My name is Ed and everything is extremely bad. To fix it I have decided to watch all the Nicolas Cage films in order and use each film to pick numbers to play with in the UK National Lottery. At least then I will be able to wear some expensive trousers while the world burns.

Next is a film about whether it is better to a) use the power to see into the future to stop terrorists from blowing up cities nuclear bombs or b) use the power to see into the future to help you bone women who are young enough to be your daughter.

Next is, in theory, an adaptation of Philip Dick’s post-apocalyptic novella ‘The Golden Man’, which is about an actually golden man who has the power to see into the future. It’s been at least a decade since I read it but Wikipedia informs me that “his golden skin acts like a lion’s mane and allows him to seduce members of the opposite sex”, so the film has kept at least some of the spirit of the original.

But for the most part the film ejects all but the most basic part of the premise and a few character names — Cris, the golden man, is instead a Nicolas Cage-coloured man who uses the power to see 2 minutes into the future to become a Las Vegas stage magician, under the stage name Frank Cadillac. He’s called Frank Cadillac because he likes Frankenstein and Cadillacs: always enjoyably obvious when they let Nic Cage rewrite bits of the script. The Government (played by Julianne Moore) want him to use his time powers to stop terrorists, but he’s mainly interested in the one exception to his 2-minute rule: a vision he keeps having a woman walking into a diner.

Cage as a sleazy magician whose biggest secret is that he can actually do what amounts to real magic is quite funny. But when he starts using his powers to chat up the woman from his visions, it gets a bit creepy, and not just because she’s played by Jessica Biel (born the same year as Fast Times at Ridgemont High) was released. We see their first meeting played over and over again as he looks ahead to see how each different chat up strategy will pan out, like some sort of PUA X-Man.

Like the similarly creepy ‘About Time’, the film doesn’t seem to have a problem with this basically dishonest method of pursuing a romantic relationship. Or maybe I’m weird for not wanting a potential partner to use time powers to trick me into liking them. I suppose maybe being able to check future outcomes would make you better at sex things?

The other distracting thing about Cage in this film is his truly alarming hair. The latter stages of Cage’s career have seen some… interesting things happen to the top of his head, but this is really on another level: it’s like a sort of strange hairy bird has gotten stuck there, and is trying very hard to escape.

The entire character of Cris seems misjudged — anti-hero is fine, but he’s also leaning so hard into ‘weirdo’ that there’s never any actual charisma to make us even slightly root for him. It doesn’t help that, other than the love interest, the only person we meet who appears to like him is his friend Irv, played by a desperately ill-looking Peter Falk in one of his final film roles (he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s the following year).

Even if there wasn’t a gaping void of charm in the middle of it, Next would still be no good at all. Between the relatively few moments of action it’s rather ponderous, especially for a film with such a lack of underlying logic. Why does Cris have this power? Why does the government even know to look for people with this power? Are there other people with special powers? Why does he keep having visions of Jessica Biel? And what are the terrorists trying to achieve, anyway?

At times it feels like someone accidentally deleted random scenes from the script and the filmmakers are just improvising how to get from the last scene to the next. There’s a whole sequence in the middle of the film where our heroes hang out with some kids in the desert for absolutely no reason, other than for Cris to charm Jessica Biel by showing her that he doesn’t murder kids, I guess.

As if a general air of pointlessness wasn’t enough, the film’s final twist is that a significant portion of the events we just watched never actually happened: Cris just looked ahead to see how they might happen, because bedding Jessica Biel has somehow made his power strong enough to see far beyond his original 2 minute window.

Still, it turns out the only way to use the power to see into the future to stop terrorists from blowing up cities nuclear bombs IS to bone women who are young enough to be your daughter, so that’s alright.

THE NUMBERS

2 — Nicolas Cage can see exactly 2 minutes into the future, unless he has a boner for Jessica Biel in which case he can see the entire last act of this crappy film and avoid any of it happening.

8 — For no readily available reason Nicolas Cage has long foreseen that he will meet Jessica Biel at some diner at 9 past 8 exactly.

27 — As well as using actual real magic to pretend to be a magician, Nicolas Cage also uses it to cheat at gambling. In the film we see him doing this at table 27 of the casino.

36 — One of the reasons Nicolas Cage doesn’t trust the government is that apparently when he was 3 they made him guess what was on flash cards for 36 hours. This like a pretty counterproductive thing to do, guys.

45 — At one point Nicolas Cage leaves Jessica Biel a note and tells her to read it 45 seconds after he leaves. I don’t know why he does this and I suspect neither do the people who made the film.

50 — There’s a car number plate which reads ‘50K F272’. I forgot to write down whose car it was and I am not going to watch any of this film again to check.

