A year before he co-starred with Nicolas Cage in Face/Off, John Travolta played an angel in the film Michael. Maybe at some point during the production of Face/Off he was like, “Nicolas Cage, playing an angel is the best!” because Cage’s very next project was City Of Angels.

City Of Angels is a load of insipid crap, and you can quote me on that if for some reason you need to do tha.t

Okay so there’s absolutely loads of angels, and they basically seem to hang around until people die so they can tell them that they’re dead. Nic Cage is one of these angels and when he gets bored of telling people that they’re dead he decides to stalk Meg Ryan and watch her when she’s having a bath and that which is apparently cool for some reason — I guess God gave him permission.

Then eventually she can see him because of reasons and so she dumps her boyfriend who is the face-swapping doctor from Face/Off but I don’t think it’s meant to be the same character because he died in that unless this is set before that? Anyway Nicolas Cage wants to make out with Meg Ryan but he can’t because he’s an angel so he jumps off a building and that turns him into a normal bloke because ???. It also lets him do some quite good Nicolas Cage-type acting instead of just standing around looking morose but you have to wait like an hour for this to happen and you could have just watched Face/Off again instead.

Anyway then they bone and then she gets hit by a truck. Well first there’s this long scene where she’s on her bike and it is amazingly obviously that she is going to be killed somehow and you can have fun shouting “DIE!” at the screen. I guess this is supposed to be an instructional film for angels to help them weigh up the benefits and risks of becoming human, because there doesn’t really seem to be any other particularly good reason for it to exist.

Obviously it was a smash hit, because of saps. There’s a Sarah McLachlan song in it.

THE NUMBERS

1 — “I would rather have had one breath of her hair, one kiss of her mouth, one touch of her hand than eternity without it.” says Nicolas Cage who is playing an ANGEL and definitely not a SERIAL KILLER.

6 — An angel listens in to the thoughts of a mother who’s just had a baby that weighed 6 lbs, 4 ozs.

21 — Meg Ryan reads a bit of an Ernest Hemingway book out. It’s “A Moveable Feast” which is set between 1921 and 1926. It says on the internet.

24 — At one point Meg Ryan wakes up at 7.24am because she’s just worked out how to cure a poorly baby.

44 — There’s a bit at the beginning where loads of angels stand on a building numbered 444. 444 is the ANGEL NUMBER according to SOMEONE OR OTHER.

58 — Colm Feore plays the doctor who’s getting off with Meg Ryan before Nicolas Cage turns up, and was also the face surgeon from Face/Off. He played Toby the Tram in a Thomas The Tank Engine film and was born in 1958.

THE RESULT

A terrible, terrible thing has happened. 2 of my numbers came up.

And. I. Forgot. To. Buy. A. Ticket.

For the first time in weeks, I would have actually won something. Only a free lucky dip ticket for the next lottery, but SOMETHING.

(Incidentally, I believe that’s the first time in National Lottery history that 1, 2, 3 and 4 have ever come up in the same draw. WHAT ARE THE LOTTERY GODS TRYING TO TELL ME?)

What happened is that I found out you could tweet at some cider company and they would bring you 4 cans of cider so I tried to get them to bring me some cider to Russell Square in Central London, where I was writing some Important Content in the sunshine. They did this and then I drank the cider and forgot that I needed to buy a lottery ticket.

Maybe that Lucky Dip would have won it. Maybe it would have been my time in the stupid Millionaire Raffle thing where they print a thing like RUBY 1234 5678 on your ticket and maybe that means you win a million quid. But now I will never know.

Still, I did get 4 cans of free cider.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Snake Eyes, which does not have any snakes in it, but does have at least one eye.

My name is Ed and I try to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films, until there are no more Nicolas Cage films, or I am dead.

The day after Cage finish shooting Con Air, he was back on set for yet his 3rd action blockbuster on the trot — they’d end up being released so close together that Con Air was still in the top 5 at the US box office the week his next film opened. That film: Face/Off.

Face/Off is so good that the first time I watched it I almost immediately had to watch it again. It is so good that it doesn’t seem like it should be possible for a film to be genuinely this brilliant unless you are actually currently watching it: there are so many moving parts to its greatness than the human memory can’t capture them all at once.

Nic Cage is the megalomaniac criminal Castor Troy, John Travolta is Sean Archer, the FBI agent who swore to take him down after Troy killed his son. A series of slightly convoluted plot twists later, and they’ve had surgery to swap their faces, and thus their identities — Archer’s now the one on the run from the authorities, while also desperately trying to prove to them who he really is.

Apparently before they landed on Cage/Travolta, other pairings considered included Harrison Ford and Michael Douglas, Schwarzenegger and Stallone, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, and Bruce Willis and Alec Baldwin. Johnny Depp was also at one point going to be star with Cage. Ideally all of these versions would have been made simultaneously.

