The Cotton Club (1984)

So that is the trailer from The Cotton Club, which is not a brand of bargain underwear to be found at your local Wal-Mart but rather a 1984 tap-dancing gangster saga directed by Francis Ford Copolla and staring Richard Gere. This movie was pretty much exactly what you think it’d be if you were thinking this movie would be a mash-up between The Godfather and Step Up 3D. So what kind of convoluted bullshit would ensue from that? Well let me relay the entire plot to you now:

Richard Gere is Dixie Dwyer a trumpet cornet player at the local "negra" club. One day this ugly gangster motherfucker named Dutch and his dildo squad come into the club to smoke cigars and enjoy some "negra" music. Two guys dressed as cops enter the club. They're not actually cops but rather rival mob members attempting to kill Dutch by dropping a Wile E. Coyote-sized bundle of dynamite under his table. Richard Gere saves Dutch by acting all charming and Richard Gere-ish and stuff and so Dutch totally gets a gayboner for him and decides he wants Gere on the payroll. Problem is, Dutch is a big asshole who stabs people at fancy dinner parties for no reason and Richard Gere doesn’t really like him too much so he starts fucking Dutch’s mistress who is played by a young, hot Diane Lane with a stupid flapper hat on her head in every scene.

"You mean this isn't the set of Tron?"

So while that is going on, there’s these two tap dancing brother who get a job doing some soft-shoe at The Cotton Club, which is the name of a jazz club in Harlem. One of the brothers is named Sandman and he's a much better tap dancer than the other brother so he gets to bang this half-white chick who sings at the club. Apparently, a black guy giving the ol' banana split to a half-white lady was taboo back in the late 20’s when this movie takes place. If you take inflation into account, that’d be like seeing a relationship between a blind Japanese dwarf and an obese Midwestern grandmother in a movie today. Point is...well I don’t suppose I have a point. I guess I just wanted to give you the mental image of a Japanese dwarf elbow deep in Paula Deen’s cooter. Enjoy that.

So by now you’re probably asking “Hey, I just read, like, 4 paragraphs of this stupid Nicolas Uncaged post. Where does Nicolas Cage come into play in all this?” Funny you should ask because he has a supporting role as Richard Gere’s little brother, Vincent. Cage starts out living in his brother’s shadow. Not his actually shadow, but the shadow of his trumpet cornet playing. So Cage does what any logical person would do and he starts working for Dutch as his hired muscle. I know every time I feel inferior in my life, I think, "Man, I wish I knew a guy named Dutch so I could work as his hired muscle." Eventually, Cage grows weary of doing all the dirty work for the mob for shit pay and he confronts Dutch all like “Yo, I’m fuckin’ Nicolas Cage over here! I should totally be the Godfather or whatever movie this is.” Naturally Dutch is all “Go eat a dick, Cage. I’m gonna have my consigliere fucking kill that little doofus character you hang out with because he's only had, like, 3 lines in this whole movie. In fact, here's how much your little sidekick sucks: one day someone will write a blog post about this movie and no one will mention him until he gets killed. And do you know why? Because fuck you. That's why.” So that’s exactly what happens. Then Cage is all “Freeeeeedom!!!!!” (or was that Braveheart?) and he orchestrates a drive-by shooting on Dutch’s crew which ends up killing around 4 innocent kids in the process. Gere meets up with Cage and is like “WTF, bro. You killed kids!” Cage is all, “I’m the mob boss now!” Gere is like “Sigh” except he just sighs and doesn't say "sigh". And then Nic Cage is whacked by Dutch in the next scene. This momentous occasion marks Cage’s first on-screen death, unless you count the horrible fiery death he endures as Brad’s Bud in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Of course, you probably don't know about that scene because ended up on the cutting room floor. Thanks a lot, Obama.

 

 Seriously guys, who farted?

So back in The Cotton Club there’s this little guy played by the dude who played Eddie in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? He runs The Cotton Club and is also a talent agent and he is also in an implied gay relationship with the dude who played the judge in My Cousin Vinny. Okay, maybe their relationship wasn't homosexual in nature, but by this point in the film, I was getting kinda bored and was trying to spice it up for myself. Anyway, Eddie from Roger Rabbit thinks Richard Gere is hot and decides to hook him up with a screen test to be in the movies. Gere does the screen test and the movie studio is all like, “Damn, this Richard Gere guy is fuckin’ sexy as hell. And he plays the trumpet cornet like a mofo! But his acting sucks balls. Fuck it – let’s put him in a movie anyway because it’s the early 30’s and most actors of this era are terrible.” So Gere leaves Harlem to star in a movie called The Mob Boss and he comes back every once in a while to bang Diane Lane and watch some tap-dancing at The Cotton Club while Eddie and the judge from My Cousin Vinny take turns tea-bagging each other in the back office.

