Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films.

The problem with trying to predict lottery numbers by watching every Nicolas Cage film in order is that you have to watch every Nicolas Cage film in order, even if they are films so bad that they went straight to video at the time and are of so little note that they have never been released on DVD. Such as Never on Tuesday

Seriously, what hasn’t been released on DVD, in 2016? It’s basically this film and the entire back catalogue of Little and Large. Although in that case the inexplicability is more that they ever achieved mainstream popularity  —  watch some videos on YouTube, it is mind-bending stuff. There’s this one where they’re dressed up like Status Quo and Bob Holness from Blockbusters is there as well and they’re just pretending to play Status Quo songs and that’s the entire joke. It’s basically performance art. Sadly Nicolas Cage never appeared in a Little and Large show, as far as I can tell.

The feasibility of actually watching Never on Tuesday was a major concern when I initially tried to work out how viable this whole project was. After all, I definitely can’t win the lottery by watching all of the Nicolas Cage films if I haven’t watched all of the Nicolas Cage films. ‘Thankfully’ after a great deal of searching I managed to get hold of a rather blurry, panned and scanned, copy of it.

The first thing to note is that this is stretching the definition of “a Nicolas Cage film” — he appears, uncredited, with a false nose and wig, as a man who drives up in a sports car, gets out of it, wheezes, flails and giggles a bit, then gets back in his sports car and drives away again.

This is one of a series of cameos that punctuate Never on Tuesday (other turns include Charlie Sheen and Judd Nelson), a rather slight film about three people stuck on a desert roadside after a car accident.

Eddie and Matt (Peter Berg  – who now directs things like that film based on the game Battleships, and Andrew Lauer  – later in justifiably forgotten Lea Thompson sitcom Caroline In The City) are sex-crazed teenage boys who think driving to LA will in and of itself get them laid for some reason. They decide that divving about while driving is a good idea and crash into another car, stranding themselves and the other driver. Who is called Tuesday. And is Claudia Christian, from off of Babylon 5 (the best TV series ever, according to people who drink Humbrol paint) and many other even worse things. The boys would like to do a sex with her, as the film subtly indicates by pointing the camera at her boobs.

Unfortunately for them, she is a lesbian  –  what bad luck, because as we all know women who aren’t lesbians love to have the sex with strange men who’ve just wrecked their cars!

Aforementioned series of cameos aside, the gist of pretty much the entire film is this: the wet men objectify the woman, and the sassy woman says something sarcastic about the men. Insert your own joke about Steven Moffat scripts here.

You can see what first-time director Adam Rifkin is going for  – a cheap, very simple set up carried by the humour and the relationships between the characters. But there’s just nothing there  –  the jokes are at best listless and at worst offhandedly sexist and homophobic, while the characters barely exist. Tuesday at one point asks why the boys are even friends and the response might as well be, “I don’t know, but it says we are in the script.”

I feel a bit bad for kicking something that has essentially been dumped in the bin of cinematic history anyway, but Never on Tuesday really is appallingly bad. Despite this, a rerelease on DVD was at one point scheduled, before the company responsible went bust. Which is probably not a very good omen, but still, it’s time to play the lottery.

THE NUMBERS

6 — There are 6 notable uncredited cameos: Nicolas Cage, Charlie Sheen, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Cary Elwes and Gilbert Gottfried.

7 — The boys’ car numberplate is 529 T7H.

8 — Her numberplate has an 8 on the end. Look, there really aren’t a lot of numbers to pick from in this thing.

9 — One of boys wears size 9 Reeboks. I do not care to remember which one.

20 — Gilbert Gottfried plays a brush salesman. It is a special brush. Our heroes buy a brush off of him for 20 dollars — well, 19.95, but he keeps the change, promising to return the nickel if he ever sees them again. I suspect this to be a lie!

30 — Nicolas Cage’s total screen time is less than 30 seconds. Never on Tuesday lasts over 90 minutes. The average life expectancy for a British male is 79 years.

THE RESULT

Well, nothing. I mean in some ways it would have been annoying if I’d won because of a film Nicolas Cage isn’t really in it, but I imagine the 2 million quid would have gone some way to making up for it.

Still, onwards and upwards, to something that Nicolas Cage is definitely in.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Vampire’s Kiss. Even if you haven’t seen it, you have almost certainly seen the memes.

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films.

Last week made a refreshing change — one film was quite good, the other was fantastic. But neither won me the lottery. And so, I continue, hoping each time that my next leap will be the leap home.

Why, as suggested in the Dean Martin song “That’s Amore”, would the moon hit your eye like a big pizza pie? I mean, I get that it’s a metaphor and not really about the actual moon hitting you in the eye which depending on where it happened could be anything from a personal to a global disaster. I think it just means “when the moon looks really big” but I don’t see why that’s romantic. The biggest moon I’ve ever seen was when I was walking along a canal on my own, swigging beer out of a tin. Is that what Dean Martin thinks romance is?

Anyway, Moonstruck seems to broadly agree on this moon/romance theme, even taking Dean Martin’s song as the music for the opening titles. The plot of the film is that there is a big moon and it’s making loads of Italian Americans be in love/want to do sex. The main ones who are in love/want to do sex are Loretta (Cher), who has just gotten engaged to a dull bloke called Johnny because she wants a baby, and Ronny (Nicolas Cage), who is Johnny’s estranged younger brother.

Johnny leaves the country and asks Loretta to persuade Ronny to come to their wedding. At first she does not get on with him at all, but in a shocking unforeseen twist, they end up banging.