As I’ve noted before, Cage tends to do his best work operating within hyper-stylized cinematic worlds — and here he’s being directed by John ‘Do you want any more doves with that?’ Woo. As Troy, he’s basically a comic book villain, complete with a matching pair of gold pistols. The opening sequence involves him pretending to be a priest for absolutely no reason, then immediately blowing his cover by starting to dance wildly before coming on to a surprisingly receptive choir girl. But once the identity swap happens he’s just on another level — portraying a man who is pretending to be an insane criminal while simultaneously losing his own mind. Some sort of facial expressions per second record must have been set.

None of it really makes any sense — even once you buy into the premise of face-swapping being a thing. Archer has some liposuction and a haircut to look like Troy — so is Troy wearing a wig and a fat suit or what? Then very conveniently only three people know about the whole thing and they’re very easy to find and set fire to in the middle of the night. And then despite this being an amazing new procedure invented by this one doctor who just went on fire it turns out at the end there’s another FBI surgeon who can do it. AND there’s a spare kid going to replace Archer’s dead son!

But none of it really matters — who’s watching a film about Nic Cage and John Travolta swapping faces because you want narrative rigour? Face/Off is such a bizarre mix of comedy, action, science fiction and even horror (both psychological and full on body horror — the scenes with a ‘faceless’ Troy are surprisingly disturbing) that you barely have time to pay attention to minor details like ‘the plot’.

But it is the central performances that make the whole thing work — not only is this an iconic Cage turn, but Travolta is brilliant as the bad guy enjoying pretending to be good for a change. The film is packed with wonderfully strange bits of business — for some reason the Archer family have this thing they all do where they touch each other’s faces as an affectionate gesture, which is obviously a clever reference to the film being about faces, but is also a hilariously weird thing to watch people doing to each other. And because it’s a John Woo film there’s a bit where loads of doves appear for no reason.

It probably doesn’t need to be 2 and half hours long, but almost nothing really does. Still: a solid gold classic in the Cage canon. But will it win me enough money to buy some solid gold?

THE NUMBERS

2 — Although the film describes the height difference Archer and Troy as negligible, John Travolta is 2 inches taller than Nicolas Cage.

6 — The opening flashback in which the kid is shot happens 6 years before the rest of the film.

9 —I think Archer’s son was killed by Troy on 9th September. I didn’t keep proper notes for this and I was quite tired when I watched it.

18 — Confession time: I have genuinely forgotten what 18 referred to.

20 — Also this. The numbers probably appeared on a screen? I am sorry.

25 — On the offshore prison, the prisoners are forced to wear special magnetised boots to stop them from rioting. These apparently weighed 25 pounds each, and were reused props from the excellent 1993 film Super Mario Brothers. The concept is also weirdly similar to an idea in a 1991 episode of Red Dwarf.

THE RESULT

One number. Maybe instead of playing the National Lottery, I should have my face swapped with someone who has millions of pounds.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

City of Angels, which is set in Los Angeles, the City of Angels, and is also about angels.

My name is Ed and I have now watched nearly 30 Nicolas Cage film and TV productions because I want to win the lottery. It hasn’t worked, but I still have hope in my heart, and so: Con Air.

Con Air has a brilliantly simple premise — a group of America’s nastiest convicts are being transported across the country on a prison plane, which they then hijack.

Only one problem for them: also on the plane is Cameron Poe, The Most Goodest Man In All Of America and a former US Ranger. The opening of film labours to give us a reason for our hero to have ended up a convict: he accidentally kills a drunk man who was being very rude to his wife, and is banged up for years because his army-trained hands have been registered as deadly weapons (I am only very slightly exaggerating). But guess which flight is taking him home on the day of release?

Poe, is of course Cage, giving a reasonably entertaining, though very caricatured performance. He’s a Good Ol’ Boy, complete with a questionable southern accent, but Con Air is not the kind of film that requires nuance. Which is also why it all ends up being a bit grim.

Opposite Cage are the Bad Criminals, including John Malkovich doing some top John Malkovich-type scenery chewing and Steve Buscemi playing Steve Buscemi if he was a serial killer. Then there are The Authorities, trying to Stop That Plane: because I am a nerd, it’s always nice to see Colm Meaney from Star Trek in a proper film, and also John Cusack is in it.

Con Air ultimately left a bad taste in my mouth. I dimly remember it being well-regarded amongst the 14-year-old boys of my acquaintance when I was a 14-year-old boy, and that makes a lot of sense, because there’s a streak of genuine nastiness in the humour that appeals to the sort of adolescent who hasn’t quite come to grips with the idea of empathy yet — rapes and murders become the criminal equivalent of “the banter”.