Eventually Dutch finds out Gere and Diane Lane are slapping the ham together and he’s reasonably pissed off. He whips out his gun right in the middle of the club to shoot Gere, but the tap-dancing half-white-lady-screwing Sandman guy sees this and in mid-dance does this twisty ninja-style spinkick and kicks the gun right out the window. Now this is the only point in this 2 hour 15 minute movie where the tap-dancing storyline and the gangster storyline cross over so I assume that that one ninja kick was the apex of the film.

Then there’s some more singing:

And then I don’t really remember what happens next except that Dutch eventually gets killed by someone and Gere and Lane end up together. Then there’s more singing and tap-dancing:

So here's my verdict: This movie was a sloppy fucking mess. Almost as sloppy as this post about it. There was not nearly enough Cage for my money. And I barely even paid any money to see it...so...like...I want a refund, or whatever. Richard Gere wrote and performed all his own cornet solos which is pretty impressive to nerds on trumpet playing internet message boards, but it’s not nearly enough to save this sprawling urban epic from running complete off the rails within the first 20 minutes.

This whole post and I forgot to make a joke about Richard Gere putting a gerbil in his ass. Regrets....

2 Cageheads out of 5

Racing with the Moon (1984)

So that was the trailer for Racing with the Moon in all of it's monophonic, low-resolution glory.

Oddly enough, with a title like Racing with the Moon you think there would've been a lot more racing and/or moons in this film, but this was not so. There's maybe two or three races the whole movie. And only, like, one moon. Actually, I don't think there was even a moon in it at all. Maybe in the background or something, but no one ever talked about it. At the very least they could've interjected some brief moon-related dialogue. Something along these lines:

Sean Penn: Hey, Nic Cage, check out the moon tonight. Have you ever seen anything so...moon-like?
Nic Cage: Oh yeah, there it is. In the sky. Like always.
Sean Penn: Hey man, do you want to race it?
Nic Cage: What is that supposed to mean?
Sean Penn: I mean, like, let’s get in a car and start driving really fast and we’ll see who wins – the moon or us.
Nic Cage: What do you mean by 'race' though?
Sean Penn: Shit, man. I don't know. I just thought I'd be fun to win a medal or something.
Nic Cage: Right, but, like, the moon is about 480,000 miles away and is traveling around the Earth at 2,288 mph. I drive an ’36 Pontiac and my curfew is at 11. Even if we were to 'race' it, I'm pretty sure we'd lose.
Sean Penn: Hey, how do you know so much about the moon anyway, Nicolas Cage?
Nic Cage: Why do you keep calling me that? Who’s Nicolas Cage? That person doesn’t exist in the reality of this film, and even if he were to exist, the year right now is 1943 and he hasn’t been born yet.
Sean Penn: Oh right.
Nic Cage: Anyway, let’s go hustle some pool or something.
Sean Penn: Yeah, fuck the moon.
Nic Cage [laughing and flipping off the sky]: Yeah, fuck you moon. Go eat a dick.  

This movie stars Sean Penn as Hopper, Nicolas Cage as Nicky and Elizabeth McGovern as the bonerific Caddie Winger. The story is about Hopper and Nicky goofing off and getting laid in the weeks before they ship off to WWII and Sean Penn's character falls in love with Caddie, or something like that. There's probably some subtext and shit in there too. I don't know. Look, if you want a better synopsis than the one I just gave you, go watch the trailer I posted above or check out the Wikipedia page or whatever. I'm not going to spend 20 minutes here rehashing the plot of this dumb movie to you. I've got a lot of shit to do today. Like laundry. And napping.

This movie was rated PG by the MPAA because it features such family-friendly fare as prostitution, larceny, alcohol and tobacco abuse, sex, nudity, gambling, and abortion.  Yes, you read that right - there is an abortion subplot in this movie. For some reason it seems that whenever you stick Nicolas Cage and Sean Penn in a movie together, someone is getting an abortion. This is probably because Nic Cage is so crazy awesome that he causes every women he meets to become spontaneously pregnant with a Christ child:

I think I felt the tingle of new life in my balls.

I wonder why things like prostitutes, bare tits and alcohol abuse were acceptable under the PG umbrella in 1984, yet PG movies today are all Shrek 2 and shit. Were kids more mature in 1984? Were we, as a society, more enlightened? I'm arguably a product of that time. And I do love tits and cigarettes. And gambling. And abortion. Okay, maybe I don't love abortion, but I do love contortion and extortion and they both rhyme with abortion so that's pretty close. Does this mean all my problems and  perversions are a product of once seeing a nipple in a PG movie when I was a child? Can I blame every single one of my failures and shortcomings on this motherfucking Racing with the Moon movie???

