Enter the Cage...with Nicolas Cage!

In a recent interview, Nicolas Cage spoke these words: "If I can give the director two good scenes in a movie, I feel like I've done my job."

Two good scenes...in an hour-and-a-half movie where there are several dozen scenes per movie...

And this is why Nicolas Cage is the single greatest actor known to Man! His two good scenes per movie put most actors' entire filmographies to shame. This is a man who has an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas and also starred in one of the worst pieces of shit ever to splatter across the screen in The Wicker Man. Talk about versatility! He's been in artsy movies, he had a run of cheesy action flicks in the 90s, then he started starring in five movies a year so he could pay off his tremendous debts from owning several dinosaur skulls. Is there a more interesting actor on the face of the planet? He even has a face named after him. When you flair your nostrils, throw your eyes open wide, and mentally make your forehead expand in size, that's "Nic Cage Face."

For these reasons and countless others, I've decided to watch every Nicolas Cage movie ever made starting with Valley Girl (He was credited as Nicolas Coppola in Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and ending with National Treasure 5: The Quest for Herbert Hoover's Leather Chaps. It will basically be the equivalent of traveling across the Universe on the back of a comet that eventually crosses the barrier into Heaven where you witness God's true form that will result in your face melting off like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark...claymation style!

But what a ride it shall be...

THERE IS NO ESCAPE FROM THE CAGE!

Ghostbusters 2 (1989)

Nothing makes you feel older than when your childhood heroes start dying...

When I was young, I was obsessed with The Ghostbusters. I watched the cartoon several times a day. I was too young to see the original movie in theaters (I was barely two), but when the sequel came out, you would have had to cross the streams to keep my ass from seeing it. My parents took us to the drive-in (Remember those?) and I sat in the back of our station wagon having a 7-year-old orgasm (which is just when you get really, really excited without having to change clothes afterward).

Now Egon is dead and he's taken a little piece of my childhood with him...

Generally, the sequel to the legendary original is bashed fairly handily on most movie nerd message boards. The main complaints are that the movie was just a carbon copy of the original and the sequel was dumbed down to appeal to kids who were obsessed with the extremely well done animated cartoon, The Real Ghostbusters (Why would the animated series be the "real" version? Is it supposed to be ironic? 'Cause I'm pretty sure I didn't know what irony was when I was seven).

The rabid movie nerds are right on both accounts. The movie is basically a lamer version of the original. They even do the Ghostbusters the disservice of running them out of business and making everyone in New York forget that a giant sailor made of marshmallows invaded New York and the Ghostbusters saved them. Who would forget that? Or sue them for that matter? So then they have to prove themselves all over again and there's an evil force (a transvestite painting) possessing people and making them do his bidding and then a giant thing walks through the city (this time the Statue of Liberty...which makes no sense) and the Ghostbusters save the day and Peter and Dana (There is no Dana! Only Zuul!) get together...again. Pink slime doesn't make it different.

The thing that really doomed this sequel was the cartoon being so damn good! Watch it today...as an adult. It's still amazingly good! So they did what any money-hungry whores would do: They dumbed it down for the kids. There's no edge to the sequel. No one smokes anymore. None of the ghosts are creepy or scary. Ray never gets a BJ from a ghost whore (Still don't know why that was even in the original). It's tame, it's safe, it's a commercial for some new action figures. Vigo is defeated by singing...by SINGING!

Still, with all that being said, it's still the fucking Ghostbusters and if it's on TV (like it is every damn weekend on VH1), I will watch it and laugh at Janocz's ridiculous accent and Peter's quips and the dancing toaster and Egon's deadpan delivery. It still reminds me of being a kid when everything was awesome and nothing hurt. And, after all, isn't that what movies are supposed to do anyway? Transport us to a place where things are better?

Still, if they try to make a third one or a reboot, I will flip shit!

Why It's Not Really As Awesome As It Should Have Been:

Seriously, that whole Statue of Liberty part made ZERO sense! The positively charged slime made the toaster jump around, not walk like a human, so wouldn't the statue have just vibrated down the street, crushing everything in its path? And how could you control its movements with a Nintendo game controller? What was it hooked up to? And why did it BLINK! Dah! It's so stupid!

Best Quote (This one's for you, Harold):

Ray: You mean you never even had a Slinky?
Egon: We had PART of a Slinky...but I straightened it.

Say Anything (1989)

I wanted to watch a romantic movie for February, but I had no interest in menstruating so I didn't want it to be too girlie. The magical world of the 80s was the obvious destination...a place where anything is possible...a land where a woman can have sex with a duck or a robot and it's totally acceptable (Howard the Duck and Short Circuit respectively).