Apologies if this all seems a bit po-faced, but e.g. there’s a scene where Steve Buscemi’s Hannibal Lector-esque character encounters a small girl and they use ‘Has he murdered her?’ as a bit of comedic tension. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with using that kind of stuff in comedy, but because Con Air fundamentally still operates under the rules of drama (i.e. there are real characters we’re supposed to care about on some level) it all just feels a bit grisly.

All of which basically ruined an otherwise competent action movie. Anyway. Did it win me the lottery?

THE NUMBERS

7 —The plane crashes into a slot machine and causes it to spin a Triple 7. I don’t know if that’s good or not, because gambling is evil and wrong like anyone who does it.

8 — Poe serves 8 years in prison for killing the bad man who wanted to have a dance with his wife.

14 — Poe’s daughter was born on July 14th. He has never met her prior to the events of the film because he didn’t want her to see him in prison, which seems like a slightly curious way to behave but there you go.

20 — Poe served in the 20th Battalion of the US Rangers, according to the writing on his uniform.

23 — Danny Trejo plays a man named Johnny 23, because he has raped 23 women. This is treated simultaneously as an obviously extremely bad thing but also as Top Banter, which is a good example of why I couldn’t really get on board with this.

50 — Being a criminal is apparently better than working 50 hours a week for 50 years. Which is possibly true. And maybe THE BUSINESS MAN IN HIS SUIT AND TIE is the real criminal.

THE RESULT

ZERO NUMBERS. The actual crime here is obviously me not winning any money on the lottery even though I have played it THIRTY TIMES. There are only 50 more films to go! Come on gods of the lottery and the Nouveau Shamanic, you’re running out of time to bless me.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Face/Off.

Face/Off.

Face… Off…

My name is Ed and my last hope is to win the lottery, which I will do by watching Nicolas Cage films.

Cage may have won the Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas, but it was what he did next that would prove to be truly career-redefining — not just one of the most ludicrous action movies ever made, but THREE of the most ludicrous action movies ever made. Starting with: The Rock.

And it turns out if you actually sit down to watch a film as though you actually want to watch it, on a chilled out Friday night with a glass of wine, it’s a lot more enjoyable that trying to hold your eyes open at 8am while desperately trying to pry 6 numbers out of it. Who knew?

For something that’s now regarded as part of the essential canon of ’90s action movies, The Rock really doesn’t seem like it should have worked on paper. The closest thing to action movie Cage had made before this was the truly dire Top Gun-but-with-helicopters Fire Birds, and while his co-star Sean Connery obviously had more of a track record, his ’90s output had been a bit of a mixed bag — this came between voicing a CGI dragon and playing the baddie in the terrible film version of The Avengers (the one with bowler hats rather than capes).

The Rock’s script was reworked several times before reaching the screen — the final credits were based on an arbitration process but among the contributors were Quentin Tarantino, Aaron Sorkin and Clement & La Frenais from off of writing The Likely Lads (Connery had them rewrite his dialogue in a number of his films). Cage himself was effectively given carte blanche to rewrite details of his character and dialogue, and I would guess that this is why Dr Stanley Goodspeed spends a lot of his first scene banging on about The Beatles for no particularly good reason.

There’s a hell of a lot of set-up — it’s over an hour before our heroes reach the titular Rock (i.e. the island and former prison, Alcatraz), which has been taken over by some soldiers who feel betrayed by the US government and are now holding it to random it by pointing missiles full of deadly poison at San Francisco. Cage’s Dr Goodspeed is the only man qualified to defuse the missiles, while Connery is John Mason, the only man who ever escaped from Alcatraz. Except that actually he’s reprising the role of James Bond.

Okay, obviously the film never admits this, but John Mason was a British intelligence agent in the 1960s, who no longer officially exists because he was imprisoned for stealing secrets so secret that even his imprisonment had to secret. And he does pretty much play it as Bond (even getting himself dolled up with a nice hair cut and crisp new suit) — even if the details don’t quite line up (e.g. Mason is ex-army, Bond’s ex-navy according to his backstory, plus the dates don’t really work). Imagine if they’d actually been able to just go the whole way with it.

Only in a film as ludicrously overblown as The Rock could Sean Connery unofficially reprising the role of James Bond be a fairly minor subplot. In most other films the massive car chase in San Fransisco or the ridiculous Indiana Jones-style mine cart sequence (in the mine that’s underneath Alcatraz because????) would be pivotal scenes. Here they’re practically filler!

The whole cast is great — Cage really works because he’s been deliberately been cast against type because the character doesn’t want to be an action hero, and Ed Harris sells the hell out of Hummel, the good guy turned bad for the right reasons. And always nice to see the late John Spencer, here, as the head of the FBI, practically auditioning for his future role as Leo McGarry on the The West Wing.

The Rock is all a load of old nonsense, but it’s nonsense that’s so well-performed and entertainingly shot that it gets away with it completely, and you can forgive the more risible elements. The joke involving Goodspeed asking someone if he likes the song Rocket Man before firing a rocket at him is almost criminally lame, and the final scene is so stupid it’s amazing anyone could be bothered to film it, but the action movie era of Nic Cage is off to a solid start.