The answer to that is, of course, no. But not because I'm not totally influenced by the movies I've seen as a kid (which probably explains why I only respond when people call me The Keymaster.) I can't blame Racing with the Moon for influencing me because I had never seen it before. Yes, this movie managed to slip completely beneath my radar until I began this whole Nicolas Uncaged project. It's weird because I tend to consider myself a hip and cultured sort of dude. Like, you know that thing that happens when you're talking to someone 15+ years older than you and they make some joke or pop culture reference about some no-longer-relevant thing that happened in the world from when they were younger and then they turn to you and say something like "but you probably don't know what that is" like you're some kind of stupid-ass goldfish who can only remember things that happened in the past 3 minutes. Well I USUALLY KNOW WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT.

Look, I'm not bragging here. I just like to thing of myself as the kind of guy who know things about stuff and shit.

But then a movie like Racing with the Moon comes along and plops a fat steamy turd right on my carrot cake. It reminds me that I don't know everything. That nobody knows everything. And it makes me wonder how many other movies are out there that I may have missed. How many movies out there YOU may have missed. Think about it, there may be movies that literally everybody may have missed. I imagine there's a whole secret cinematic library somewhere that NO ONE in the world has ever heard of. Extrapolating further, if you've never heard of it, it means that these unseen movies could be about ANYTHING. Or EVERYTHING. Because how would you know? You haven't seen it. And extrapolating on that even further, that means this secret library in which the are shelves filled with movies that are based off of every idea that everyone may or may not have have NEVER made, every thought you've ever thought and every thought you haven't is and isn't recorded on some celluloid somewhere. Or nowhere. Entertaining someone. Or no one. If you consider that as the very logical possibility that it is, this may be why Racing with the Moon managed to elude me for 29 years. It's not because I'm out-of-touch. I'm just living out the plot to the movie where I didn't seen Racing with the Moon for 29 years.



This has all been scripted.

2 Cageheads out of 5.

Rumble Fish (1983)

I was feeling a tad dubious heading into this movie. I mean, what kind of title is Rumble Fish anyway? What am I about to watch here, a mash-up between Rocky and Jaws or something? Man vs. Beast! The Rumble in the Puddle! Adrian! You're gonna need a bigger boat! etc.etc.

Actually, a mash-up between Rocky and Jaws would make a pretty sweet movie, wouldn't it? In fact, it's such a sweet idea for a movie that I’m copyrighting it right now. That means if it ever gets made at some point and you don't see my name attached as the executive producer or the star or whatever, you’ll know some motherfucker out there owes me a million dollars. I’m sorry, what’s that? You're saying I don’t own the rights to either the Rocky or the Jaws franchises so my claiming a copyright on it is both ridiculous and invalid? Well, smart guy, in my version Rocky Balboa is an actual rock and Jaws is just the jaw bone of a shark whale and they don’t actually fight but rather sit there on the bottom of the ocean floor for however many years it takes for the real Rocky and Jaws franchises to enter the public domain. And then I’ll copyright it.

Ha ha ha! Who’s ridiculous and invalid now, ya jerks?

So let's talk about the movie for a bit, shall we?

This was a decent film. Certainly it's not Francis Ford Coppola’s best (a lot of you will probably say The Godfather is his best work, but I’m going with Apocalypse Now) and it certainly isn’t Matt Dillon’s best (a lot of you will probably say Dillon reached the absolute pinnacle of art when he made You, Me and Dupree, but I’d say that honor goes to the threeway sex scene from Wild Things. In fact, that threeway might be the greatest thing ever committed to film in the history of mankind - and I'm including all the movies they made back in the Jesus days in that too (wait, did they even have movies back in the Jesus days or do they just make movies about the Jesus days? (They had plays in Jesus times though, right? They never talk about Jesus taking in a good play in the Bible (I wonder what type of movies or plays Jesus would watch? (#WWJW? (Let's get that shit trending on Twitter!))))) (Man, that was a lot of parentheses I just used.) (Parentheses is a weird word to spell.) (Pare-en-thas-sees.) (I always forget if the period goes inside or outside the parentheses. I guess I'll do it on both sides from now on, just to be safe.).

Here are three not-very-good reasons why you should watch Rumble Fish:

         1. The main character is named Rusty James (Matt Dillon) and for some strange reason, he is only ever referred to as that. The whole time I was wondering if his first name was Rusty and his last name was James, or if Rusty was more of a qualifier, like his name is James and he's covered in rust. And it's weird that his friends or family don't call him anything except Rusty James. You think at some point they’d feel familiar enough to abbreviate it to something a little shorter like Russ or RJ or James or Jim or Jimbo or Rusty Jimbo or R. James or Ray Jay or Jamie or Russet or Brussels Sprouts or Jim Jack or Rust Jack or Justy Ram or Rusty Jam.