Surrounding this is a series of loosely connected ‘comedic’ vignettes — Frasier’s dad from off of Frasier keeps having glasses of wine thrown over him by inappropriately young women, one or more of Loretta’s indistinguishable elderly relatives is having an affair, and so on. It would be tempting to describe Moonstruck as being something along the lines of a lesser Woody Allen work, if not for the fact that the main love story about an older woman falling for a younger man which would obviously never happen in a Woody Allen movie.

The most notable scene is that in which we meet Cage’s character for the first time — whilst he is called upon to do some quality emoting, he ramps things up to provide some QUANTITY EMOTING, which is so over the top as to be laugh out loud funny. As he details the history of the feud with his brother, gesticulating wildly with his ‘wooden’ hand (the real one having been chopped over for tenuous plot-driving reasons) and managing some truly interesting ‘interpretations’ of the Brooklyn accent, he’s so wild that you could be forgiven for thinking that he’s taking the piss.

This is, unfortunately, about as good as Moonstruck gets — after this peak it rapidly slides back into varying degrees of interminable, if occasionally amiable. ‘Crazy’ Ronny ends up falling for ‘dowdy’ Loretta, who dyes her hair and puts on a nice dress and — SURPRISE — ends up looking like Cher. The film drifts towards a conclusion like a fancily shot soap opera (via an actual opera — DO NOT PUT A TRIP TO THE OPERA IN A FILM UNLESS THERE IS GOING TO BE SHOOTINGS), and everyone appears to live more or less happily ever after.

Apparently I’m an outlier in not finding much of interest in Moonstruck — it won three Oscars, including one for the screenplay and one for Cher (fair enough, she’s pretty good in it), and is generally pretty well-regarded — people especially seem to like the bit where she slaps Nicolas Cage in the face for some reason. Philistines.

THE NUMBERS

2 — A priest tells Loretta that banging Ronny means she must pray two rosaries as penance. I don’t know what this means but it doesn’t sound that bad.

5 — There has been 5 years of bad blood between the brothers because Ronny cut his fingers off in a bread slicing machine whilst his brother was… nearby? And that made his fiancée leave him?

19 — Loretta’s apartment is located at 19 Cranberry St. It’s now worth over $4 million. Maybe I will buy it if I win the lottery. People will be so impressed that I live in the Moonstruck apartment — “Look over there, it’s where Cher pretended to bang Nicolas Cage!”

25 — In the light of the moon one of the old men looks like he is 25 years old, according to one of the old women. He doesn’t, he still looks well old.

28 — Loretta was 28 the first time she got married. Her husband got hit by a bus.

50 — Loretta meets a weird old lady at the airport who tells her she’s cursed Johnny’s plane because her sister is on board. Her sister stole her boyfriend 50 years ago, apparently. Everyone in this film should calm down.

THE RESULT

1 number again. What do you want, the lottery? Do you want me to cut my fingers off?

Stuff the stupid moon up your arse.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Never On Tuesday, which is so good that it has never been released on DVD because that would be unfair to all the other films.

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films.

I know not why I must do this, but a spirit came to me in a dream and told me I must do it, so I do. This time, Nicolas Cage is actually married to someone named Ed so I am almost definitely going to win the jackpot.

The very best things don’t really appear to have been made at all. They are so exactly the thing they’re supposed to be that even the greatest efforts involved in producing them become invisible. They give the appearance of just having one day popped into the universe, self-contained, fully and perfectly formed, because it was somehow necessary for them to exist, and once experienced it seems wholly unlikely that there was a point that they didn’t.

The films of the Coen Brothers include a remarkable number of examples of this, and although Raising Arizona could be considered an fairly minor work in their canon, by almost anyone else’s standards it is a classic.

In essence, Raising Arizona is the story of an ex-con (Herbert “H.I.”/”Hi” McDunnough — Nic Cage) and an ex-cop (Edwina “Ed” McDunnough — Holly Hunter) who, unable to conceive a child of their own, decide to steal Nathan Junior, one of a set of local quintuplets, reasoning that the parents have more than they can handle.

It is not a story with a great deal of weight, but it’s so vividly and wittily brought to life that it’s completely enjoyable, from start to finish. Cage is finally at home in the abstracted version of reality (somewhere between fairy tale and bible story) that the Coens’ films live in — the performance is not much less wild than his Peggy Sue Got Married turn but here it’s grounded, contextualized. There’s no on-screen evidence of the reported ‘spirited’ disagreements between the three during production, although it is presumably no coincidence that they’ve never worked together again.

Holly Hunter is delightful as Ed, the cop who fell for H.I. because she was booking him at the station so often — this origin could almost be a film in itself, but here is deftly told with a few minutes of opening montage. The supporting characters are superb creations — especially Francis McDormand’s Dot, an enthusiastic advocate of motherhood who shows absolutely no interest in parenting her own vile, destructive offspring (and also a swinger).

If the film overreaches at all it’s with Leonard Smalls, a somewhat inexplicable avenging lone biker who takes it upon himself to take back the kidnapped child, and has some, never quite acknowledged, connection to H.I. — are they relations or is he H.I.’s own conscience made flesh? It gives the film the final confrontation it requires but it feels a little forced — a rare glimpse at the men behind the camera maneuvering things.

But yes, overall, I like Raising Arizona, it is good, and now can I win the lottery please because I would like to buy a boat.

THE NUMBERS

1 — In H.I.’s vision of the future, the grown up Nathan Junior is seen wearing the number 1 on his American football shirt. The actual baby grew up to be an estate agent.

