This is one odd crossroads for Nic Cage. It was really the last time we got "prestige" Cage. The last time he was granted the reputation as a "great actor" by the mainstream. He was coming off his last Oscar nomination (and my personal favorite performance) just three years earlier in Adaptation. Then Matchstick Men was lush with prestige in typical Ridley Scott fashion. And then the following year, National Treasure was his breakthrough "family film" hit.
By 2005, Cage…
Paul Thomas Anderson's 50th birthday is tomorrow. Hard to believe he is that old, but also hard to believe he is that young. This may sound like looney-talk, but I believe his best films are still ahead of him. A lot of the greats peak in their 50s and he does not appear to be slowing down in my mind. Creatively that is. His coke phase certainly slowed down a generation ago, and his mellowing out has met my wavelength…
You know what I miss in movies? Cutting to a guy snapping a pencil in half out of frustration. We don't even hold pencils anymore. How can we snap pencils if we aren't holding them to begin with? Smart phones haven't just killed the art of slamming a landline phone as punctuation, but they killed the pencil too. A whole species wiped out.
As an admirer of snow crime movies (which is a sub-genre specific to the late 90s sparked in the wake of Fargo fever), Switchback was somewhat of a gentle surprise, considering I had genuinely never even heard of it until maybe a year ago. But this is a sturdy mid-budget Paramount release, back in the golden age of mid-budget, and I can easily settle into a groove when seeing that nostalgic 90s Paramount logo. The movie mainly follows two story…
A simple fact: action movies have been neutered, half-baked, half-written and served cold for children with Attention Deficit Disorder. Die Hard has aged into a lost art. It has a wholly original, unpredictable screenplay, crisp with sharp dialogue matched with badass line delivery through the mouths of believable human characters (This sentence alone cannot be attributed to a single modern action film). There is a tight plot that gradually escalates, accumulating ZERO gaps in logic equaling to not a single…