     2. Tom Waits has a cameo as the dude who works behind the counter at the diner and he says things like this:

     3. About 35 minutes into the film is Nicolas Cage’s nude debut during a sloppy, drunken teenage orgy in a broken-in house. No joke. That happens. Though let's be honest, it really would've been better if it included Neve Campbell and Denise Richards. He shoulda talked to Matt Dillon about that.

And here is one very good reason NOT to watch this movie:

1. Aside from that one ass shot, Mr. Cage is really only a few scenes in the beginning and end of this film. That's not nearly enough! Especially when discussed through the filter of this blog. We should boycott this movie until they film some new scenes with Nic Cage and recut the whole thing. Our rallying cry could be this: "What do we want?" "MORE NIC CAGE!" "When do we want it?" "30 YEARS AGO!"

The screenplay for Rumble Fish was written by Coppola and S.E. Hinton, who also wrote the book on which the movie was based. You may know S.E. Hinton from your 9th grade English class as the author of The Outsiders.

I remember back in high school my friend Shawn and I both tried out out to be in the The Outsiders. We had to take turns doing a monologue from the script in front of the theater teacher. Then I think we had to sing a song. Or maybe I’m remembering it wrong. I mean, if it’s a musical about street gangs in the 50’s, I’m probably thinking of West Side Story. Right? Or is there two classic gang-related musicals? I guess that would be a weirdly specific genre of theater, wouldn't it? Musical dramas about 50’s gangs based off of books (I’m pretty sure West Side Story was based off of the Twilight series. You guys might need to fact check me on that.).

Anyway, Shawn and I tried out for this play and he ended up landing the lead as Ponyboy and I ended up not even getting offered a role. Not even as an extra. The theater teacher was all like “You can be stage crew. We need good people on stage crew.” And I was all like “You can stage these nuts in your mouth, teach. I’m gonna go smoke cigarettes behind the gym.” And then I did.

That was over 15 years ago and still there are some nights when I can't fall asleep and I find myself wondering what if... What would've happened if I had gotten cast in that play. How might things've turned out? I didn't need to be the lead. I know from watching Nicolas Cage's career thus far that amazing talent sometimes can begin in the most unassuming of places. I would've been happy as Sodapop or Dallas or Johnny. Any side character, really. Just put me in the play, goddamn it! Maybe getting a taste of that kind of validation up there on the stage - the applause, the lights, the glamor of it all - maybe it would’ve fostered and flamed something I hadn't known was in me. Maybe I would’ve turned to acting as my desired profession instead of this stupid writing bullshit I’m stuck doing instead. I would’ve moved to New York, of course, where I'd end up getting cast in an off-off-off Broadway production of some kind, more than likely an avant-garde art play where I’d be forced to kiss a guy or something like that in front of everyone in the sparsely filled theater. Eventually though, a casting director or a talent agent or some other big shot would happen upon my performance and me and him’ll get to talking after one of the shows. He'll say I've got "spunk" and that I'm "going places" and then, after doing some more gay stuff, this time with him (in a more private setting), he’ll make a few calls and get me cast in a series of commercials for men’s aftershave. After a year or two of part-time commercial work, I'll discover he's been skimming a few extra bucks off the top of my paychecks for himself this whole time. I'll feel betrayed. Hurt. But I'll persevere. Then, one day, I’d spot an ad in the Village Voice about a small, independent film that's looking to shoot sometime over the summer. I’d try out the following week. Week after that, I'd get a call back. Soon enough, I'd land the lead. The film itself will have a small theatrical run, but it will be lavished by critics who will call it things like "a powerhouse" and "bold". Then, come awards season, the film AND my performance in it are abuzz on the lips of the media and the Academy alike. Although the movie would ultimately lose the Oscar to something Nicolas Cage starred in (hey, let's give credit where credit is due) I’ll now be touted as Hollywood’s new “it” boy. Soon the roles come pouring in and I'll switch from small, indie fare to making more mainstream films. I get rich. I get famous. And eventually I get rich and famous enough and hold enough sway in the industry to produce my own films to star in. And my first major motion picture will be a prequel to Wild Things that I'll call Feral Stuff and then, THEN, I’ll FINALLY get to have a threeway sex scene with Neve Campbell and Denise Richards just like Rusty James got to. “This is awesome!” Jesus will say (#WWJW) as the steamy sex scene unfurls on the celluloid in front of him in his own personal movie theater in his kick-ass Heaven mansion. “It really is,” God will nod in agreement. And then, years later when I die and finally ascend into Heaven myself, absolutely nothing will change for me because I'll already be living in Heaven here on Earth. For me, there will be no death. There we only be happiness. Pure, unadulterated happiness from now until forever. And ever. And ever...

Don't box me in, Rumble Fish. All rivers lead to the ocean. I live my life in full color. And I've got to swim.

3 Cageheads out of 5.