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.…

I didn’t plan on watching Never on Tuesday because the movie never made it to DVD, and because Nicolas Cage goes uncredited in it as the “Man in the Red Sportscar”; but I found the entire film on Youtube here so decided to at least watch the Cage-relevant scenes (really just one scene). Summary: The…

Spoiler alert! If you haven’t seen Vampire’s Kiss and you think you might (which I recommend) you may not want to read this post until you’ve watched the film. I’m going to speak freely about the plot and the ending so read on at your own risk. Coming into my WATC(H) viewing of Vampire’s Kiss…

When the moon hits your eyeLike a big pizza pie, that’s amoreWhen the world seems to shineLike you’ve had too much wine, that’s amore –Dean Martin “That’s Amore” I vaguely remember first watching Moonstruck in the early 90s. At the time, I was working my first job at a mom-and-pop local video rental place called…

I recently read a book called Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It. The book was published recently, so it focuses attention on the fact that men have left the workforce in droves (since the pandemic), are much less likely to get married,…

In 1986, Nicolas Cage would turn 22 years old and release two movies. The first movie, The Boy in Blue, details the story of Ned Hanlan, a late nineteenth century Canadien sculler (= rower) and world champion. Unfortunately for the WATC(H) experiment, this movie is currently out-of-print, not streaming online, and except for a few…

[editor’s note: re-dated this blog for chronological consistency, but it was first published on 3/25/23] Prologue It seems that Scarecrow Video (that I introduced in this post) has come through for me once again. How? By providing me a place to rent this hard-to-find Canadian film, starring–you guessed it–Nicolas Cage, called The Boy in Blue…

At the end of Racing With the Moon, Nicolas Cage and his best friend Hop jump onto the back of a speeding train as they set off to join the war effort. In the opening scene of Birdy (1984), a disfigured and bandaged Nicolas Cage (playing the character Al Columbato) is returning from the war…

Where I live it’s not uncommon to hear the blast of a train’s horn in the distance, the metallic squeal of steel wheels gliding over steel rails, the clickety-clack of each colored rusty car passing over wooden railroad ties. The times I’ve been close enough to watch or count these trains filing past me beside…