THE NUMBERS

4 — The bomb Goodspeed defuses at the start of the film shuts off with just 4 seconds on the clock, for reasons of dramatic tension.

12 — Each of the rockets has 12 guidance chips in it, also for reasons of dramatic tension.

14 — The film accurately notes that there were 14 recorded attempts to escape Alcatraz, but none were officially successfully. John Mason’s escape is implied to have been covered up.

30 — Mason is said to have been imprisoned without charges for 30 years.

32 — Mason’s daughter’s address is 32 Stenson Drive.

46 — The film opens with General Hummel visiting the grave of his dead wife. She was born in 1946.

THE RESULT

I am yet to escape the prison that is not having won the lottery.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

It’s back-to-back Jerry Bruckheimer, with Con Air.

My name is Ed and twice a week I watch a Nicolas Cage film, pick 6 numbers based on that film, and enter the UK National Lottery. I will win, and use the money to enact terrible revenge on all those that have wronged me.

It seems sort of unlikely now that he’s mainly known for his work in animated GIFs, but once upon a time Nicolas Cage did actually win the Academy Award for Best Actor, for Leaving Las Vegas.

Cage more than earns his Oscar here — his performance as the alcoholic ruin of what was once Hollywood screenwriter Ben Sanderson is some of his best work. Though we join Ben right as he reaches his lowest ebb, we get just enough flashes of the brilliant man he was, might have been, to give us a sense of just how far he’s fallen.

Cage’s wild charisma, so often used to great comic effect, here becomes a tragic force — the life and soul of the party has burned himself out, and what remains is past hope, or even despair. As performance exercise, it’s certainly interesting. But unfortunately it’s also supposed to be a film.

Leaving Las Vegas is based on an apparently semi-autobiographical novel by a writer who ended up killing himself a weeks after the film went into production. As you might expect, it’s not a barrel of laughs, but the real problem with it is that it’s not much of a barrel of anything other than endless misery, to no real end.

The story follows Ben as he heads to Las Vegas after being fired from his job and deciding to torch what remains of his life (literally burning most of his possessions). He ends up connecting with Sera, a prostitute, who is not having a massively good time either, and they end up in a strange, rather sad relationship as both of their lives go from crappy to even crappier.

Elizabeth Shue does well with what she’s given, but it does appear to be all in the performance, rather than the fairly stock character (a sex worker who turns out to be actually be a nice person, you say?). And it’s never quite apparent why she makes such a quick connection with someone who appears to bring nothing to the relationship other than the occasional round of boozey vomit. Though there is almost enough chemistry between the actors to cover for this, it doesn’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny.

The film itself ends up so relentlessly bleak that it almost becomes a voyeuristic celebration of how awful life can be. Glamourising is not quite the word, but is the director (the miserablist Mike Figgis) really trying to suggest that there’s some sort of serene and meaningful beauty in dying of alcohol poisoning in a shitty motel room, as long as you’ve gotten to shag Elizabeth Shue first? No offence to Ms Shue, but I suspect there isn’t.

THE NUMBERS

2 — Part of Nicolas Cage’s research for this film involved going to Dublin and spending 2 weeks getting pissed up. Why not ask your boss if you can go to Dublin for 2 weeks and get pissed up as “ important research”?

4 — The wall of Ben’s motel room is decorated with a design of the 4 aces from a set of playing cards. Because it’s in Las Vegas, I expect.

5 — At one point Ben goes gambling and rolls the dice, wishing for ‘snake eyes’ — which means a double one in gambling. Snake Eyes is also the name of another Nicolas Cage film that I haven’t watched yet. Anyway, he actually gets a 5, which is presumably not as good.

12 — As Ben departs his home in Hollywood there are 12 bin bags of his stuff outside his house.

25 — Ben initially offers Sera 250 dollars to fuck him. He ends up giving her 500 and they just have a chat instead, although she does suck his willy for a bit first.

37 — Leaving Las Vegas is based on a semi-autobiographical novel by a guy called John O’Brien. Among other things he did before topping himself was writing part of the 37th episode of the children’s cartoon Rugrats. This isn’t referenced in Leaving Las Vegas.

THE RESULT

Just one number. Leaving Las Vegas is not apparently, my lucky film, so I will take this as a sign that I shouldn’t attempt to drink myself to death.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

The Rock, in which only one of the things that’s about to blow up is Nicolas Cage’s career as an action star!!!

My name is Ed and winning the lottery would solve a lot of problems for me right now so in order to do that I have been watching Nicolas Cage films and using them to inspire my selection of lottery numbers. This is definitely a rational thing to do and not some sort of extended cry for help.

This one has David Caruso in it, and is called Kiss Of Death.

