As much as I loved Nicolas Cage in his weirder-than-weird “Willy’s Wonderland,” it was just too much of a struggle to love the even weirder “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” (2022). Cage is a strange dude in real life (ask the IRS) who apparently isn’t afraid to parody himself and his film roles, which “Massive Talent” accomplishes to pull off this Escher drawing of a movie-inside-a-movie-about-a-movie. A trip to Spain for a quick buck and a script-reading takes an awkward turn toward guns-blazing hijinks. Cage is sooo uncomfortably strange, it’s hard to see where reality ends and parody begins.
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I didn’t know anything about “Willy’s Wonderland” (2021). I only saw a promotional photo of Nicolas Cage and some puppet-looking things. My jaw tensed. I stretched my index finger onto the mouse and clicked “rent.” I just didn’t know what I’d be getting myself into. As it turned out, I witnessed the kind of excellence in grindhouse cinema I hadn’t seen since “Machete.” Cage is the Man With No Name (and no voice – it entertains me to think his lack of dialogue was related to some kind of lawsuit or IRS thing) tasked with ridding a town of mechanical menace.
I went into “Valley Girl” (1983) thinking it was going to be a broader comedy about, well, San Fernando Valley girls (actually, “Clueless” comes closer to that space 12 years later). This is more of a by-the-book teen romance featuring class conflict between Hollywood punk hunk Nicolas Cage and suburban sweetheart Deborah Foreman (who, at 21, looked too old to be playing a high school junior). That doesn’t make it a bad movie, but the better part is its visual love letter to the neon, music and fashion of early 1980s Los Angeles. Looking back, it’s a pretty-in-pink time capsule.
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