THE RESULT

You couldn’t even win the lottery if you could look 2 minutes into the future because the last time you can enter is 3–4 hours before the draw. What a stupid superpower.

Anyway, the film Next clearly has no magical predictive properties as I got ZERO numbers.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

Yessssssssss.

My name is Ed and I am watching everything Nicolas Cage has ever done in order. I am doing this so that I will win the National Lottery. Join me in hell.

Werewolf Women of the SS is a trailer for a film that doesn’t exist — one of several released as part of Grindhouse, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’ double feature ‘tribute’ to exploitation movies. You could make the argument that I should have watched all of Grindhouse, but you could also absolutely 100% go fuck yourself. Whether the original three hours and change constitutes a single film is at least debatable enough that I’m taking the easy ride and only watching the small part of it that Nicolas Cage is in.

Tarantino and Rodriguez asked several directors to contribute fake trailers, and this was the effort of heavy metalist and horror schlock purveyor Rob Zombie. It’s not so much a fake trailer as a load of stuff rammed at the screen to no particular effect. Nazis, werewolves, bare ladies — all human life is here!

The gist is that the Nazis want to win the war by turning bare ladies into werewolves? Or something? Presumably Rob Zombie had some Nazi costumes and fur lying around and thought this would be a good way to look at some bare ladies for a bit.

The highlight is a very brief scene at the end of the trailer, mainly because of who’s in it. Zombie initially offered acquaintance Nicolas Cage the part of the creator of the werewolf women — when Cage said he didn’t want to play a Nazi, Zombie invented a scene featuring dodgy old caricature Fu Manchu on the spot.

In the seconds-long sequence, a false-bearded Cage screams something incomprehensible enough that you can just about pretend he isn’t doing an offensive accent, and then laughs maniacally. In a longer version released on the Grindhouse Blu-Ray he yells that he wanted a Cinnabon, which is some kind of American roll. Who knows? And why appearing as the, at absolute best, naively racist creation Fu Manchu is better than playing a Nazi is anyone’s guess.

A couple of the other Grindhouse trailers got turned into real films: despite rumours, this is apparently all we’re going to get of Werewolf Women of the SS. Probably for the best. You can find it on YouTube but I wouldn’t bother.

THE NUMBERS

This is a 2 minute longer trailer — even the extended version only runs for 5 minutes. So this is going to be a bit tenuous.

The first thing we see after an opening text scroll is a car driving into a Nazi concentration camp. The car’s numberplate reads “BN F7532”.

Beggars can’t be choosers, so:

2

3

5

7

And to round it off:

13 — The narrator refers to the concentration camp as “Death Camp 13”

31 — The Cinnabon brand of baked goods celebrated its 31st birthday this year. I am sure they were delighted to be referenced in Werewolf Women of the SS!

THE RESULT

Just one number, winning me absolutely nothing. I hate Nazis.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Next. Ironically enough!!!!!!111

My name is Ed and I have played the National Lottery 49 times, each time picking the numbers using a different Nicolas Cage film. So far, this has failed to win me the lottery, but who thinks they can win the lottery by watching 49 Nicolas Cage films? A fool, that’s who. So, number 50: Ghost Rider.

Given that Nic Cage is a professed comic fan — his stage name was borrowed from Marvel’s Luke Cage — this, his first comic book movie, comes surprisingly late in his career. It was never meant to be this way — in 1998 he was signed on to play Superman in a Tim Burton movie, but the project fell apart 3 weeks before production started and the possibility of an entirely different pop cultural world fizzled out.

So instead his ‘superhero’ debut was as the less heroic, and much, much more obscure Johnny Blaze, a motorcycle stunt act who sells his soul to the devil and in return is transformed into the ‘Ghost Rider’, a computer-generated skeleton what is on fire. For some reason.

Here are the good things about Ghost Rider: Johnny Blaze gets some bits of character-defining business where we learn that his main vices are, for some reason, drinking jelly beans out of Martini glasses and watching videos of chimps. These are mainly funny because I have the strong suspicion they’re there at the insistence of Cage, rather than because they were in the script. Peter Fonda is an okay devil. There’s also a very small role for the then largely unknown Rebel Wilson, who is quite funny as ‘girl in alley’.

Here are the bad things about Ghost Rider: the rest of Ghost Rider.

Ghost Rider’s writer/director Mark Steven Johnson holds the unique distinction of being the only human to helm a film so boring that it has caused me to fall asleep at the cinema — the extremely poor Ben Affleck version of Daredevil. I suppose it is sort of an achievement that I remained ostensibly conscious throughout Ghost Rider.

You’d think a film about a guy who does motorcycle stunts and turns into a burning skeleton might at least have some visual flare, but the action is totally limp — replacing scenes with a “computer graphics go here” caption would only be marginally less compelling. How do you make Nicolas Cage jumping over six helicopters on a motorcycle boring? HOW?