5 — The babies are known as the Arizona Quints. Not because they’re from Arizona, but because their father is Nathan Arizona (because, as he explains, who would buy furniture from Nathan Huffhines?)

6 — Nicolas Cage is 6 foot tall, as is clearly visible from the height chart in the opening sequence where Ed repeatedly takes H.I.’s mugshot. I used to think I was 6 foot tall but it turned out that in some moment of vanity I’d given myself an extra half inch and then forgotten about it.

12 — H.I. steals Nathan Junior on Wednesday, April 12th.

31 — When Ed and H.I. first meet his most regular address is Maricopa County Correctional Facility For Men State Farm, Road Number 31, Tempe, Arizona.

56 — H.I. and Ed’s “starter home” is a trailer located at 4256 of some road in Tempe, Arizona. There’s a bit where it gets slightly smashed up and it upset me because I don’t like when people’s stuff gets smashed up in films?

THE RESULT

Another solitary bloody number.

10 films in, and I have won 0 pounds. AND NICOLAS CAGE WAS BASICALLY MARRIED TO ME IN THIS ONE.

Anyone could be forgiven for abandoning the whole thing at this point.

But then the other night I went for a walk, and the powers sent me an omen. Dozens of National Lottery entry slips, scattered over the road. Staring at me. Willing me on.

So it continues.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Moonstruck. It’s the one where he bangs Cher I expect.

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films.

What would you do if had the chance to travel back in time and fix your mistakes? Would you be able to fix it so you’d have something more fulfilling to do with your existence than watch 2 Nicolas Cage films a week and pretending it will win you the lottery? Or would you decide to change nothing and do it all over again?

Well, that’s exactly the dilemma Kathleen Turner faces in Peggy Sue Got Married apart from the bit about watching 2 Nicolas Cage films a week and the lottery. But basically exactly the same as that!

It’s the eve of Peggy Sue (Turner)’s 25-year school reunion and she’s somewhat dreading it, having recently separated from her unfaithful husband, and high school sweetheart, Charlie (Nic Cage). Running into her old school friends gets her reminiscing about what she’d have done differently if only she got another chance, which she then immediately does after falling over and waking up in 1960.

Peggy Sue Got Married, the 3rd and final collaboration between Cage and his uncle Francis Ford Coppola, bears some striking superficial similarities to the previous year’s Back To The Future, although here the time traveller is returning to her own past rather than that of her parents. Class geek Richard becomes a pseudo-Doc Brown, convinced of Peggy’s story after she tells him of his future as a great inventor, and both films climax with their leads attempting to return to their own times via deeply unlikely procedures in the middle of a thunderstorm.

But thematically they’re very different — where Back To The Future is about the realisation that your parents weren’t always so different to you, this is about dealing with your own past, regrets and missed opportunities. Peggy Sue desperately wants to get back to her adult life — but is also hugely tempted by the opportunity to start over again and do it differently this time. Also to do it with the school’s would-be beat poet in the woods.

Cage’s role as written is fairly straightforward stuff — in 1960 a carefree romantic with dreams of being a rock ‘n’ roll star, by 1985 given a heavy dash of disillusionment and midlife crisis. Cage’s role as acted? Well…

For reasons best known to Nicolas Cage, he decided he was going to base the character on a squeakily voiced animated horse called Pokey from a sort of shit American prefiguring of Morph called The Gumby Show. Complete with ludicrously huge false teeth. Which is all rather enjoyable on its own merits — the carefree musician played with a bizarre goofball energy — to draw another Back To The Future analogy, Cage is playing both Marty and George McFly simultaneously, as one character. (George McFly was played by Crispin Glover, previously encountered in The Best Of Times and, briefly, Racing With The Moon.)

But here’s the problem: Cage’s ridiculous performance is almost totally incompatible with the rest of the film. By all accounts Kathleen Turner was furious about the whole business (that the director could be taken to be allowing his idiot boy nephew to get away with it can’t have helped) — and this is visible in their catastrophic lack of chemistry. Fine when she’s reacting to the man who has left (or is going to leave) her for a younger woman, pretty hopeless when we’re supposed to believe she’s fallen in love all over again.

It’s a shame, as Peggy Sue Got Married is otherwise not half bad — Turner is charming, Coppola’s nostalgia for the era is palpable, and the script’s refreshingly unpredictable, with a bittersweet, not entirely unhopeful, ending.

Somewhat improbably, a musical adaptation of Peggy Sue Get Married opened in London’s West End for a few weeks in 2001, before closing a few weeks later after 9–11 made people stop wanting to see musicals. Never forget.

But will I never forget the day I watched Peggy Sue Got Married because it was the day I won the lottery?

THE NUMBERS

3 — Everyone’s constantly saying “Why, I oughta!” and laughing. This is something one of The Three Stooges says, apparently.

5 — Peggy Sue’s mum wears Chanel No. 5 — Peggy Sue finds the smell nostalgic which is a bit of clever irony because she is smelling it in the past! Peggy Sue’s daughter, meanwhile, is played by Helen Hunt, also the co-star of some of the implausibly terrible Trancers films, which are also about time-travel and make Police Academy seem like an artistically important franchise.

6 — When Peggy tells Richard the nerd that man will land on the moon in 1969 he claims this is 6 years ahead of schedule. For space reasons, I imagine.

10 — Michael the school poet says he’ll be gone 10 minutes after graduation. He’s planning to go to Utah and wants Peggy Sue to come with him and help his other girlfriend look after his chickens while he writes poetry. Amazingly she turns down this offer.