Who knew that David Caruso had ever played another character than ‘the sunglasses policeman’? Here he is ex-con Jimmy, trying to walk the straight and narrow and be a good family man. One illegal favour for his cousin later, he’s in prison and his wife’s dead. I hate Mondays!

The two things Kiss Of Death has going for it are an enjoyably twisty-turny plot and a great cast. Jimmy becomes an informer: but really he’s using the police to play the bad guys off against each other. The district attorney who cuts him the deal (Stanley Tucci) is more interested in getting promoted to judge than actually getting a conviction. The police detective (Samuel L Jackson) blames Jimmy for the unusual injury to his face that means he literally can’t stop crying. Not even all of the crooks are exactly what they seem.

Caruso was nominated for a Razzie, but this just goes to show that the Razzie lot are a bag of spanners. His underplayed performance is exactly what the role requires — everyone he encounters is this big, mannered, creation, so he plays it small, is the quiet everyman.

The biggest performance of them all comes from Cage — superbly ridiculous as Little Junior, the head of this particular gang of crooks, a psychotically macho figure who lives his life by three words: Balls, Attitude, Direction. It is a very, very broad performance but it works because he becomes terrifyingly capable of anything. There’s no such thing as ‘too far’ for the character, so ditto the performance. Little Junior is a big horrible baby, murdering and mutilating on a whim.

Kiss Of Death is fine little thriller — not mind-blowingly original, occasionally hokey, but mainly well told and entirely well cast. You’d have to be asleep not to see the final twist coming a mile off, but by that point you’re rooting hard enough for poor old Jimmy to have something go right for a change that it doesn’t really matter. Would watch again if found while channel surfing at 1am, if for some reason I’d travelled back to an era where people still did that.

THE NUMBERS

4 — There are 4 car-carrying truck things involved in the car stealing crime at the start of the film. There’s loads of lights on them like they’re the Coca Cola truck, which seems like a bad idea.

5 — Big Junior, Little Junior’s dad, has just 5% of his lung capacity left when he carks it. Asthma is actually a relatively important plot point in this film, at least compared to how important a plot point it is in most films.

8 — Jimmy’s wife Bev is killed at 8am. By driving a car into the path of a truck. Don’t do this, even if you are trying to escape your husband’s dodgy cousin.

20 — At the film’s climax, Jimmy tells his police detective mate to meet him at the strip club in 20 minutes. In quite a ropey bit of tension-building the detective then gets held up in traffic caused by a car accident.

40 — Little Junior does a special sort of exercise which involves lifting a stripper up and down 40 times. That’s not a euphemism, he just lifts her up and down.

47 — Kiss Of Death is a very loose remake of a 1947 film of the same name starring Victor Mature. It was also adapted into a 1958 Western (!) called The Fiend Who Walked the West. There have been 2 UK TV dramas called Kiss Of Death, but they have nothing to do with it.

THE RESULT

A single number, 5. Why even tease me with this shit, lottery gods?

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Leaving Las Vegas. He won his Oscar for it, so that’s got to be a good sign, right?

My name is Ed and I intend to win the lottery by any means necessary, by which I mean I am going to watch Nicolas Cage films and pick lottery numbers inspired by those films.

I’ve never had any particular opinions about Dana Carvey. Like more or less everyone else of around my age I have a nostalgic fondness for the Wayne’s World films, and he wasn’t notably bad in that episode of Saturday Night Live I had to sit through the other week because Nicolas Cage was in it. Beyond that I would have struggled to name anything else he’s actually done.

But now? Now I hate Dana Carvey. Because of Trapped In Paradise.

I literally did a deep exhale after typing the title. Bloody hell, this film is no good. It might be the worst Nicolas Cage film so far, although I’m not going to watch The Boy In Blue again to check.

Here’s the premise: one Christmas Eve three bad brothers rob a bank in a good-hearted aw shucks golly gosh little American town called Paradise, then find it hard to escape (i.e. they are trapped). Will the magical Christmas spirit work it’s way into their criminal hearts? Probably.

On paper this looked like it might be alright — writer/director George Gallo is behind the reasonably well-regarded Midnight Run, and while Jon Lovitz has been a lot of terrible crap I thought maybe he and Cage could be a fun pairing.

Unfortunately, the script is the biggest load of ‘will this do?’ shit padded out to nearly 2 hours with the worst kind unfunny, illogical plot twists. Cage’s character makes no sense — he’s supposedly the ‘good’ one, despite having the same criminal urges that have landed his brothers in jail — so is he reverting to his true nature when he becomes a bank robber, or when he has ANOTHER change of heart at the end of the film? The token romantic plotline involving him and Mädchen Amick is ridiculously perfunctory — two tepid conversations and he’s planning to move into town permanently. I mean I suppose she is Mädchen Amick.