Eva Mendes plays a brilliant character called something like Roxanne A. Loveinterest, and Cage has slightly less screen chemistry with her than with the videos of the chimps, his motorcycle, or indeed more or less anything else on screen. Her drunk acting in a largely unnecessary scene where Blaze stands her up on a date is so poor that one can only assume the director was attempting to deliberately sabotage her career out of spite.

The film is abominably slow — it takes the best part of an hour for Blaze to become the Ghost Rider, and even longer for there to be anything that could be meaningfully described as plot. It turns out the devil’s son (Wes Bentley, looking more like a bully from a rival school that the Saved By The Bell gang are going to teach a lesson) wants to eat a contract that has 1000 corrupt souls trapped inside it. ?????? There’s another Ghost Rider but he rides a horse instead of a motorbike then fucks off for no particular reason. Two computer animations have a fight and then the devil says Nicolas Cage doesn’t have to be a skeleton that goes on fire anymore. Nicolas Cage says actually he loves being a skeleton on fire and drives off on his motorbike. The end.

But perhaps the biggest crime of Ghost Rider is to cast Nicolas Cage in a role that necessitates us not seeing his face or hearing his (undoctored) voice for the skeleton-based segments of the film. It’s Nicolas Cage! That’s what we’re here for! Still, at least they didn’t make a sequel.

Oh, for f

THE NUMBERS

3 — Roxanne is a reporter for Channel 3 News. Or News Channel 3. Or something. The van has a big 3 on it, anyway.

6 — One of the stunts Johnny does in the film is to jump over 6 helicopters on his motorbike. This is impressively shot, in that it is impressive that they made it look incredibly dull.

17 — Johnny is 17 when he sells his soul to the devil. To cure his dad’s cancer. You’ll never guess, the devil does a trick on him and his dad dies anyway when a stunt goes wrong.

32 — IMDB says “On Dec. 31, 2007, Robbie Madison essentially performed Johnny Blaze’s “Goalpost-to-Goalpost” motorcycle jump in Las Vegas, setting a new world record distance of 322.625 feet.” He didn’t sell his soul to the devil and turn into a burning skeleton though, did he? Lame.

51 — Johnny’s father’s cancer-based paperwork says he is patient number 2351.

56 — Johnny says he hasn’t seen Roxanne in 56,000 years. This is a lie.

THE RESULT

I had a Lucky Dip to use from last time. Come on, at least let me have won the lottery as a reward for sitting through that load of old shite.

1 stinking number on the main one, nothing on the bonus. Now I’ll have to sell my soul to the devil just to feed my baby.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

One of the fake trailers from Grindhouse! At least it will be short!

My name is Ed and I am tired of scrabbling in the gutter for pennies so I have decided to win the UK’s National Lottery. In order to do this, twice a week I watch a Nicolas Cage film and pick lottery numbers from that film. This ritual act of pop cultural shamanism will, at some point net me a winning lottery ticket. For sure.

As detailed a couple of instalments back, I watched half an hour of World Trade Center by mistake when I was meant to be watching The Ant Bully. My funny joke was that World Trade Center was less bleak.

It’s not less bleak, obviously. It’s about fucking 9–11.

The film follows the unhappy fate of a real group of police officers sent in to help shortly before the collapse of the buildings. As the skyscrapers fall down around them eventually only two are left alive in the rubble: veteran cop John McLoughlin (Nic Cage) and the relatively raw Will Jimeno (Michael Peña from off of being Ant-Man’s mate). We cut between them, their anxious families, and their would-be rescuers searching for survivors.

I dunno, it’s a real story of some actual dudes who were in the rubble of 9–11 so you feel a bit bad for a having a pop but I can’t really imagine any other circumstances than “watching all the Nicolas Cage films” in which I’d have thought, “Hey, let’s pop World Trade Center on, that’ll be a good time.”

This is, at best, perfectly respectful, well-executed, movie-of-the-week stuff: the story of their survival is incredible, but not all that dramatic. The most jarring moments of the film are when, early on, we see the smoking towers — not as the familiar grainy news coverage, but in computer-generated film quality footage. It’s these moments of agonising build-up that are most effective; maybe there’s more tension in the rest of the film if you don’t know whether they’re going to survive but I had to look it up because (for reasons that I won’t go into, but that are fairly straightforward) I find films in which people deal with the death of their father a bit traumatic. While I’m on the subject, here’s a cheery fuck you to that creepy piece of shit ‘About Time’.

There’s also something uncomfortably OOH-RAH about the story of the ex-marine who rescues the trapped men, and then, the film tells us, joins back up to show the bad terrorist countries what’s what: it certainly throws National Treasure’s sugar-coated version of American patriotism into sharp relief.