25 — The films opens at Peggy Sue’s 25th school reunion. One of Peggy Sue’s school friends is played by the lady what kisses Captain Kirk in Star Trek IV, which is also also about time travel.

55 — The Gumby Show, which featured Cage’s inspiration Pokey the horse, was first shown in 1955.

THE RESULT

0 matches on the Peggy Sue Got Married ticket, 1 match on the Lucky Dip I won last time. Damn you, Peggy Sue.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Cage meets the Coens, in Raising Arizona.

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films.

You know how famously popular film Star Wars has that whole writing bit at the beginning where it goes:

“It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.”

Imagine a film that instead has a writing bit at the beginning that goes:

“Before baseball, football or soccer, one sport alone captured the imagination of both rich and poor — sculling.”

Fuck everything.

The thing about watching and writing about these films twice a week is that between watching them, buying a lottery ticket with numbers inspired by them, waiting for the result and finishing the write up, each one ends up sticking around in my brain for 2–4 days — so this whole era of early Cage mediocre-to-crappy period drama has been a time of fairly low morale.

But bloody hell, The Boy In Blue.

The Boy In Blue is, very loosely, the story of real-life Canadian rowing champion Ned Hanlan, and when I say loosely I mean that had he not died in 1908 some of this would probably have been actionable. Hanlan’s actual biography is more or less: was good at rowing, so it needed a bit of fleshing out.

So there’s some Triumph Against Adversity: Will poor smuggler done good Ned Hanlan win the day and prove he is the goodest at rowing despite the rich rowing barons who want him to lose so they can win a bet or something?

And a Love Story: Ned wants to do some full kissing on rich rowing baron Christopher Plummer’s daughter.

But fundamentally what we’ve got here is just “Damp Rocky” — training montages and everything.

But this is really is damp stuff — if it wasn’t for the fairly appalling (although incredibly tame) sex scenes and everyone shouting ‘Bugger!’ constantly for reasons of dubious historical accuracy, this would pass as an educational TV special for bored Canadian children.

Side note here: it’s notable that almost all of the films I’ve watched for this endeavour have involved superfluous topless ladies. Presumably life before the internet was bad enough that people would buy a ticket to see some rubbish period drama on the off-chance that a lady’s top would fall down.

The storytelling is so mechanically laboured that the cast sleep their way through it — bang out the lines to get through the scene, move on. The film has so little confidence in its ability to make Hanlan’s actual life interesting that it fabricates wildly — most notably falsely suggesting that he was banned from rowing in America after deliberately capsizing a rival’s boat, which is a pretty shitty thing to say about someone.

The film’s main attempt to add colour is it’s truly sub-Police Academy level ‘jokes’. For instance: “You oughta be an actress!” Ned’s manager tells a prostitute who’s just helped them out of a fix. “I am an actress!”, she replies. Then Motormouth Jones does a noise.

Above all this the film’s biggest flaw is a complete failure to capture what might be compelling about rowing as a sport — the tension in the racing scenes always comes from someone having sabotaged Ned’s boat — there’s no question that he might not measure up. Indeed, his ability to recover after his opponents are handed huge leads suggests boat sabotage might be a reasonable handicap.

Cage himself is not on particularly good form — lumbering around alternately grinning stupidly and doing a cross face depending on how much he’s being mugged off by rich people in each scene. His ostensibly Canadian accent vanishes depending on whether he’s remembered to do it. In interviews he’s made it clear that he considered the film at best a ‘learning experience’, and afterwards he had his back tattooed with a fluorescent lizard in a hat to make it harder for directors to cast him in ‘shirtless beefcake’ roles.

The absolute best thing that can be said The Boy In Blue is at just over 90 minutes it is mercifully short. And to think that just 4 weeks ago I was complaining about watching 48 minutes of The Best Of Times.

THE NUMBERS

2 — When Ned is arrested for smuggling or sinning or something, he is thrown into Cell Number 2.

3 — Apparently it will cost Ned $3 a fancy carriage to impressive Margaret, “velvet seats and all”.

10 — At one in the film point some chancer is selling Ned Hanlan pillowcases for 10 cents — 25 cents after he wins! You can actually buy Nicolas Cage pillowcases but sadly they cost a lot more than 10 cents.

20 — Ned buys Margaret a puppy for $20. Remember, puppies are for life, not just trying to impress slightly dull posh women.

40 — The Boy In Blue gets a rowing boat with a special sliding seat that will “put 40 yards on a mile easy”. Whatever the hell that means. It involved the number 40, anyway.

50 — The inventor of the special sliding seat is offered $50,000 for the patent. In fairness, the technology it replaces is apparently rubbing loads of oil over the back of your trousers so I guess I’m in.

THE RESULT

Perplexing. The actual Cage numbers only matched 1 ball, but the Lucky Dip I won last week matched 2, winning a further free Lucky Dip. This whole exercise would have been a lot less complicated if they hadn’t changed the rules of the stupid lottery.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Hopefully I can step back from the ledge as we move beyond Cage’s dreary period drama era, with Francis Ford Coppola’s answer to Back To The Future, Peggy Sue Got Married. Which now I think about it is technically a period drama. SAVE ME FROM MYSELF.

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films, because I believe that Nicolas Cage is magic and has the power to distort the laws of probability, or at least I am willing to pretend to believe that for the sake of a thin conceit. (If you’re just joining me, start here for the full reasoning behind this.)