Various other things happen: the brothers try desperately to leave town by car, canoe and sleigh, some rival would-be bank robbers kidnap their mum, the FBI show up to try and sort everything out: but it’s a pretty desperate box-ticking exercise in ‘things that should happen in this sort of the film’ — there’s no sense of anything close to joy in any of this, no feeling that anyone involved particularly cares.

The single worst thing in this film is Dana Carvey, and his character, Alvin. Both character and performance are perhaps the most irritating things I’ve ever encountered in any media. When Cage and Lovitz have finally actually robbed the bank, they run out to the getaway car — Alvin is at the wheel. Alvin, because he is an idiot. starts driving away before they’ve got in the car. Eventually he stops, but then just as they catch up with him, he drives away again. And so on, in varying forms, for the rest of the film. Stop being such a dick Alvin. Stop it.

Stupid characters are obviously a comedy mainstay, but there’s no comic affect, or indeed effect, to this character — he is quite literally a witless fool.

Much of the rest of his contribution is related to his single other character trait: he’s a kleptomaniac. So get this: he’s constantly stealing stuff. Imagine! A kleptomaniac who steals stuff! And then pulls a face so we all know he’s a bit simple! The film does this ‘joke’ approximately 100 times. Why? WHY?

I would say that Dana Carvey is the poor man’s French Stewart, but is it even possible to be the poor man’s French Stewart? French Stewart IS the poor man’s French Stewart. Dana Carvey is the French Stewart of the man who is so poor that he has long since died of starvation.

Avoid.

THE NUMBERS

7 — At the beginning of the film Nicolas Cage finds a wallet with 700 dollars in it and is tempted to steal it. He decides against it, because he’s the ‘good’ brother. Until some very light persuasion leads him to turn into a sodding bank robber.

8 — At some point someone says that there are 8 million stories in the naked city (i.e. New York). This is a reference to the film The Naked City, which like 7,999,998 other stories in New York is no doubt better than this.

20 — If the brothers get caught they’ll apparently get 20 years in prison, minimum.

27 — The brothers steal 275,000 dollars from the bank, which doesn’t seem like that many dollars even in 1994 money, at least not enough to be worth the risks involved with robbing a bank.

24 — Most of the film is set on Christmas Eve, which is generally the 24th of December.

45 — Their bank robbery is delayed because the bloke with the key to safe isn’t going to be back for 45 minutes. LOL?

THE RESULT

No numbers. NONE. There’s also a thing this month where for some reason if you put some details about your ticket on their website there’s another draw in which you could win £20,000 and I haven’t even won that. Maybe I should rob a bank.

Actually, ironically enough, this week my debit card got cloned and someone attempted to spend £100 of my money in a Morrisons. I blame Dana Carvey.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Kiss of Death. If it’s worse than this I am going to have to seriously rethink my plans.

When people find out you’re watching all of Nicolas Cage’s films to try and win the lottery, there are two questions they generally ask.

The first is some variation on: ‘Why?’ or ‘What is wrong with you?’.

The second is: ‘Have you seen that one where he wins the lottery yet?’

I had, actually, already seen half of the one where he wins the lottery.

Life, it seems, is a series of peaks and troughs, and I once hit a particular low, when, newly single, newly unemployed, and with all my possessions stored in boxes in a friend’s spare bedroom, I found myself stood in a field near Staines with floodwater up to my knees. Clearly it had all gone wrong somewhere.

Perhaps it had gone wrong when I’d stopped watching Nicolas Cage films.

About three years before, while in something of a mental lull, I’d decided I was going to watch every film Nicolas Cage had ever appeared in, in order. Not to write about them, not even to play the lottery based on them (what a naive idiot I was), but simply to find the three funniest faces I could find Nicolas Cage pulling in each movie. I took screenshots and posted them on a Tumblr. But then stuff got in the way, things started going pretty well for me, personally and professionally. I decided I had better things to do: though I would claim I intended to carry on at some point, I basically had given up on Cage. About halfway through the one where he wins the lottery.

Could it all really have been a coincidence? Had I conjured a powerful force that had turned my life around? Had I then been punished for my lack of commitment to the Nouveau Shamanic, the dark art that fuels Cage? Or is this all just an extremely loose interpretation of the actual facts that happens to provide some tepid narrative to this delusional endeavour, while excusing the author of any real responsibility for being crap at life? Either way, I had to go back to the beginning and finish what I’d started.

Which brings us to It Could Happen To You.

Several things happened in 1984. Some of them were bad: Tommy Cooper had that heart attack on live television and everyone just laughed because they assumed it was a joke; Marvin Gaye was shot to death by his dad; I was born. But at least one of them was alright — a police officer offered to split any winnings from a lottery ticket with a waitress, instead of leaving a tip. He won $6 million, and in a true life heartwarming story actually did give her half instead of just pissing off with the money.