I don’t know. I understand why this exists. And I don’t really like any of the other Oliver Stone movies I’ve ever seen, so. Maybe you’ll like this if you like Oliver Stone and also buildings falling down? Cage gets to do some good shouting when the World Trade Center falls on him, I guess.

THE NUMBERS

9 — Never.

11 — Forget. Look, there’s no way to be respectful while picking lottery numbers based on the true story of survivors of the World Trade Center so let’s just go with it, okay?

13 — The trapped cops keep shouting “8–13”, which apparently is a special police code for “FUCKING HELL I’M REALLY FUCKED!”

20 — According to their rescuers, McLoughlin and Jimeno are trapped 20 feet down in the rubble. I imagine that’s quite bad.

21 — McLoughlin tells Jimeno that he’s spent 21 years in the police force.

24 — The police commandeer a bus to get to the WTC. It’s a number 24 bus. Or at least it has a 24 written on it, I don’t know how New York buses work.

THE RESULT

Wow. I actually matched 2 numbers. Thanks 9–11! Like an idiot I forgot to take a picture of the ticket and the guy in the shop took it off me when I handed it in to get my free lucky dip.

What does this mean? Is terrorism good now?

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Cage makes his long overdue comic book movie debut, as Ghost Rider.

My name is Ed and the other day I found out someone once shot part of a short film based on an Alan Hollinghurst story in my house. Nicolas Cage wasn’t in it though, so I am not going to watch it and then play the lottery using numbers I have divined from the events contained within.

I’ve heard it said that The Wicker Man is a deliberate work of outsider art, and Cage has made some claims that it was always intended as black comedy. I don’t know if I believe that (because people always say when it turns out everyone thinks their film is shit), but it is certainly something.

One thing it is is a remake of the cult classic The Wicker Man — Cage takes Edward Woodward’s role of a copper sent to a mysterious island on the trail of a missing girl, while the leader of the weird island folk, Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle, becomes Ellen Burstyn’s Sister Summersisle.

This hints at the biggest divergence between the two films — not that the island of Summerisle gains a wholly unnecessary extra s, but that it is wholly matriarchal society, where the men don’t even appear to be able to speak. As a man, this is deeply offensive to me and so I immediately took the DVD out and put it in the bin next to where I will put the DVD of the new Ghostbusters film once that is out.

Actually, the problem with this is it means that film gains a rather misogynistic undercurrent — on the simplest reading, the cop, Malus, is the one good man alone on an island dominated by evil women. This reaches its peak at the film’s climax, where he starts full on punching women in the face while screaming that they’re bitches, which doesn’t make for wholly comfortable viewing. I’m not sure anyone set out to make a misogyny-thriller (although I’m told director Neil LaBute has some form onthis), but at best the film takes some individually reasonable steps in plot logic that end up delivering some very dubious imagery.

To add to this, the film’s first big twist is that the missing girl is actually Malus’s daughter — when Cage is fighting women to get his kid back, while dressed like a bear for only semi-explicable reasons, well, it’s all a bit Fathers 4 Justice, isn’t it?

There is something to be said for the entertaining contrast of the increasingly exasperated Cage with the matter-of-factness of the islanders: in a particularly frenzied moment he threatens a bemused woman with a gun because he wants to borrow her bicycle. There are moments of glorious stupidity here, but they’re sadly far and few between.

And there’s a distracting logiclessness to the whole thing — the islanders repeatedly point out something obvious to anyone with the vaguest familiarity with the US legal system: Malus, a motorcycle cop from California, has absolutely no jurisdiction on an island near Washington State. But why lampshade it when you could just as easily rewrite it so he does have legitimate authority for them to undermine?

Then there are the bees. “NOT THE BEES!”, as Malus cries out in the film’s most famous scene, in which bees are poured all over his head. For Malus is fatally allergic to bees, yet has gone to an island that fake Google told him was full of bees. Seriously, dude. Malus is also really bad at using fake Google — all the other results are for summer related things, suggesting he only searched for “summer”. Luckily Summersisle has really good SEO. Sorry, I get a bit distracted by excellently rubbish fake search engines in films —anyway, bees.

After essentially attempting to torture him to death, Sister Summersisle gives him his anti-bee injections to save him. Before putting him in a big wicker man and burning him to death. Now, the whole reason for putting him in the Wicker Man is so he’ll be a sacrifice to the gods who will then make sure that the bees keep making honey. So why risk him dying of an allergic reaction before you can even get him in the sodding thing?

(The bee torture sequence, arguably the most notorious moment in Cage’s entire career, was actually cut from the original version of the film and only achieved notoriety when it appeared on an extended DVD version. Lucky it wasn’t buried under the M4 or whatever supposedly happened to all the cut footage from the original version of The Wicker Man.)