Another thing that idiots suppose has the power to bend the laws of probability is birds. A bird shitting on you is good luck. Seeing one magpie is bad luck. Seeing several magpies causes you to remember the 1970s, and so on. This is all obviously nonsense — every kind of bird doing anything at all is bad luck, because birds are all gross mutants and looking at them for any length of time makes me feel ill.

I’m not entirely clearly why this is, but one time a dead pigeon appeared in my front garden and it had all it’s guts hanging out and disposing of it (using a baking tray, rolling pin and rubber gloves, all of which I binned immediately afterwards) was one of the most upsetting moments of my entire life, much to the amusement of my idiot friends who aren’t even afraid of dead birds with all their guts hanging out.

Unfortunately for me, the next film on my list is Birdy, which features dead birds, alive birds, men dressed up as birds and worst of all, baby birds, nature’s most horrifying creation. When I was a kid I stopped eating boiled eggs for a bit because I was terrified of the possibility of finding dead chick inside. I have some really messed up stuff going in my head re: birds, apparently.

Birdy is a rather strange story about two teenagers, one of whom, Matthew Modine’s titular Birdy, is so obsessed with birds that he wants to turn into one and the other of whom, Al, is played Nicolas Cage. The film explores the psychological consequences of their time spent serving in the Vietnam War, while flashing back to show the origin and development of their friendship, and also loads of horrible bastard birds.

The film is in some ways most effective in the framing sequences in which Al visits Birdy in a mental hospital and attempt to coax him out of the near catatonic state his military service has left him in. Birdy’s mute status leaves Cage with some long, rather theatrical monologues and whilst his performance isn’t mind-blowing it’s engaging enough and in terms of straight-forward dramatic performances, his best to this point.

The flashbacks, however, are something of a cypher. The film traces Birdy’s growing obsession, which leads from training to carrier pigeons, to dressing up as a bird, to building a “flying machine”, to ultimately believing that he can actually somehow become a bird — but it’s unclear if we’re supposed to think of him as a misunderstood eccentric or as someone with a severe mental illness.

The friendship is also presented somewhat obliquely — given Birdy’s visible disinterest in women (at point he is proffered some bosoms and is left utterly baffled) and several moments of rather tender physical contact, one could hunt for the obvious subtext. But that doesn’t, to me, seem to unlock anything of particular interest here (unless you really want to imagine Nicolas Cage and Matthew Modine kissing), and if anything Birdy just seems to really want to kiss an actual disgusting bird.

Anyway, then they go to war and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a film with the Vietnam War in it, but you’ll never guess: it goes very badly for everyone concerned. As with much of Birdy, the war sequences are visually effective but lack substance — at heart it’s entirely standard Vietnam movie fare with a cameo from a tropical bird whacked in at the end.

The film’s highpoint is, fittingly literally, a technically innovative sequence from the POV of Birdy as he dreams that he has become one of the birds flying over his neighbourhood. The footage, shot with a camera on wires hung from four 100 foot high posts, is stunning, and, most importantly doesn’t involve any revolting close-ups of birds.

In summary: an insubstantial, occasionally quite well-shot curiosity ideal for people who think looking at birds is nice.

THE NUMBERS

2 —There’s an urban legend that while preparing for Birdy, Nicolas Cage had two teeth extracted without anaesthetic purely to get a lived experience of intense pain to reference in his performance. This is largely bollocks — Cage himself says he happened to need to get two baby teeth removed and it fitted with the facial injuries Al suffers in Vietnam— but I also had to have two baby teeth removed so let’s take that as a omen. (I didn’t even get to be in a film, I just got stupid braces.)

3 — Al’s army service number is 10107003.

14 — Birdy is being kept in cell number 114 of the mental hospital.

16 — Birdy likes being in the sea because he think swimming underwater is a bit like flying. He stays under while an increasingly concerned Al counts out 16 Mississippis.

40 — After a lot of exercise Birdy believe he can flap his arms with “40 pounds of flying power”.

53 — Birdy and Al fix up a 1953 Ford. The first time they take it on the road they are arrested for driving an unregistered vehicle and Al’s dad flogs the car to his mate. Al’s dad sucks.

THE RESULT

Nothing on the main ticket, but the free Lucky Dip I won last time matched 2 numbers, and so has itself won me another free Lucky Dip under the weird new rules of the slightly revised modern day National Lottery. I will attribute this to The Cotton Club, which won me the original Lucky Dip, rather than the revolting horrible bird film that I hope to never see again.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Oh Christ, The Boy In Blue, yet another sodding period drama. About fucking ROWING. Give me strength. At least there probably aren’t any birds in it.

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films.

This time, it’s a family business, because a) it’s another film directed by his uncle Francis Ford Coppola, and b) it’s about gangsters and people call them a family even though they shoot each in the face a lot more than most families.

The Cotton Club was a real actual place where you could go to in 1920–30s New York if you wanted to see some top musical acts with some nice healthy racism and presumably people getting stabbed up sometimes because it was run by gangsters. The film is very vaguely based on some factual stuff that happened but all the people have different names so the writers can make stuff up about them when they feel like it. This is somewhat familiar territory for Coppola — to the point where the original screenplay was written by Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather.

The big difference between this and the director’s earlier gangster outings is that this time there’s a lot more singing and dancing — the film is really the story of the performers who get unwittingly dragged into gangland, centrally pianist-turned-actor Dixie (Richard Gere) and tap dancer Sandman (Gregory Hines). And it’s the musical sequences that stand out — the film snoozes through the shouting gangster stuff but wakes up a bit as soon as someone’s singing Minnie the Moocher or whatever.

