The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent - Review Thread
May 3, 2022 0:42:22 GMT -5
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Post by Dracula on May 3, 2022 0:42:22 GMT -5
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent(4/28/2022)
There’s Nicholas Cage the actor and then there’s Nicholas Cage the meme, and I’m kind of sick of the latter. Look Cage has kind of done a lot of the damage to his own image by making all these bad direct-to-VOD movies and just kind of seeming like a weird guy both on and off screen but… I’m kind of sick of hearing about it. It’s almost like the whole “is Die Hard a Christmas movie” debates, kind of cute at first but if you’re still bringing it up now as if it’s some kind of revelation it kind of makes you look like you’re kind of basic. And it was with that in mind that I wasn’t too excited about this movie, which frankly looked like a product of that meme interpretation of Cage’s acting, but the reviews have mostly been positive so I decided to check it out. The film has Nicholas Cage playing a fictionalized version of himself in which he’s going through career frustrations and is estranged from his (fictional) teenage daughter and her (fictional) mother. He then takes an easy paycheck to attend the birthday party of a millionaire Spanish superfan of his (played by Pedro Pascal), but shortly after arriving he learns that this superfan is an organized crime figure involved with a recent kidnapping and Cage is recruited by the CIA to help them investigate them.
What counts as “creative” in cinema is in many ways a matter of perspective. For example, compared to a lot of what Hollywood puts out this could be considered “creative” and I’m sure there are a lot of audiences that would consider this whole concept “different.” But to anyone who’s seen the right films it’s readily apparent that this is a highly derivative mashup of three different Charlie Kaufman movies. The “cult celebrity plays themselves” element comes from Being John Malkovich, the “movie star working with the CIA” element comes from Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, but most of all the film starts drawing from Adaptation (which Cage starred in) as Cage and the superfan start collaborating on a screenplay, which starts to reveal itself as basically being the movie we’re watching which sort of starts to sell out as it proceeds. So yeah, this isn’t as clever as it thinks it is, but to be fair it’s not every day that Hollywood opts to ripoff Kaufman instead of Indiana Jones or Die Hard or something so maybe it’s best to view the glass as half full here. And there is definite fun to be had with The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, the film is chock full of somewhat entertaining references to Cage’s career and he and Pascal do have some pretty good chemistry and you do believe their bromance in the movie. I’m not sure the film’s ending works and I’m not sure that its “meta” excuse for going in that direction really justifies it, but again, in this film landscape maybe don’t let perfect totally be the enemy of the good and on balance I would say this is good.
*** out of Five
There’s Nicholas Cage the actor and then there’s Nicholas Cage the meme, and I’m kind of sick of the latter. Look Cage has kind of done a lot of the damage to his own image by making all these bad direct-to-VOD movies and just kind of seeming like a weird guy both on and off screen but… I’m kind of sick of hearing about it. It’s almost like the whole “is Die Hard a Christmas movie” debates, kind of cute at first but if you’re still bringing it up now as if it’s some kind of revelation it kind of makes you look like you’re kind of basic. And it was with that in mind that I wasn’t too excited about this movie, which frankly looked like a product of that meme interpretation of Cage’s acting, but the reviews have mostly been positive so I decided to check it out. The film has Nicholas Cage playing a fictionalized version of himself in which he’s going through career frustrations and is estranged from his (fictional) teenage daughter and her (fictional) mother. He then takes an easy paycheck to attend the birthday party of a millionaire Spanish superfan of his (played by Pedro Pascal), but shortly after arriving he learns that this superfan is an organized crime figure involved with a recent kidnapping and Cage is recruited by the CIA to help them investigate them.
What counts as “creative” in cinema is in many ways a matter of perspective. For example, compared to a lot of what Hollywood puts out this could be considered “creative” and I’m sure there are a lot of audiences that would consider this whole concept “different.” But to anyone who’s seen the right films it’s readily apparent that this is a highly derivative mashup of three different Charlie Kaufman movies. The “cult celebrity plays themselves” element comes from Being John Malkovich, the “movie star working with the CIA” element comes from Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, but most of all the film starts drawing from Adaptation (which Cage starred in) as Cage and the superfan start collaborating on a screenplay, which starts to reveal itself as basically being the movie we’re watching which sort of starts to sell out as it proceeds. So yeah, this isn’t as clever as it thinks it is, but to be fair it’s not every day that Hollywood opts to ripoff Kaufman instead of Indiana Jones or Die Hard or something so maybe it’s best to view the glass as half full here. And there is definite fun to be had with The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, the film is chock full of somewhat entertaining references to Cage’s career and he and Pascal do have some pretty good chemistry and you do believe their bromance in the movie. I’m not sure the film’s ending works and I’m not sure that its “meta” excuse for going in that direction really justifies it, but again, in this film landscape maybe don’t let perfect totally be the enemy of the good and on balance I would say this is good.
*** out of Five