There are interestingly odd things about The Wicker Man, but they’re undermined by the boringly or appalling odd ones which set it adrift, directionless. I don’t think the problem with it is that it’s a misunderstood black comedy — the problem is that the people making it didn’t really know what they were trying to achieve.

But I’m the real sexist, and actually 50% of Nic Cage films should feature him punching women in the face.

THE NUMBERS

1 —The star of Cage’s only directorial effort, Sonny, turns up for a cameo. Well, he does in the original version of the film without the famous bee scene — James Franco plays Bar Guy #1 in the film’s coda, in which the evil ladies set him up to be the next guy to get burnt in a big Wicker Man. For whatever reason, this was cut out of the unrated version. Maybe one really enthusiastic James Franco fan kept writing letters to Neil LaBute asking when the sequel was coming out.

2 — In the letter that lures Malus to the island he’s told that the girl has been missing for two weeks.

17 — The ancestors of the islanders originally settled near Salem in the 17th century. You’ll never guess, it didn’t go that well for them!

41 — The plane Malus uses to get to the island is numbered N7241P.

50 — Malus bribes the plane’s owner to fly him to the island by offering him Mr. Grant, and his twin brother Ulysses, by which I assume he means two fifty dollar bills (featuring the face of Ulysses S Grant), and not some weird sex thing.

55 — Cage was apparently introduced to the original The Wicker Man by Joey Ramone from off of The Ramones. Ramone died at the age of 55, a couple of years before the release of the remake, but gets a dedication.

THE RESULT

0 numbers. And they’re putting bloody QR codes on the tickets now.

I blame women.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

The film ‘World Trade Center’. Good times!

My name is Ed and I am watching everything Nicolas Cage has ever done because I think I will win the lottery. I told someone about this on an online dating website the other day and they didn’t seem to find it very encouraging, but what can you do?

I accidentally watched a film about 9–11 for half an hour when I was meant to be watching The Ant Bully. It may have been less depressing. What was up in the 2000s? Why did everyone suddenly want to make mediocre CGI movies about insects?

This one apparently happened because Tom Hanks read the book it’s based on to his kid, although one could posit that his enthusiasm for the project may have waned given that he doesn’t even lend his voice for a tiny cameo. The Ant Bully is the story of a dweeb who gets bullied and deals with this by in turn bullying some ants. You can’t really bully ants. They’re fucking ants. Who cares?

Why are kids supposed to like films about bugs? Do you like films about bugs? No, you don’t. So why do you think your kid is going to like films about bugs? Anyway, this film pretends the ants are all intelligent and can talk and that and one talks like Nicolas Cage, who does at least appear to have some vague interest in what’s going, at least as compared to his debut animated role as a bored ghost in a dreadful version of A Christmas Carol. He’s a sort of ant wizard who makes a special potion to shrink the dweeb down so the ants can teach him an important lesson about not bullying ants. In moral terms it’s basically ‘Horton Hears a Who!’ but for if your kid is a bit slow on the uptake.

At one point Rob Paulsen who plays Pinky from off of Pink and the Brain has a small part as a beetle, and neatly demonstrates why really it’s better to get people whose actual job is being really good at voicing animation to voice your animation, rather than ‘anyone whose name’ll look good on the poster and has an hour free’. Do people really pick a film to take their kid to on the basis that they’ll hear Julia Roberts pretending to be an ant? Perverts.

This is tragically the only time Bruce Campbell and Nic Cage have ever ‘appeared’ together, which seems like a massive oversight. I don’t care what the film’s about, as long as the poster involves them looking really intensely at each other.

Most of The Ant Bully is blandly inoffensive nothingness, with vaguely ugly design to boot. But I liked the bit where the ants talk about the kid pissing on them and then the bit where the kid eats something which turns out to be an insect turd. I also laughed at a joke about headlice. I would probably let my fictional son watch this while I poured out more strong liquor and tried to have opinions about Nicolas Cage films.

THE NUMBERS

3 — This was the first Nic Cage film to be released in 3D. You had to go to an IMAX and you didn’t even get to see his actual face.

6 — When the kid is shrunk down we see that he wears Size 6 underpants.

7 — The last digit the kid needs to hit when he jumps around the phone is a 7.

10 — The kid is 10 years old, and a dweeb.

20 — The original book was only 2,000 words long. I must have written at least 16,000 words about Nicolas Cage movies. Where’s my animated movie?

23 —Stan Beals, the exterminator/villain (voiced by Paul Giamatti, Paul Giamatti fans), is based at 1923 S Main St Las Vegas, according to his business card.