There really isn’t a vast amount to say about the whole business — it just sort of bimbles along rather clinically for 2 hours until it stops, leaving us vaguely educated about the more seedy aspects of 1930s New York but never particularly engaged. Everyone’s called things like Frenchie or Dutchie. There’s a “funny” scene about Hollywood producers being quite cynical — sick burn, Francis. There’s an actually funny scene where black gangsters stick a racist man’s head into a toilet. Bob Hoskins is in it.

Cage takes the part of Richard Gere’s younger brother, convinced he can become a really good gangster despite the handicap of being a massive idiot. Witless aggression is well within his range, and *spoilers* he gets his first screen death. Because, kids: being a gangster is bad.

The most interesting scene is the very final one, in which reality falls apart. Dixie is taking the train out of New York to get away from all these naughty mobsters, but suddenly Grand Central Station merges with stage of The Cotton Club — staff and passengers start dancing all over the shop, and when Dixie finally gets the girl, the audience cheers. Fairly saccharine stuff, but a relief after the rather flat 2 hours that precede it. Still, on to business:

THE NUMBERS

13 — The female lead, Vera, claims to have been on her own since she was 13 years old. Diane Lane “won” a Razzie for this which only adds weight to my theory that the people who give out Razzies are arseholes because it’s really not a notably bad performance.

20 — The train in the surreal finale is “the 20th Century Limited” as prominently indicated by a sign hanging off the back. I don’t know if this is some sort of funny joke about the film business (20th Century being one of the companies that merged to become 20th Century Fox around this time) but there really was a train service called that so now you have learned a thing about a train.

23 — Dixie chucks a drink on Vera in the 23rd Street Bar and Grill, for reasons that now escape me.

28 — The film opens in the year 1928. In the film Stargate 1928 is the year they find the Stargate but it is not clear if Stargate and The Cotton Club are set in the same cinematic universe.

37 — ‘Gangster’ is the answer to 37 across in a crossword someone or other is doing. This is a very subtle joke because the film is about gangsters!

50 — Nicolas Cage ransoms Frenchie (or possibly Dutchie, who can remember?) for $50,000. It basically does not go well for him in the long run, so I am going to stick to playing the lottery.

THE RESULT

2 balls! Free Lucky Dip! If I can get 2 balls this often, how hard can it be to get 6?

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Birdy. Yet another bloody period drama, about WAR and FRIENDSHIP, I expect.

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films. Medium recommended the tags “Personal Development” and “Mental Health” for this post and I don’t know what it is trying to say. [2020 note: I originally published these on confusing ‘content platform’ Medium]

So far, trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films hasn’t worked — but will a wartime romantic drama starring bad idiot Sean Penn turn things around?

World War 2 is happening, which means some pretend men played by Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage are going to be shipped off to fight in just 6 weeks. Let us hope nothing of note happens to them in that time! (Don’t worry, almost nothing does!)

The 2 basic plot threads here are that Sean Penn fancies Elizabeth McGovern (later the American mum one from Downton Abbey) — and that Nicolas Cage needs to pay for his girlfriend’s abortion. These two threads intersect when Cage asks Penn to borrow money off McGovern who they assume is rich because she lives in a big house except in a twist she is not rich, she is the daughter of a servant because this is not Downton Abbey and she is playing a different character because that is how acting works.

Various events occur in this film. Sean Penn tries to woo the lady by going roller skating even though he can’t roller skate with consequences that fall well within the audience’s expectations. Nicolas Cage tries to get a tattoo but is very drunk and doesn’t have any money so he can’t get a tattoo. The lady takes Sean Penn to see some injured soldiers so we can all learn that war is in fact a bad thing.

Just as the film appears to have reached a limit of tedium, our ‘heroes’ decide to raise the money they need for the abortion by hustling some sailors at pool, so we get to watch people playing pool. For approximately 17 hours until the viewer wishes a violent death on everyone present.

Cage tries to liven things up, but his attempts to give his character some edge (most amusingly in the aforementioned scene where he keeps demanding a tattooist ink the “high-flying, red, white and blue bird of freedom” over his heart) work against the tone of the rest of the film — there’s no pathos to balance the mania, so he just comes across as an aggressively unpleasant idiot.

The film finally ends with our brave boys about to board the train to war, which they deliberately miss so they have to run after it and jump on the back. Because they are bell-ends, and I hope the war goes very badly for them.

Oh yeah, and no-one races with the Moon even once. As far I can work out the title is just a reference to some cack old song that isn’t even in the film. So my advice is don’t watch Racing With The Moon unless you really need to because of a magic spell you’re doing to win the national lottery. For instance:

THE NUMBERS

2 — The number of the lane Nicolas Cage is setting up when we first meet him in a bowling alley. In the olden days they didn’t have a robot or whatever to reset the lanes in bowling alleys, they had to have a Nicolas Cage to do it!

8 — Sean Penn has a dog called August, which is the EIGHTH month.

12 — Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage are shipped off to war on the 12th of February.

25 — The shoes the American mum from Downton Abbey wants but can’t afford cost 25 dollars, which is a lot of money because it is olden days.

42 — The film starts in the year 1942.

45 —The number of the train the takes Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage to war when this film finally fucking ends.

THE RESULT

0 balls matched, on either my main ticket or the bonus Lucky Dip I won for Valley Girl. I sat through all of that nonsense for NOTHING? Screw you, Racing With The Moon. Screw you.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

The Cotton Club, which was the first film to ever use the Macrovision VHS copy protection system. It says here.

