are even in line for 2022, and next year, his National Treasure 3 is ready to go. This time, big-budget movies are finally coming to the door.
Now Cage not only has a more upward career, but also a more complete love, on the 16th of last month, Cage and his 26-year-old girlfriend Shibata Pear held a wedding. Home and Wanshixing, Cage, who reorganized the family, believes that it will inevitably usher in the second spring of his acting career.
Former NBA championship coach Tom Janovic once said, "Never underestimate a champion's heart." ”
For Nicolas Cage, I would also like to say that never underestimate the heart of a movie emperor.
You, after all, are our Nicholas Cage
Resources:
NiColas Cage:'if don't have a job to do, I can be very self-destructive “ Hadley Freeman
Design/Vision: SaiBO XiaOsI Men
artisan!