10 years later a writer called Jane Anderson took the gist of this, changed enough so no-one could sue, and turned it into a fictional lying Hollywood story (originally titled Cop Tips Waitress — it went through a variety of very crap titles before they settled on the only slightly crap It Could Happen To You). This script came to the attention of one Nicolas Cage, who passed it to director Andrew Bergman — in return, Bergman cast him as the lead.

Cage and Bergman had worked together on the slight but charming Honeymoon In Vegas, and It Could Happen To You is in a broadly similar modern day fairytale vein. There’s even have a storyteller — Isaac Hayes wanders about doing exposition.

It’s not a terrible film. Bridget Fonda and Cage are both extremely charming as put-upon waitress Yvonne and good-hearted cop Charlie, Rosie Perez is fine as Muriel, Charlie’s materialistic wife, unhappy (not completely unreasonably) that her husband has given away half their win. Stanley Tucci shows up as Yvonne’s grasping estranged spouse in a weird sub-plot that doesn’t end up going anywhere.

Where it falls down is that the script is just completely underwhelming. It’s light comedy with the emphasis on the light: the plot is vanishingly thin —the gist of how things are going to play out is obvious, the details perfunctory. Honeymoon In Vegas isn’t the world’s most complicated film, but much of its charm is in the silly bits in the margins. It Could Happen To You is straight down the line, and never stops to have any real fun. Cage’s performance is quite good — certainly his best go at ‘straight-forward’ acting so far, but it’s not particularly memorable, not a role that plays to his strengths.

Having said all that, when the happy ending inevitably rolls around I did briefly feel some fictional emotions in my cold dead heart, so I guess it does work on some level.

THE NUMBERS

Obviously, OBVIOUSLY, I’ve got to use the same numbers as Nicolas Cage uses in the film, right?

Except that the pissing New York lottery (or at least the version in this movie) uses a 99 number system, so not all of the winning numbers in the film can be used in the UK National Lottery.

Charlie picks 6,12,16,26,64 and 84, so I took the first four from the ticket, and added 2 others:

4 — Charlie and Muriel win $4 million, $2 million of which Charlie gives to Yvonne.

7 — The lottery ticket was bought on Wednesday July 7th, 1993. Or the draw was on that date. Or something.

THE RESULT

I did not win the lottery. Not a single number. Piss.

I’m not really sure if any of this is having some sort of mystically positive effect on my life. I certainly wouldn’t describe my current situation as a high point. But you know, it could be a lot worse, and I can, for the moment, still afford to buy lottery tickets.

The other day some blokes on a motorbike tried to rob my phone, but turned out to be really bad at robbing phones and instead just pulled my headphones out, let them drop to the ground and drove off. Was I protected by the power of Cage?

I also won a Sausage & Egg McMuffin in the McDonald’s lottery game thing, and have not yet ended up back in a flooded field near Staines, so maybe there is something in watching Nicolas Cage films after all.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Trapped in Paradise, the first film I’ll actually be watching for the first time. According to c0-star Jon Lovitz the cast and crew started referring to it as “Trapped in Bullshit”. So that’s sure to be good.

My name is Ed and twice a week I watch a film with Nicolas Cage in it, pick 6 numbers that are in or are somehow associated with that film, and use them to play the UK’s National Lottery.

Then I write about it, even if I’m quite tired and cross and have a headache and should really be doing any number of other things that might actually earn me some money.

And so: Guarding Tess. Shirley Maclaine from out of old films is Tess, the widow of a fictional American President. Nicolas Cage from out of Nicolas Cage films is Doug, an FBI agent who has to guard her. They have different personalities. Hilarity ensues.

This is, in the main, undemanding stuff for cast and audience alike. Cage can do comedy of frustration in his sleep, ditto MacClaine as his frustrater. The first two-thirds potter along, occasionally hitting the level of ‘vaguely amusing’ (going to the supermarket sure is different when you have to bring a team of FBI agents!) or ‘slightly touching’ (she’s sad because her husband is dead!). Richard Griffiths turns up as ‘generic Richard Griffiths role’, no particular reason.

It’s not totally unlikeable, but it’s thin stuff — given that the whole point of the film is the relationship between the two leads, it’s odd that so much is only explored in hints. The film starts with Doug having been assigned for Tess for 3 years already — putting the audience on the back foot for no particularly good reason. Too much is alluded to, too little happens. The light is too light, the shade isn’t shady enough.

It picks up a bit when Tess gets kidnapped and Cage gets to lose his shit, threatening to (and then actually starting to) shoot off a man’s toes. But really it’s all very perfunctory: he realises he actually cares about her, she realises she should probably stop being quite such a pain in the arse all the time. Everyone lives happily ever after, at least until she dies of a brain tumour.

That’s not a joke, and also not really a spoiler: Tess’s illness is a barely referenced subplot, played down compared to an earlier cut where her funeral served as the film’s framing device. Understandably, this bummed the shit out of test audiences and those sequences were hastily removed.