I had never seen Say Anything before. I was certainly aware of the legendary boombox scene and its iconic status, but we had never crossed paths...until now.

So here we have a story about an average dude named Lloyd (played by John Cusack when his "John Cuack" schtick was still fresh) who dreams of being a pioneer in the exciting world of kickboxing. But those plans are railroaded when the hottest valedictorian in the history of education (Seriously? Has Cameron Crowe ever met a smart chick?) bewitches him with her "stick-in-the-mud" mentality and her creepy loyalty to Frasier's father (who is also her father) in an attempt to blackmail Lloyd for a nursing home Ponzi scheme!

Or maybe that's not what happened at all...

Ok, I admit, I didn't really...get it. Whatever is supposed to make this movie so iconic, I just didn't see it. I get that it avoided most of the clichés of the genre driven into the ground earlier in the decade by John Hughes, but I didn't find Crowe's movie any less unrealistic. I've still never been to "that movie party" where every teenager in the entire town converges on a single home and no one seems to notice or care. We've still got the "dark night of the soul" moment where the couple breaks up momentarily...which occurs in this movie FOR NO REASON! Then Diane returns to Lloyd only after learning of her father's thievery when she needs someone. Not very romantic.

And can we talk about the whole "Dad's stealing from the nursing home residents" B-storyline? What the hell was that? It seemed so random. And who the hell tells their dad that they just got banged in the back of a Malibu by some trench coat-wearing loser? WEIRD!

And while we're talking about it, have any of these filmmakers ever actually tried to have sex in the backseat of a car? It's the worst! It's about 0% romantic so they need to stop presenting it like it's anything but the worst thing two naked people could possibly do. It's the equivalent of sitting in that seat on the school bus where the tire is...except you're naked and trying to hump something.

And I have to admit, after the iconic boombox scene came and went, I literally said, "That's it?" I was expecting so much more. Diane couldn't even drag her ass out of bed to check the whole thing out. She never even saw it! Get your ass out of bed, bitch! Someone is playing the shit out of Peter Gabriel!

What I did enjoy, however, was...the pen. The bitch breaks up with the dude and sends him off with...a pen. Man, that was awesome. I bought a shitload of pens just so I can go around pissing people off and then giving them a pen as a parting gift. Booya!

Why It's Not as Good as People Say it is:

Here's the bottom line: Some Kind of Wonderful is a better movie.

Best Quote:

Lloyd: Kickboxing. Sport of the future (He was right!).

Mac and Me = The Greatest Movie Ever Made

It's official.

Mac and Me is now the greatest movie ever made by Man.

At the beginning of February, Mac and Me became the most-viewed film on Captain 69's Retro Movie Review, clocking in at over 3100 views and finally surpassing long-time view leader, The Princess Bride. It seemed unlikely that a movie starring both Kevin Arnold from The Wonder Years and Andre the Giant would ever be surpassed, but their mighty reign at the top finally came to an end at the hands of a kid in a wheelchair and a shitty-looking puppet starring in what is essentially an hour-and-a-half commercial for McDonalds and Coke.

For those of you not familiar with Mac and Me, I can sum up the movie's greatness in two scenes.

The first is a scene where the writer, director, and everyone else involved thought it would be a good idea to have a kid in a wheelchair fall off a cliff and fall into a lake...and they were RIGHT! Check it out!

The other scene is the infamous dance scene that occurs in the middle of the movie where a random choreographed dance breaks out in the middle of a McDonalds. The best part is that only white people are allowed to dance inside. The blacks have to dance OUTSIDE the restaurant. Watch and try not to dance along!





In conclusion, Mac and Me > every other movie ever made.

Thank you.

The Sandlot (1993)

FOR-EV-ER! FOR-EV-ER! FOR-EV-ER!

So The Sandlot is just about the greatest childhood movie...EVER! This is the kind of movie Hollywood is incapable of making anymore. No, it's not a mega-blockbuster capable of making billions of dollars worldwide, but it's a perfect slice of the pure innocence of childhood where a young boy's entire existence exists on a baseball diamond.

Scottie Smalls is the new kid in town. His new dad is Dennis Leary, a baseball fanatic and all the kids in town are all-stars on the baseball diamond. Too bad Scottie has a plastic baseball mitt, a duck-bill baseball cap, and his mom (who is Marian Ravenwood from Indiana Jones) knows more about baseball than he does. That's when he meets Benny, who introduces him to...dum dum dum...THE SANDLOT!

