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Thursday, September 9, 2010
I Come Not to Bury Nick Cage...
But to mourn the death of my punchline
I've been writing, or rather, ranting, gushing, and occasionally sitting in slack-jawed shock, at the new millennium's explosion of comic book based movies for years. After a while the sheer volume of it wore down on me. I'm not going to lie to you. It was a lot more fun to be jumping up and down at the very notion that an X-Men movie might be even remotely well made. And anyone who has read Guttermouth during my tenure here knows that the folks in charge gave me enough rope to hang myself with ten times over regarding the Keanu Reeves John Constantine movie.
Anyway, I've had three whipping boys when it came down to comic book movies since the very beginning. Every columnist has their whipping boys, their go-to jokes, their punch lines everyone has heard before. It's part of the trade, and these whipping boys are usually an act of self-indulgence, which start out funny--if to nobody else than the columnist him- or herself--which eventually become dulled and finally pointless over time. My three whipping boys have always been:
1) Keanu Reeves, the casting of whom in Constantine sent me, from the moment I first heard it, into anaphylactic shock, and which continued to do so repeatedly until I finally saw the movie and, if not enjoyed it, at least allowed me to exorcise some demons (pun very, very much intended);
2) Ben Affleck, for... (I sigh.) It's not that Daredevil was a train wreck. It's just (sigh again)... There was something so damned undignified about the whole thing. I'm not sure what set me against him from the start, but as he's a Boston homeboy like me, I think I was sort of hoping for better for him. Hey, he married Elektra, he's not doing too badly, but... (I sigh.)
3) And three: Nicholas Cage.
Well, frankly, my fourth perennial target was Michael Chiklis's costume in Fantastic Four, but I won't mess with Michael Chiklis because a) he's another Boston homeboy who has otherwise not been embarrassing the Bay State and b) I'm sort of afraid that if I do, Vic Mackey will show up on my door one day and beat me within an inch of my life.
Of my big three, though, only Nicholas Cage has remained. I gave up the ghost on Keanu because the movie came out and, let me be candid, I ran out of material. I decided to give Affleck a pass for similar reasons, and also I had too many people write to me to say that Daredevil really wasn't that bad (although most of these people did so after Elektra came out, so it might be a case of degrees).
And now I think I'm about to lose my third whipping boy with the release of Ghost Rider, and I don't know how I feel about that.
See here's the thing. Urban legend and/or the Hollywood rumor mill has it that Nick Cage has been on some sort of fruitcake crusade to play a superhero since the mid-1990's, when he was said to be in contention to play Superman in one of the thirty or forty alleged post-Christopher Reeves Superman movies that were discussed before last year's Superman Returns came out.
(Speaking of which, how un-splashy was the world's reaction to that flick? Christopher Nolan goes out and makes a kickass Batman reboot that takes the world by storm, but Superman is met with a crickets-chirping ambivalence? Self-indulgent sidebar--I, who by my own admission and in the opinion of my therapist have what substance abusers commonly call "a problem" with comic book movies still have not seen Superman Returns all the way through. I've got the DVD sitting on my desk right now. One of these days I'll get around to putting myself in a position to be able to speak about it in an educated way instead of just, well, offering completely arbitrary opinion based on hearsay.)
Back go Nick Cage. What Superhero hasn't Nick Cage been rumored to be playing? He's not quite Freddie Prinze Jr., who, according to another urban legend, drove Sam Raimi bugnuts when he was casting Spider-Man, but rumors always start with a kernel of truth, and let's face it, if someone's name is coming up again and again it's happening for a reason. His name has at least been marginally associated with every superhero other than Luke Cage since 1999. (Insert your own joke here. They write themselves.)
Speaking of jokes that write themselves, Nicholas Cage is finally cast as a superhero, and it's the one whose head bursts into flames whenever he fights evil. So many punchlines, I can't choose just one. Somebody help. I'm experiencing vertigo.
The reason I'm bringing this up now, as opposed to, say, next week, when I could actually speak to Cage's performance as a marginalized and mostly forgotten tacky ridiculous 1990's Marvel comics anti-hero in an entirely unnecessary and probably ill-advised cinematic investment... Did I just say that out loud? Oh come on, it's Ghost Rider. Nobody's liked Ghost Rider since before Kurt Cobain killed himself.
Oops. Leaking. Anyway. Cage finally playing a superhero feels like the end of an era. Like something will be different in the world, changed forever, but not really all that important in the long run. All I know is I'm losing one of my preferred punchlines and I'm a little resentful about it.
I was hoping to make "Nick Cage is rumored to play the lead in 'Iron Fist'" jokes. I can't do that now, and it breaks my little black heart.
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