THE NUMBERS

3 — “I can’t do three more years there: I can’t do three more minutes there!” says Doug at the start of the film, incorrectly.

5 — Doug says he’ll shoot off one of the suspect’s toes if he doesn’t start talking by the time he counts to 5. He then actually does this, which is surprisingly hardcore given the tone of the film to this point.

7 —Doug’s marriage lasted for just 7 months. We’re probably supposed to read something into that.

22 — During a briefing about what’s been found in Tess’s recovered car, Doug says that she’s has been missing for 22 hours and 30 minutes.

30 — Tess’s kidnappers bury her in a hole for 30 hours. It’s probably not very nice being buried in a hole for 30 hours, but I’d be willing to try it for the right price.

38 — At one point Tess wants to play golf even though it’s 38 degrees outside. That is apparently quite cold in American degrees.

THE RESULT

I did not win the lottery.

What the hell is even the point of playing the lottery 24 times if you aren’t even going to win it once? Seems like a massive waste of money to me.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

In the 25th ever edition of this nonsense, it’s the one where he wins the lottery. So that’s GOT to be a sign, right?

My name is Ed and twice a week I watch a Nicolas Cage film and then play the lottery using numbers inspired by that film.

Last time, I watched Deadfall, which the Rotten Tomatoes algorithm has deemed the worst Nicolas Cage film, with a 0% score. This time I have watched Red Rock West, which has the highest Rotten Tomatoes score for a Nic Cage film, at 95%. [2020 note: It is now only the highest scoring *live action* Nic Cage film]

Deadfall is quite bad, but it’s definitely not the worst film Nicolas Cage has ever been in — it’s not even close to being the worst film I’ve watched in my quest to win the lottery. And Red Rock West is a fine enough film, but definitely not the best I’ve watched so far (and certainly not when counting Nicolas Cage films I watched before I tried to start winning the lottery). Trying to algorithmically create an ‘objective’ way to rank films is clearly a futile endeavour. Give it up, Mr Rotten Tomatoes!

But anyway, back to trying to win the lottery by watching Red Rock West.

Squint, and it’s David Lynch: Nic Cage, Lara Flynn Boyle and Dennis Hopper in a tale about the seedy underside of small-town America. Depending on your point of view this is either Lynch with a slicker, more coherent script, or Lynch with all the interesting bits filed off.

Cage is Mike, a drifter just trying to find some honest work (I can relate), who finds himself in the seemingly unremarkable town of Red Rock. He thinks he’s finally found a gig after he’s mistaken for someone else, only to find out that the ‘job’ is a hit-job, and the target is his new employer’s wife (Lara Flynn Boyle).

He warns her that she’s in danger and leaves town as fast as he can — only get into a car accident that forces him to return and face his ‘employer’, who turns out to also be the town’s sheriff. The real hitman (Dennis Hopper) turns up, Mike falls for the sheriff’s wife, and things continue to escalate, often at gunpoint. (With hilarious consequences?)

It’s a fun little film — not much to it beyond the twists and turns, but it ticks along fast enough to get away with it. Cage’s performance isn’t one of his more notable efforts, but he’s really nailed ‘increasing exasperation’ down as a baseline character trait at this point.

While compared to Deadfall this is a work of towering genius, I suspect its excellent reputation stems a lot from a lack of exposure as much as anything else. It’s a hard film to fault, but it’s also never truly exceptional — this is more tightly written than Lynch’s Wild At Heart, but it never really shows anything like the flair, anything that really sticks with you.

The distributor at the time lost faith in the film, and it would have gone straight to video if the enthusiastic owner of a small cinema in San Fransisco hadn’t chanced upon it at a Canadian film festival. I expect it turned up on BBC2 at 1 in the morning at some point.

THE NUMBERS

5 — Near the start of the film, Mike pulls into a service station, and spends his last 5 dollars on petrol. The guy working there suggests he try a town called Red Rock if he’s looking for work. HEY, THAT’S THE TOWN FROM THE NAME OF THE MOVIE!

10 — When Mike is first mistaken for Lyle, the hitman, Wayne, his would-be employer says he’ll get paid 10 grand to kill his wife: 5 now, 5 later.

12 — One of the numbers in the combination to Wayne’s safe is 12.

19 — Wayne and his wife Suzanne themselves turn out to be in hiding because they stole 1.9 million in a bank robbery.

24 — Mike reveals to Lyle that when he was a marine he was stationed with the 24th in the Lebanon.

50 — When Mike first hears of Red Rock, he’s told it’s 50 miles down the road.

THE RESULT

No numbers matched.

Soon I and my lovely wife will have to rob a bank, and then she will try to leave me and bone Nicolas Cage.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Guarding Tess. Google describes it as a ‘thriller/comedy of manners’, which must be the least appealing genre of film I’ve ever heard of.