We tackle the mountain of Too Much Everything to discuss Nic Cage, ATLANTA, and more

Plus one of the year's best books so far

It’s Sunday, April 24th, and here’s where we are…

There is Too Much Everything.

My girlfriend and I tend to watch TV series together, ones that are released week to week and ones that are dumped all at once. She watches movies as well, but she’s way more selective about what films she wants to see, and there are plenty of genres that don’t really interest her. Right now, we are working our way through at least fifteen shows, juggling episodes and trying not to overload on any one title. Once we get through those, we have at least 15 more that are waiting that we haven’t watched a single episode of yet. We’ll tap out if we’re not interested in something at this point, and I don’t feel any guilt at dropping a show. There’s always something else we could/should be watching, and I can’t even get to all of the things I genuinely love. Why would I force myself to watch every minute of something I don’t even like?

image courtesy of Netflix

The avalanche of new content continues to absolutely smother everyone and everything, making it impossible for there to be any kind of genuinely shared pop culture. People get super-excited about things, sure, but everyone’s on a different timetable. You might be starting something and you want to talk to your friends about it, and they watched it six months ago and they just remember vaguely enjoying it because thirty other things have wiped it away now. It’s a bummer because part of the joy of pop culture comes from the sharing of it and the sharing of the experience we had watching it. Conversations I have with friends about pop culture these days feel more like us handing each other homework lists than any kind of shared enthusiasm. Everyone’s at the mercy of The Great God Algorithm and the streaming services all just keep piling more content on in the hope that something will break through the noise, as if they don’t realize that they’re the ones making the noise so impossible to break through in the first place.

I’ve got plenty of things to discuss next week, once I am able to clear the table a bit, but first, let’s get straight to a bunch of reviews, starting with a new comedy that wasn’t quite what I expected…

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CAGED

Nicolas Cage has been working in movies since right around the time I started paying attention, and he has never been anything less than 100% dedicated. I understand why he isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but the minute I saw Valley Girl, I was onboard. Watching him in movies like Peggy Sue Got Married and Vampire’s Kiss and Raising Arizona, it was clear that he was willing to make gigantic bold choices in the way he created characters. While Moonstruck was a big mainstream hit, Cage’s work was still fairly divisive. Big studios clearly wanted to figure out how to make him a movie star and they tried, but his best work tended to happen in the smaller and more independently minded films like Red Rock West or Wild At Heart. The mid-90s saw him finally win the approval of both the Academy (Leaving Las Vegas) and mainstream audiences (The Rock, Face/Off), and his filmography since then has been a wild mix of films that feel like they are meant as big commercial swings and totally personal decisions. I think he’s only as good as the material and his collaborators, and it should be no great shock that his best films are the ones where everyone involved nailed it.

When I met him, it was on the set of Kick-Ass, and what started as a potentially awkward situation quickly warmed up. I’ve written about that encounter and the way it played out, but the short version is that I was originally told I wasn’t allowed on set while he was working, but it was too late to cancel my trip to London. He reluctantly allowed me to observe, and we ended up having a number of long conversations that were sparked, in part, because I recognized one of the primary influences he was drawing on for his performance as Big Daddy. Over the next five years, I had an ongoing dialogue with Cage that I found illuminating because it gave me a glimpse of the person behind the persona. I wouldn’t pretend we were friends or even particularly friendly, but he did let down enough of his guard that I got to watch the way he worked and talk to him about his influences and how he approaches his art, and my big takeaway is that he’s not even slightly “weird,” but is instead a guy who clearly understands and appreciates film as an art and who wanted to make an indelible impression on it. I think he’s a very canny performer who has ingested a staggering amount of media over the course of his life, picking and choosing things he could incorporate into his own work in a way that makes it all feel original.