THE RESULT

Nothing. I am off to smash up an ant hill, and/or a dweeb.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

The Wicker Man. So people can finally stop asking if I’ve watched The Wicker Man yet.

My name is Ed and I watch Nicolas Cage films so I can win the National Lottery and be rich and not have to deal with any of your shit any more.

Fuck you. The Weather Man is a film about a weather man who earns hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for doing 2 hours of easy work a day, but is still not happy! Fuck. You.

The Weather Man was written by the same guy who wrote the Ben Stiller version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and shares a lot of the problems with that stinking turd of a film: these are movies that really want you to connect with wealthy, privileged men who are flawed in deeply unsympathetic ways. Oh no Ben Stiller is going to lose his cushy job at Life Magazine! Good thing you somehow have enough money to fly around the fucking world at short notice and have an amazing holiday where you learn a fucking obvious lesson and then bang Kristen Wiig.

This isn’t The Secret Life of Walter Mitty but it is still largely insufferable bourgeois whining, and if I need more of that in my life I’ll just drink a bottle of whiskey in front of the mirror. The Weather Man can’t deal with his ex-wife seeing a new bloke, he can’t deal with his shitty kids, he can’t deal with people chucking ice cream at him on the street. Fine. But there’s no pathos to any of this. Cage makes a good go of making him into a ‘beaten down everyman’ but he’s so patently, absurdly not an everyman that it doesn’t stand a chance. We’re never given any reason to root for him — even when he does the ‘right’ thing it’s uncomfortable — his son claims his counsellor came on to him so The Weather Man beats the shit out of the guy in the street. HOO-RAH?

The Weather Man’s dad is Michael Caine, who for some reason is attempting to an American accent. Michael Caine very obviously cannot do an American accent, but apparently no-one was willing to tell him this. One of his kids is Nicholas Hoult so you can go ‘Oh look it’s a pre-Skins Nicholas Hoult!’ if you like but I’m not trying to watch all of Nicholas Hoult’s films so I don’t really care.

Who’s this film for? Is it for shitty dads to have something to relate to? He almost shoots his ex-wife’s boyfriend with a bow and arrow, for Christ’s sake — we’ve all been there, right lads?

The Weather Man deservedly fucking bombed, and I am only sorry it didn’t stop screenwriter Stephen Conrad from writing that fucking garbage Walter Mitty movie which, thank Christ, Nicolas Cage isn’t in.

THE NUMBERS

2 — Dave Spritz, The Weather Man, tells us that his extremely hard job is basically just reading prompts for 2 hours a day.

4 — Dave has been working on a science fiction novel for the last 4 years. It’s called “Breaking Point”. Hey screenwriter, maybe you should labour that a bit more.

24 — Dave earns $240,000 a year, plus appearances. Boo hoo.

29 — Dave’s apartment is in a building with 29 written on the front. I assume that’s the street number but who knows how these things work in America?

33 — Dave’s dad won a Pulitzer at age 33. Can you win the Pulitzer for self-published reviews of Nicolas Cage films because then maybe I’ve still got time to do that!

47 — At the end of the film we find Dave in a parade on the street of New York. He is in front of Sponge Bob Square Pants, but behind fire brigade 47. Just like in his life! Or something. Fuck off.

THE RESULT

Fuck all. Fuck you. Fuck all of you.

My name is Ed and I play the lottery using numbers picked from Nicolas Cage films because I require enough money to disappear entirely but comfortably from human society.

Nicolas Cage is topical at the moment because the film The Rock is mentioned in the Chilcot Report so loads of journalists have had the chance to show off the fact that they can’t spell Nicolas Cage’s name. Speaking of Nicolas Cage and wars: Lord of War!

War, what is it good for? Making mad bank for arseholes, apparently! Lord of War is sort of a biopic, in that it follows the life of an arms dealer who while fictional, is purportedly based on several real people. Cage is Yuri Orlov, one of the meerkats from those brilliant adverts, who becomes an arms dealer after a hilarious misunderstanding! Simples!

Actually, he’s a Ukrainian-American who figures that you can make more money selling guns than from running restaurants, and takes advantage of various world events including the Lebanon War and the fall of the Soviet Union to prove that. The flashy life Yuri’s work buys him back home in America is contrasted with the hairy situations selling weapons to warlords tends to get you into. Simples!

Lord of War is a certainly slickly made film with some memorable moments — the opening sequence where we follow the ‘life’ of a bullet, a time lapse of Orlov watching helplessly as his plane is stripped to its component parts, the entire segment of the film where Orlov wanders around Liberia off his head on a drug cocktail that includes his own gunpowder. It’s got Ian Holm in it (as a rival arms dealer) and it’s nice to see Ian Holm in a thing. Even Jared Leto is vaguely plausible as Cage’s younger brother.

