My senior year of high school, I drove a big yellow beast of a car called the Ear Xtasy. It was named that because of a bumper sticker I put on the back of the car to make it look a little less like a grandma car (1980 white-topped Buick Century) and a little more…

This seems like the perfect music video for the next film on the WATC(H): Bangkok Dangerous (2008) Go ahead, treat yourself…I’ll wait. Did you catch any of those lyrics? One night in Bangkok and the world’s your oyster The bars are temples, but the pearls ain’t free You’ll find a god in every golden cloister…

If you’re thinking (like me) oh good, we’re halfway there, you’d be dead wrong. Even though we’ve hit this monumental number 50 in the WATC(H), we are still not quite halfway home yet. And yet another Cage movie, Dream Scenario, came out this month.  But I don’t want to take away from my accomplishment.  Fifty…

Maybe my expectations were a bit too high. With Ghost Rider, I kinda knew what I was getting into, but I thought Next (2007) starring Nicolas “the Mage” Cage would be right up my alley. Here was an entertaining Cage film I hadn’t seen yet that had a lot of promise.  Mid-aughts sci-fi, time scrying,…

This Quentin Tarantino / Richard Rodriguez double feature film (Grindhouse) homage to exploitation films of the 60s and 70s barely counts as a Nicolas Cage film. But it was on the WATC(H) list so I had to watch it. Nicolas Cage only appears on screen, as Fu Manchu, for about 12 seconds in the R-rated…

Turns out, our worst fears about the devil and hell were correct. The road to hell is paved with middle managers.  And it seems Lucifer himself is the one who is pushing the corporate politics and turning the wheels on the Peter Principle to its most eeevillll and absurd conclusions. Institutionalized incompetence–the 10th circle of…

I came to a harsh reality recently. I’ve only watched 46 Nicolas Cage movies thus far (in about 9 months time) and I haven’t even made it halfway through my WATC(H) journey yet. I know that sounds impressive, but it’s also been challenging.  To be honest, I’m not even really close to halfway (that would…

Where were you on 9/11?  This is a question most Americans (of a certain age) can answer definitively. I remember I was heading into the office where I worked, at a health insurance company, listening to the radio about a plane that had crashed into a building in New York City.  The World Trade Center.…

What Tom Hanks wants, Tom Hanks gets. That’s the lesson I learned watching the animated film, The Ant Bully (2006). The story goes that Tom Hanks used to read a children’s story called The Ant Bully to his kids every night, and decided it would make a great full length animated feature. So he reached…

In Adaptation. (you’ll remember) Nicolas Cage plays Charlie Kaufman, a neurotic screenwriter who is experiencing the crises that every writer must face at some point in their creative journey: writer’s block. In it we get to hear directly from Kaufman’s angsty, slightly neurotic mind as he narrates stream-of-conscious thoughts on how he hopes to turn…