This movie isn't really about baseball; it's about the utopia that is childhood in suburbia. In a lot of ways this movie reminds me a lot of The Wonder Years (my favorite show of all time) with the monologue and the 1960s and the 60s music. It's what being 12 is all about: hanging out with your friends, getting horny over girls even though you're not old enough to know what to do with them yet, getting into trouble, and chillin' with blind Darth Vader and his monster gorilla dog. Being a kid is awesome!

The movie doesn't have much of a plot until the last third of the film...and it doesn't matter. There are so many call-outs to things that I remember fondly: endless summer days where there was nothing better to do than hang out with your friends, campouts, spending hot days at the pool, throwing up at the carnival, beating down on douchebag kids who think they're hot shit, and trying to steal back stuff that ended up in neighbors' yards.

And everyone had friends like the Sandlot crew. There's the leader (Benny), the fat kid (Ham), the funny nerd (Squints), the brothers (Timmy and Tommy Timmons), and "the new kid" (Smalls). My favorite was easily Squints. That pimp move he pulled on Wendy Peppercorn at the pool...LEGENDARY! Of course, you gotta give it up to Benny and that pickle he ran on The Beast. RESPECT!

It's one of my favorite childhood movies...and I don't even like baseball! As someone I can't recall once said, "Baseball is what we were; football is what we are." This movie is about a more innocent time when all people had to worry about was nuclear warfare and complete annihilation. Ah, the innocence...

Why It's Awesome:

It's a harmless, fun, and poignant film that represents all the best parts of childhood. Oh, and it has NO SEQUELS. I repeat, NO SEQUELS!

Best Quote:

Ham: You're killing me, Smalls!

I'll Be Back...

For any regular visitors to The Captain's cinephile lounge, Captain 69 is downshifting in 2014. Instead of a plethora of reviews each month, I'll be reviewing a single movie. I have some other projects on the line for 2k14 that require my attention, and, to be honest, the number of "good movies" that are worth reviewing is dwindling now that I've been doing this for over four years.

I know it's a contentious time to leave, especially considering that within days, Mac and Me will overtake The Princess Bride as the most viewed post on this site...EVER! Both have topped over 3100 views and the glorified McDonald's commercial is within 25 views of the top spot. It's insane considering what a shit movie Mac is and how legendary Princess Bride is. Maybe I'll  have some sort of celebration when it finally happens. I'll commemorate the big event by eating a Big Mac and a Coke (while forcing all the blacks to stay outside the store...and dance!) and then I'll push a kid in a wheelchair off a cliff. So, all in all, a pretty nice day.

So, in the words of Arnold, GET TO DA CHOPPAAAAAAA! Oh, and I'll be back...

Fight Club (1999)

Every cinephile has a favorite movie. Fight Club is mine.

I read Chuck Palahnuk's novel after watching the movie, expecting the novel to blow the movie out of the water. You know what? It didn't. It's one of the few movies that completely dominates the book. That's something special right there.

The first rule of fight club is you DO NOT talk about Fight Club...

A lot of people (n00bs, mostly) believe Fight Club is an action movie; these people couldn't be further from the truth. Fight Club is a philosophical movie; it SAYS something. There aren't too many movies that say something meaningful. American Beauty says something, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind says something, but no movie better critiques the 20th Century than Fight Club.

A lot of people don't get Fight Club. The entire movie is a statement on the over-civilization of modern man. The basic instincts of the modern male are useless in our modern society where life is easy and survival all but guaranteed. Man no longer finds the need to challenge himself. Once upon a time there were tigers to eat us and rival clans to fight for land, food, and women. Those things defined us as males. Now we're defined by the tag on the clothes we wear, the kind of car we drive, or how large our flat-screen televisions are.

The things you own, end up owning you...

We've been transformed from warriors into consumers, buyers of things. Previous generations had wars to fight, depressions to overcome. What does this generation have to overcome? Finding the perfect bed skirting for our bedroom in our perfect, little townhome? Having a wife whose ass looks less fat than all our friends' wives? Our own mediocrity?

We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world...

That's why Fight Club is a great movie - my favorite. This is the opposite of The Avengers. This movie is not a t-shirt. This movie is not a lunchbox or an action figure or a spin-off television show. This movie is an idea, a philosophy, a reflection of our society at the end of the century. This movie explains why young men walk into movie theaters and elementary schools with guns and shoot up the place. When you create a hollow country with no soul based solely on buying shit, we can't be surprised when people treat human beings like "things."

Now that's a fucking movie...

Why It's Awesome: If nothing else, it's one of the few movies that is better than the book...but it's so, so much more. In Tyler we trust.

Best Quote:

Tyler Durden: It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.