Film Words

  It’s hard to say when Nick Cage started playing himself. The seeds of self-reflexivity are already present in his 1987 breakout films Raising Arizona and Moonstruck , where his performances exude a madcap energy that threatens to overwhelm, and probably would have sunk lesser films without the supporting structure and talent to contain him. Certainly by time he appeared in Face/Off ten years later the prospect of Cage playing around with his own on and off screen persona was enough to not only make the film a hit on its release but secure it a place in the pop cult cannon that endures to this day. In the decades since Cage has been more than willing to create cinematic feedback loops out of that uniquely captivating energy, weaponizing and subverting his own myth as Hollywood’s most confounding actor.           The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent uses Cage’s legendary, internet friendly status as its premise, casting the actor as a fictionalised ...

  Everything about The Northman is supersized: the muscles, the action, the budget, and for filmmaker Robert Eggers, the stakes. The Norse epic represents a significant step up onto the worlds stage for a director previously responsible for niche little indie genre flicks, decent hits in and of themselves, but free of the expectations a near $100 million budget will bring. The last ten years have seen many indie breakouts like Eggers suddenly catapulted to box office juggernaut status off the back of just one or two films (Colin Trevorrow, Taika Waititi, Etc) and almost all have lost their creative soul in the process, delivering branded content (TM) studio noted to unintelligible blandness. The supersized risk of The Northman lies in how much it feels like an Eggers film, only bigger. An Eggers film, for those uninitiated, means a semi-mythic period piece dripping with exhaustively researched historical detail, down to the tiniest, grimiest piece of fastidious production desig...