I don’t think I ever saw Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston in 1992’s The Bodyguard, although I could be having selective memory about it. The year it was released, I was 18 years old and in the height of my grunge / alternative period, so even if I did watch this romantic drama about a…

When you wake up in the morning wondering things about Nicolas Cage, it’s probably about time to start questioning (at least some of) your life decisions. I started this WATC(H) series a little over two months ago now, and since I’m 20 movies in I’m reminded how quickly my experiments can become obsessions. With both…

With a Nicolas Cage movie, you never know exactly what you’re going to get. After the uneasiness I felt watching Amos and Andrew, I was really hoping for a rebound film. Specifically, I wanted to see something different from Cage that I hadn’t seen before.  Looking back at the last five movies, we’ve seen Nicolas…

When Samuel L. Jackson’s agent sent him the script to 1993’s Amos & Andrew his first reaction was “nope” based on the racially ignominious title alone (e.g. see Amos ‘n’ Andy). His agent said, “read the script” and Jackson did and was intrigued by the role, “Where are we going with this?” he wondered. Jackson’s…

I graduated from high school in 1992, the same year that Honeymoon in Vegas came out in theaters. It was the only Nicolas Cage movie released that year (following the sole release of of Zandalee in all of 1991.) These were especially “slim times” for the prolific output of Cage, as he tends to make…

A young Steve Buscemi plays an unnamed convict, aka the OPP, Orleans Parish Prison man, in the 1991 straight-to-video release, Zandalee. In the opening scene of the film, OPP is seen riding on the back of a garbage truck, somewhere in the French quarter of New Orleans. As Zandalee (played by Erika Anderson) stares on…

It’s been a number of years since I watched this blockbuster movie, Top Gun (starring Tom Cruise), about a crack team of F-14 US fighter pilots “protecting democracy” from her enemies via air-to-air combat. So some of the details may have gotten a little fuzzy in my aged mind. For example, did you know that…

In keeping with the David Lynch / Nicolas Cage team-up theme from Wild at Heart, reviewed yesterday, I watched the short home video release of Industrial Symphony Number 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted. The avant-garde concert / play, which was performed twice at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City in 1989,…

Art is conditional. As much as I’d like to believe that art is unconditional, and that the best art (given an open and fair consideration) can ascend beyond time and context into the universal, its tether remains firmly subjective, grounded in individual taste, aesthetics, and consciousness. If people were unchanged by internal or external factors,…

Prologue Ok, so I narrowly avoided making the exact same mistake I made early on in this WATC(H) journey. When it came time to view this next Cage movie, Giuliano Montaldo’s production of Time to Kill (1989), I instead almost watched A Time to Kill (1996) starring Matthew McConaughey, Samuel L. Jackson, and Sandra Bullock.…