Cage doesn’t play Orlov as a ridiculous caricature, which is in some ways a fine choice — monstrous acts aren’t necessarily done by people who are obviously monsters, but unfortunately there isn’t really much of character underneath that. He is what he is: a salesman peddling a particularly nasty product.

And the film also avoids the Wolf Of Wall Street trap of celebrating its reprehensible protagonist, but ultimately despite the worthiness of the endeavour it never quite connects as drama. There’s just not much to be teased out because arms dealing is so clearly bad, regardless of whether it causes Jared Leto to get shot in the head.

Here’s a weird thing I found while looking up something about Lord of War: there’s a version of IMDB entirely about the firearms that appear in movies called IMFDB and I am really scared of everyone who posts on it complaining that actual it was the 1982 model of Uzi that was used to shoot all those people, not the 1983 one god dad can’t you get anything right? Anyway, the people on there love this because there’re so many different guns you can spot and write down in your book of guns, so it’s nice that there’s a film for them.

THE NUMBERS

9 — Orlov’s plane carries the ID number 9Q-CIH.

10 — Orlov’s Interpol nemesis tell him he’ll spend 10 years getting from a cell to a court room before he even starts his sentence. He’s wrong because the military industrial complex comes to bail him out.

12 — In the opening monologue, Orlov informs us that there’s one firearm for every 12 people on planet.

27–998 TM 27 is the number plate of the car of Orlov’s rival Simeon Weiss.

42 — Orlov’s pilot came 42nd out of 43 at his Moscow flight school.

47 — According to Orlov the AK47 is Russia’s greatest export, followed by vodka, caviar, and suicidal novelists.

THE RESULT

1 stinking number. Sorry world peace, you’ll have to wait. Who wants to buy this big box of guns?

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

The Weather Man. Which I assume is based on that Corrs song.

Four score and seven years ago my forefathers left a code that could unlock the very secrets of the National Lottery. They left instructions for that code to be hidden with the films of Nicolas Cage, and when I have seen all of them I will have all the information I need to become rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

I actually fist-pumped when I check which film was next on the list because National Treasure is, appropriately enough, a solid gold American classic. Despite the fact that it really, really shouldn’t be.

Somewhere between Indiana Jones and Dan Brown with the patriotism dial turned up to about 15 million, National Treasure details the adventures of Ben Gates, a historian who’s on the trail of a family legend that no-one else believes in: the location of a horde of all the world’s most amazing lost treasures. Gates must race to solve various clues to get his hands on it before the evil British man Ian Howe (Sean Bean, obviously) beats him to it. Assisting him are hacker sidekick Riley and archivist/love interest Dr Abigail Chase, who gets roped in after Gates and Riley steal the Declaration of Independence from under her nose.

Because that’s the sort film this is. Stealing the Declaration of Independence is a sub-plot. I think there’s a lot to be said for films that stare you straight in the eye and refuse to blink no matter how stupid things get. It’s what makes both the Twilight and Fast & Furious franchises such unexpected sources of joy, and it’s a big part of Cage’s appeal — you can never see him winking at the audience, he’s just gonna go for it and it’s up to you to come along with him (or not, in the case of some his poorer efforts, but still).

The Da Vinci Code’s film adaptation was a year off at this point but the book had been such a hit that this is clearly to some extent riding off the crypto-history thriller’s success. But National Treasure sensibly sticks to using the secret history as little more than a McGuffin to keep the increasingly ludicrous action going rather than trying to bring down Catholicism or whatever. Just as important to the film is celebrating genuine American history, with lots of supposedly stirring stuff about the founding fathers and the ideals they believed in. This should be, at minimum, nauseating, but as delivered by Cage there’s actually something sort of sweet and quietly rousing about it. Weirdly the closest comparison I can think of is those bits of The West Wing, but as far as I can tell Aaron Sorkin didn’t do any script doctoring on this.

This is in some ways incredibly straight-forward Cage performance — it’s hard to describe Ben Gates as a character. More than anything Ben Gates is a Nicolas Cage performance: you half-wonder if in Ben Gates this isn’t the closest Cage has come to playing (a version of) himself — even the names resonate. Gates is very much the man of many roles — one minute crossing the arctic ice to find a lost ship, the next planning a heist in a museum, then performing some advanced cryptography before starring in a crappy version of Rocky about rowing. No, hang on, that one was the real Nicolas Cage!!!

