Entering The Cage, Part 2.

I have always been a glutton for punishment.

During the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, my younger sister developed a love for reruns of late '80s sitcom Full House. During that summer, Full House reruns ran for a two-hour block every weekday, two episodes from 11:00-Noon on TBS, followed by two episodes on ABC Family.  I sat with her and watched every single episode that aired that summer, which was easy since I didn't usually get out of bed until about 10:00, and nobody wanted to do anything until about 2:00. There were probably millions of better uses for my summer, but I was a man with a mission. I had to understand how a show aired for eight full seasons on a major network, billed as a comedy, and not have one funny moment in its history. I was convinced that at some point in time, someone would tell a joke, (Probably Uncle Joey,) and it would make everything right. There would be one incredible line, and eight seasons worth of laughter would come pouring out of my mouth. There I was, two hours a day, waiting for a show starring Bob Saget to release the line that would launch me into hysterics. That line never came. Similarly, the release from the grip of that horrible summer stuck in the house with my sister and my increasingly-psychopathic mother that I had been searching for never came. A girlfriend, a video game, a ride into town, something. I'm sure those things happened (except the girlfriend), but if they did, they weren't enough, and I certainly don't remember them. Maybe they didn't come because I was on the couch watching Full House every morning. Maybe it wouldn't have come regardless. But the fact remained, I spent that summer on the couch with my sister waiting for something that would never come, to distract myself from the fact that I was waiting for something that would never come.

Save me, Uncle Jesse. Save me with your beautiful mullet.

Fast-Forward to Summer of 2010. My sister is now the one waiting for release, and I am playing the role of the successful college student. Having just discovered my love for cinema, I spend my spare time floating around the internet discussing metaphor and symbolism, quoting Foucault when I've only just read him, and generally sounding like a pretentious douche. And when someone on a forum discusses the ridiculous filmography of madman and auteur Nicolas Cage, I step up to plate with something to prove. I take a challenge: To watch every single Nicolas Cage movie in the course of a year. My thoughts are documented on this forum, and this blog. At first, it's going okay, and then comes Zandalee.

Zandalee is a little-known direct-to-video which Nic Cage supposedly likes kept off its resume. It is one of the worst films I have ever seen, and there's no reason for it to exist, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The point is, Zandalee broke me. It made me unable to watch films for about two weeks. It made me fail the Great Cage Challenge, but that led to me writing film commentary in a semi-professional fashion, so that all worked out.

Also, in Zandalee, Nicolas Cage looks like this.

Here's the status quo between myself and Nicolas Cage: At the moment, Nic Cage's career is considered "a bad joke" according to this month's GQ Magazine. This is a man once described as "daring and fearless in his choice of roles, and unafraid to crawl out on a limb, saw it off and remain suspended in air" by legendary critic Roger Ebert. Today, Nicolas Cage is better known for outrageous, over the top performances than he is the fun and creative characters he used to play, like when he won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1995 for Leaving Las Vegas. Due to insane overspending and bad accountants, Nicolas Cage is forced to take any role he's offered due to the staggering amount of money who owes to the IRS.

Meanwhile, this is where I stand: I'm at the crushing end of a five-year long relationship which has dominated the majority of my formative dating years, meaning I have no idea how to be single, having not been for so long. I'm staring down the barrel of a job in the electronics department of the local Walmart that I told myself was only temporary three years ago. I don't speak to my mother, and my father and I are incredibly awkward around each other. I'm at least a full term behind in my classes, and I have all the job opportunities that are afforded to an English Lit major during a recession to look forward to. To top it all off, I recently had to admit to myself that I am in fact, a size 36 waist, instead of the 33 I've been telling myself I am since high school. I still have my writing, but at the end of the day I have to remind myself that no matter how many readers I have, I still have to wear a nametag and be treated sub-human in order to pay my rent.

As a result I find myself drawn back to Mr. Cage. In a way, we're kindred spirits, in that we both have to look at ourselves in the mirror some mornings, think of the potential everyone said we have, and wonder "What the hell happened?" And so I come back to the challenge. Just like that summer and Full House, I go back to my couch, where I will try to figure out what went wrong for Nicolas Cage, and what happened to me along the way.

Shoo-ba-do-ba-ba-DOW!