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films, for reasons discussed here!

A few hundred years ago, a bloke named William Shakespeare wrote a play called Romeo and Juliet about a man and lady from slightly different backgrounds who want to have a kiss. It does not end well at all! This play is of no use to me because it doesn’t have Nicolas Cage in. Nicolas Cage isn’t even in any of the films of it, not even the one by that Australian bloke where it’s sort of modern day so teenagers from the ’90s can relate to it.

What does have Nicolas Cage in it is Valley Girl, a romantic comedy that is supposedly based on Romeo and Juliet, but that isn’t actually based on Romeo and Juliet very much at all. Alright, the main characters are called Randy and Julie — she’s from the valley, he’s from the city. Their friends disapprove of their relationship. And there are a few fights in it. But it certainly doesn’t have what would have been the most miserable ending in ’80s teen comedy canon.

This is the first time Nicolas Cage was actually cast as ‘unknown actor Nicolas Cage’, rather than ‘ Nicolas Coppola, nephew of famous director Francis Ford Coppola’, although the family connection continued to pay off. The story goes that director Martha Coolidge had struggled to find a leading man, eventually in exasperation saying something along the lines of “Stop bringing me these pretty-boys, I want someone who looks like this bloody weirdo,” while holding up a headshot of Cage which just happened to have come to hand.

Cage then immediately turned it down because he’d just accepted a role in his uncle’s film, Rumble Fish (for which see previous instalment). Coolidge was determined to have him, and thought she could work some scheduling magic by pulling in a favour from Francis Coppola – she’d worked for his production company earlier in her career. The resulting phone call was somewhat awkward, as Coolidge didn’t know Nic Cage was Nic Coppola, and at the time no-one working on Rumble Fish knew that Nic Coppola was Nic Cage. With hilarious consequences, I expect!

If you want to overanalyse the plot of Valley Girl like one of those films they overanalyse on the internet nowadays, the romantic arc is, on the face of it, a little creepy. Our male lead gatecrashes a party, is kicked out after having a fight, before gatecrashing the party again to hides in the bathroom for hours until a girl he fancies comes in. He then takes her on their first date and his seduction technique is telling her how much he hates people like her. Despite this, they start going out.

When she ends up breaking up with him, he stalks her everywhere she goes to the point of pretending to be an employee of various businesses, finally turning up at her high school prom and punching her boyfriend in the face. Which is okay, because she’s apparently really into that so they live happily ever after.

Which, on that reading, doesn’t sound great. But watching it, it all kind of works. Despite there being almost no screen time dedicated to explaining why these people might be in love, or even like each other — most of their relationship is told in montage — it’s all just about carried by the leads, who are very believably into each other. Partly because Cage and co-star Deborah Foreman are using the classic actors’ trick of “falling in love in real life while making the film”.

And in the first couple of post-dumping scenes, where Randy inexplicably turns out to be Julie’s cinema usher, and then her waiter at a fast food place, there are the first seeds of the unlikely performance style best described as ‘Full Cage’. He becomes a strange, otherworldly force, apparating into existence at unlikely moments to grin wildly at utter things like, “Oh, well, Peter Piper picked a pepper, I guess I did!” before disappearing again — to Julie’s amusement before he starts sleeping outside her bedroom window, which apparently isn’t as charming.

Now, let’s emphasise, weird men, that very few of you are fictional characters played by Nicolas Cage, so probably don’t take any of this as a lesson in how to win back your girlfriend when she dumps you.

Given that this reasonably perfunctory love story leaves a quite a bit of extra time to fill, there are a couple of minor sub-plots to pad things out. Julie’s “children of the ’60s” parents, worrying that she’s not having enough fun and trying to surreptitiously smoke the wacky baccy behind her pack, are while not roaringly funny, are at least enjoyably unusual teen movie parents. And a sub-plot about a love triangle between a teenage girl, the boy she fancies and her step-mother is resolved in a way that happily fails to prefigure “Stiffler’s mom”-style unpleasantness.

It’s probably far enough that Valley Girl hasn’t really been remembered as a classic of it’s genre, but it’s likeable enough as minor works go. And for something shot extremely quickly and on a relative shoestring, the film did alright — it made almost 30 times the original budget back at the box office. I have so far invested £8 into playing the National Lottery. Will I win back 30 times that amount?

THE NUMBERS

3 — At the cinema Randy’s love rival asks him, “Oh bitching, is this in 3D?” Randy, who’s pretending to be an usher, spits back, “No, but your face is.” Insults that almost sound like they aren’t non-sequiturs, but definitely are, are the best.

6 — The number of “grody” bus rides Julie will take to Hollywood to see Randy before deciding to ditch him, according to her awful mates.

8 — The number of boobs seen in this film. Director Martha Coolidge was contracted to include 4 topless scenes by the producers, who believed that was the only way that Valley Girl would possibly make any money. One pair of breasts on show belong to an actress later best known for voice work, which means I have seen the breasts of the baby from Rugrats and Babe from Babe: Pig In The City. Bazinga!

14 — The age of Julie’s hippy dad’s weird sandals. He bought them to go to Woodstock.

27 — The party where Julie and Randy first meet is at held at 23727 Sierra Vista. Apparently 5-digit house numbers do in fact make some logical sense to Americans.