As for the rest of the cast, Jon Voight does a decent job as the dad, channeling Sean Connery to Cage’s Harrison Ford. Sean Bean could do ‘standard British villain’ in his sleep and Justin Bartha and Diane Kruger deliver ‘wise-cracking bloke sidekick’ and ‘weary lady sidekick’ as needed. No-one could claim this is challenging stuff, but there’s something to be said for well-executed cliché. Then Harvey Keitel turns up because Harvey Keitel is mainly in stuff to make people go ‘What the fuck, Harvey Keitel’s in this?’ now. He played Gene Hunt in the American Life On Mars where it turned out they were all astronauts hunting for genes i.e. life on Mars. That is true!

National Treasure was by some distance the biggest hit Cage had had since The Rock, and spawned the very first sequel that he’d ever appear in — it’s actually surprising the franchise hasn’t exploited harder given the repeatability of the formula (“We have to go to Russia because it turns out there’s a secret communist code carved on all these statues of Lenin!”). It is, on any serious analysis, a deeply stupid movie, but it’s fun and fast and just basically a really good time. Five Cages out of Five!

THE NUMBERS

6 — We’re told that Ben Gates is the last six generations of fools who have been searching for the treasure.

9 — Among the people who signed the Declaration Of Independence were 9 freemasons. I dunno, it’s probably true, isn’t freemasonry basically just like rotary clubs but with more elaborate hats?

10 — The treasure is valued at $10 billion. Gates and chums are offered a reward of 10% but obviously Gates turns this down because he is a GOOD HONEST MAN so they get 1% instead. I would like 1% of 10 billion dollars. I think it would be nice.

22 — The hiding place of some special spectacles that reveal a hidden message on the back of the Declaration of Independence is only revealed at 2.22pm.

35 — While hiding in a gift shop, Gates is forced to pay 35 dollars for the Declaration of Independence, which the staff assume is one of the replicas they sell.

53 — The Liberty Bell was cast in Whitechapel in 1752, but recast by Pass and Stow in 1753 after it cracked. Why not go to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry and tell people you’ve seen where their boyfriend was made?

THE RESULT

Well I certainly didn’t find any secret treasure hidden in this film!

No numbers. Still, there’s always National Treasure 2!

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Sadly, not National Treasure 2. Lord of War. It’s about guns.

Some might say that The National Lottery is the biggest con of all, as the chances of winning are so remote. But I am going to con the con, by watching Nicolas Cage films and picking numbers indicated in those films through the same mystical forces that fuel the acting of Nicolas Cage.

Anyway, Matchstick Men is about cons.

A matchstick man is a term for a very simple picture of a man, with thin limbs like matchsticks, like how lazy LS Lowry painted. It is also apparently used to refer to the shallow personas developed by con-men to trick their marks. Does everyone know this? I didn’t know this. I had to look it up.

Anyway, Nic Cage and Sam Rockwell are ‘Matchstick Men’ who operate a con involving selling overpriced water filters to people who think they’ve won a holiday through a lottery. Buying water filters won’t help you win the lottery, even if Nic Cage sells them you.

Nic Cage plays Roy, who is barely keeping his criminal lifestyle together because of his severe OCD. At the same as his partner Frank suggests an even bigger scam, Roy discovers that he’s got a teenage daughter that he didn’t know existed, and, against his better judgement, ends up dragging her into the con with him. But which con is conning the con in the big con? Cons!

Cage’s performance as obsessive-compulsive con man Roy is a treat — giving him neurotic characters with fiddly little details to flesh out is always a solid move, and here he barely stops moving. Rockwell and Alison Lohman (who plays the daughter) are great as the foils, and director Ridley Scott does a decent job of keeping the surprisingly sparse plot from dragging.

Being a film about con artists, there are obviously some twists (maybe the real con is on you, the audience???) and the conclusion admittedly leans towards the hokey side. But if I had a problem with contrived premises I probably wouldn’t be watching Nicolas Cage films in order to win the lottery.

THE NUMBERS

3 — Roy’s OCD compels him to open and close doors 3 times before going through them.

8 — The film’s (ostensible) big hustle involves (pretending to) swap 80,000 pounds for 80,000 dollars, which seems like a good idea to the mark because of exchange rates. An even better idea thanks to BREXIT, eh readers?

14 — Roy’s daughter Angela is 14. Actress Alison Lohman was actually about 22 at the time, which ends up sort of tying into the plot.

23 — When Roy and Angela go bowling they use lane 23. I feel like bowling lanes come up surprisingly often when I’m picking these numbers.

30 — Roy introduces Angela to the art of grifting with a scam based on getting someone to pay $300 for a ‘winning’ lottery ticket. It isn’t a winning lottery ticket, you idiot.

36 — Roy’s safety deposit box is number 366. The guy who wrote the novel it’s based on is best known for a series of books about dinosaurs who wear hats or something.

THE RESULT:

Just one number. I think they should check the lottery machines and make sure they aren’t broken. Maybe someone has done a con on them.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

National Treasure. I actually punched the air when I read the title on my list.