Tom Gormican's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
It’s a comedy.
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Celebrate last week’s winner.
Matthew B. & Jonathan P. & Jack S. & Chris H. won movies with the best drug trip scenes with their submission, The Big Lebowski, and therefore earned one ticket in the lottery for our annual mystery prize.
Check out the Robert DeNiro movies and don’t forget to vote on your favorite entries.
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* The Footnote Chronicles: Day 103. The footnotes * and ⁹ are gathering supporters.
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What it is.
A spoiler-free description of the movie.
Movie star Nicolas Cage is hired to attend a billionaire fan’s birthday party.
If you like these things, then you’ll like the film.
→ Silly Nicolas Cage. He’s given us Wild at Heart and Con Air and Pig and everything in between, and here he gets a chance to reminisce and poke fun at his distinct acting style, which has long drawn admiration and memes in equal parts.
→ LSD. It doesn’t get any better than watching Nicolas Cage and Pedro Pascal experience LSD-induced paranoia, and I refuse to hear arguments to the contrary.
→ Insufferable heroes. Nicolas Cage plays the most arrogant, self-centered, and morally-confused version of himself, and worse yet he’s tasked with doing something absolutely selfless and heroic.
At the time of this publication, Nicolas Cage is credited on IMDb as an actor for one hundred and twenty-seven distinct roles. Over his nearly 45 years appearing in film, Cage has managed to reinvent himself over and over again. He’s given us outrageous and understated and just about everything in between, and perhaps that’s been the key to his staying power. Though, one can argue that his most important and useful and striking skill as an actor is his outright refusal to take himself too seriously. This is what makes Tom Gormican's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent work so beautifully, and why it’ll make you laugh your little tushy off. This, and a doe-eyed Pedro Pascal fawning over Cage’s brilliance with an energy that is probably best described as prepubescent or boyish, the way a little kid might present if they met the real Spider Man for the first time. Bearing witness to these two all but falling in love and tripping on LSD and failing so miserably but doing it together is the stuff of life for your author, and for this reason, I feel compelled to recommend this film to you.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a kind of silly victory lap for Cage, who spent such an inordinate amount of time on the silver screen over the years and didn’t overstay his welcome with audiences. And I submit that his performance in this film is exactly the kind of performance that’s made him so shelf stable in the first place.
A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat.”
→ Nicolas Cage turned down the role two or three times before accepting it. “I didn’t want to play myself in a movie, I wanted them to look for someone else to portray me. But [the director] Tom was very hell-bent on making sure I played the part, and he wrote me a very thoughtful letter…it became clear to me when I read the letter that he wasn’t really trying to mock the Nicolas Cage character, but kind of trying to look at this evolution of the character in terms of family.”
→ It was Cage’s idea to make out with himself in the film. He said it reflected the film’s ethos. “I’m actually making a movie about two versions of myself…it’s like making out with yourself in the weirdest way. So we might as well do that symbolically and have them kiss each other.”
Thoughts completely unrelated to this week’s film.
BOTTLE EPISODE: TIME TRAVEL
Things expectedly got confusing when time travel was commoditized, because nothing was ever the same from one moment to the next.
If someone went backwards to save their husband from dying in a horrific car accident, it would inadvertently cause someone else’s kid to die instead. And, obviously, that person would go back to save their kid, which in turn would provoke some other nasty situation, and the cycle never really ended. And so with the birth of time travel came the death of consistency, and now life has more-or-less become a box of popcorn kernels, waiting to explode and leap any which way.
This would be the worst of it, if not for the fact that every Traveler — except those on the PRO MAX PLUS plan — must watch a minute of advertisements for gambling and SaaS products and anything else that can be sold, for every minute they wish to travel backwards or forwards.
See you next week!
Blake
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