42 — Around 42% of the film’s $600,000 budget was spent on licensing minor pop hits of the time (although notably the credits include tracks by the Clash, the Jam and Bananarama that don’t appear because the producers couldn’t make an affordable deal in time for release).

THE RESULT

Well, I wrote this while taking a break from filling in an even more depressing than normal tax return, so I was really hoping for better news. Not great, but 2 numbers like last time, so I’ve won another free Lucky Dip — although, as you can see above, the last one didn’t win me anything, as you’d expect from numbers that aren’t even from a film with Nicolas Cage in it.

Still, if this increasing rate of success comes up I’ll be hitting all 6 numbers within a few weeks! That is definitely how probability works!

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Racing With The Moon, the first Nic Cage film to have been released within my lifetime. I HOPE HE GOES TO THE MOON IN IT!

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films, for reasons discussed here!

So far in trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films, I have watched 2 Nicolas Cage films, and won the lottery 0 times. But the films were both quite bad. What will happen when I watch a Nicolas Cage film that isn’t terrible?

I’ll be honest, I in no way expected a film called Rumble Fish to be much cop at all. Because it’s called Rumble Fish, for fuck’s sake. But stupid name aside, it is in fact quite good, which is annoying because it turns out it’s way easier to point and laugh at failure than is it to write about a thing you had genuine positive human emotions about.

If I didn’t know who Francis Ford Coppola is, I think I’d have assumed Rumble Fish was his first film — there’s something almost brashly naive about it, like someone’s spent loads of times thinking about how to make films, finally had the chance to do it and poured absolutely everything into it at once. Which is weird, because by this point Coppola could have stopped making films and still be considered a titan of 20th century cinema canon (having made The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and other long films old people like).

ONE THING I LIKE ABOUT RUMBLE FISH IS THERE’S LOADS OF DRY ICE IN IT! LIKE IN ABOUT HALF THE SCENES EVEN WHEN THERE’S NO PARTICULAR REASON FOR IT TO BE THERE!

Rumble Fish is largely about a teenage Matt Dillon trying to prove to the world that he can be a big tough gang leader, while his older brother, Mickey Rourke (who it turns out looked like a normal human man before he subjected his face to an unfortunate combination of punching and plastic surgery) attempts to dissuade him of that ambition. The Rourke character was himself into gangs and fighting, but has subsequently thought better of it, preferring to spend his time philosophising and looking at fish.

ANOTHER THING I LIKE ABOUT RUMBLE FISH IS THAT MATT DILLON’S CHARACTER IS CALLED RUSTY JAMES AND EVERYONE SAYS “RUSTY JAMES” LIKE ABSOLUTELY LOADS AND THAT IS BRILLIANT.

There’s barely a plot to speak of — the film is instead carried along by a general sense of uneasiness and boozey paranoia. Stewart Copeland from off of The Police provides an excellently hectic percussive score that literally rattles along as the brothers careen their way towards the film’s conclusion.

RUMBLE FISH IS IN BLACK AND WHITE EXCEPT FOR THE FISH, LIKE THAT BIT IN SCHINDLER’S LIST BUT LESS HOLOCAUSTY.

The film has an intriguing lack of era— although the setting is apparently contemporary there’s a noirish sensibility that gives it the feel of a period piece — at times this clash (well, and all the dry ice) even give it the effect of some sort of dystopian science fiction.

Rourke is fantastic as the nameless older brother (only ever referred to as Motorcycle Boy) simmering with instability throughout even as he tries to guide Rusty James away from a life of violence. The cast as a whole is top — with respectable turns from Dennis Hopper, Larry Fishburne and even a very young Sofia Coppola (who I’m sure got the role entirely on merit).

DENNIS HOPPER PLAYS THE DAD IN RUMBLE FISH AND HE LOOKS LIKE HAROLD STEPTOE. THIS IS OCCASIONALLY DISTRACTING.

Our friend Nicolas Cage (the director’s nephew, who’d only recently changed his surname to make his career look less nepotistic) has a relatively small part as a member of the would-be gang who ends up supplanting the increasingly distracted Rusty James’ leadership, and even hooking up with his ex-girlfriend. It’s not a brilliant performance, but as one of the more straightforward roles in an otherwise manic film, it was never really going to stand out.

So, 3 films down and finally one I’d genuinely recommend. But will the quality of the film improve the quality of my lottery numbers, and make me a millionaire?

THE NUMBERS

10 — Rusty James’ big fight is scheduled for 10PM. He almost misses it because he is too busy doing a kiss (and maybe other things???) on a girl!

11 — Nicolas Cage tells Rusty James there haven’t been any real gangs since he was 10 years old. “Bullshit man, I was fucking 11.”

13 — The street number of Benny’s Billiards, which various characters haunt throughout the film. Benny is Tom Waits, from off of singing.

21 — Mickey Rourke “looks so old I forget he’s just 21”, in handy bit of lamp-shading to cover the fact that the actor is very obviously at least 30.

36 — One of the few moments that grounds the film in it’s era is a brief visit to an arcade. It’s at number 536.

45 — Welsh communist monsters the Manic Street Preachers like this film and once almost named a song “Colt 45 Rusty James”. They then decided to rename it “Spectators of Suicide”. Heavy.

THE RESULT

TWO WHOLE NUMBERS. Now we’re talking! And because they changed the rules of the lottery last year I actually win something! 2 balls apparently means you get a free go at the next lottery now (there’s more numbers to chose from so it’s harder to win). Thank you, Rumble Fish!

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

He finally gets a leading role, in Valley Girl. Sadly, he does not play the Valley Girl.