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Thread: Nic Cage is Knowing....

  1. #26
    Quote Quoting Sycophant (view post)
    I think Nic Cage was up for Oh Dae-Su at some point, before Spielberg-Smith were attached. I could actually see Cage pulling it off, especially if the rest of the film ended up being kind of schlocky.

    A bunch of friends are way hyped to see this movie this weekend and I'm hoping my schedule allows me to accompany them.
    I would consider not even bothering to watch the Oldboy remake if Nic Cage was the lead. Lazy, overexposed actor running through oddball tics is all it would turn out to be.
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  2. #27
    White Tiger Field Stay Puft's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Morris Schæffer (view post)
    But I can't take Cage seriously anymore.
    Definitely a problem.

    I otherwise agree with the sentiments in your signature, too.

    There's a great sequence of events late in the film that had me howling with laughter, from the moment Rose freaks out and takes the kids, screams over the phone that someone has to save the children while they are simultaneosuly being abducted by the whispering people, to Nicolas Cage driving through the forest to save his son, gun in hand while steering the wheel. There is definitely some intentional humor in this film, but it eventually reaches a point when I couldn't tell if I was laughing because the filmmakers want me to, or because it's Cage. Or are the filmmakers aware of this, too? How else is anyone supposed to react to that shot of Cage driving his truck through the forest, gun in hand?

    I'm not sure Alex Proyas will ever direct another Dark City, which is unfortunate, and disappointing when I think of what Knowing could have been with a stronger writing team. There are some great ideas here, and the directing is sharp at times, but too many other elements hold it back. I love the ending, too. Damn, I love the ending. Or at least the idea of it. It deserves a much better movie. The moment the credits started, the guy sitting in front of me stood up, gestured towards the screen, and said to his friends, "That was... weird. What the hell was... that.. that was weird." I agree.

    But that also got me thinking: How are people going to respond to the "message" of the ending? It seems calculated to appease to differing ideologies. Like, if I'm a devoted Christian and believe in God and all that, I'm going to be satisfied with Cage's character arc. But, if I'm an athiest and skeptical of the Christian story, I'm going to appreciate the way the film suggests that it is all a fiction through the many visual allusions in the ending. Which is interesting, because the message of faith comes entirely from Cage's mouth, whereas it is the very structure of the film, its narrative, that seems to counter Cage's religious epiphany. And after all, Cage is just a character who says things. But even here the film seems to take things careful, as, if I recall correctly, it only suggests that Cage is having a spiritual epiphany, not an religious one, which is also interesting because...

    Or, wait, maybe it isn't. Because if you're not Christian, why would you care? How the hell does this movie account for other religions? It still places Christianity in the center and makes it the source of some kind of truth. Oy, I have no idea what to make of this anymore.
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  3. #28
    Scott of the Antarctic Milky Joe's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Stay Puft (view post)
    How the hell does this movie account for other religions? It still places Christianity in the center and makes it the source of some kind of truth.
    I don't think it exclusively champions Christianity. All religions have a kind of promise to them of transcendence. Not only does this speak to traditional religions, but it also speaks to the people who think God is an alien. And then it speaks to non-believers through the vehicle of death: death as transcendence in itself. The most haunting, effective image in the film, for me, was of Cage falling to his knees as the spaceship flies away, rain falling on his face, denied transcendence. This is simultaneously one of the bleakest and most hopeful films I've seen out of Hollywood's asshole in a while. I kind of liked it, mediocre scripting aside.
    ‎The severed arm perfectly acquitted itself, because of the simplicity of its wishes and its total lack of doubt.

  4. #29
    White Tiger Field Stay Puft's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Milky Joe (view post)
    I don't think it exclusively champions Christianity.
    Yeah, I see that, but I'm going back to the specific religious allusions the film makes, which are Christian. (Actually, I guess that's not true, since it's mostly Old Testament, but I think Cage's father was supposed to be Christian, which is why I defaulted to referring to that tradition. Or maybe because it's the most prominent. I'm not a religious person, I don't know what I'm talking about, so I should probably tread more carefully.)

    My point: What occured to me as I was writing my last post is that, even if we accept what you say about the film and transendence, which I think is true, it still places a specific religious tradition at the center. It's like, if we're supposed to accept that everybody was wrong, the Bible still gets to be right, in a sense, because it is a(n understandable/inevitable) corruption, over time, of things that actually did occur. Other religions are just peripheral nonsense.

    I don't know, I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to be taking away from the ending anymore.
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    Night Hunter (David Raymond) *

  5. #30
    Scott of the Antarctic Milky Joe's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Stay Puft (view post)
    It's like, if we're supposed to accept that everybody was wrong, the Bible still gets to be right, in a sense, because it is a(n understandable/inevitable) corruption, over time, of things that actually did occur.
    That's a good point, but even though the film places Christianity at the center, I still think it touches on the common threads that run through all religions. It just happens to take place in America (and star Nicolas Cage). But it's an extremely spiritual movie, to be certain. I can see the atheist crowd just loathing it.
    ‎The severed arm perfectly acquitted itself, because of the simplicity of its wishes and its total lack of doubt.

  6. #31
    Administrator Ezee E's Avatar
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    Pretty good actually. There's some good things that can be talked about, and I already see it through Puft and Milky Joe.

    Regarding the final image[
    ]

    With that, the movie makes some strange choices, usually involving Cage, whether it be his chase in the subway, or the stunts in his truck. They could've easily been avoided.

    I wish the movie used a better actor, it could've been great.

    Nonetheless, quite the surprise. Nice score too.

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  7. #32
    Administrator Ezee E's Avatar
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    I also think D-Davis may like this a lot.

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  8. #33
    Scott of the Antarctic Milky Joe's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Ezee E (view post)
    Regarding the final image[
    ]
    Yes, it's obvious, but it's also pretty subversive of Christianity, given that the final image implies that the "Tree of Life" and Adam/Eve storyline is a kind of generic thing, an ongoing, cyclical process that this higher-dimensional (or whatever) race of beings can basically repeat on demand, and not the one-time, only-on-Earth deal that the Bible would have us believe.
    ‎The severed arm perfectly acquitted itself, because of the simplicity of its wishes and its total lack of doubt.

  9. #34
    Administrator Ezee E's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Milky Joe (view post)
    Yes, it's obvious, but it's also pretty subversive of Christianity, given that the final image implies that the "Tree of Life" and Adam/Eve storyline is a kind of generic thing, an ongoing, cyclical process that this higher-dimensional (or whatever) race of beings can basically repeat on demand, and not the one-time, only-on-Earth deal that the Bible would have us believe.
    [
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  10. #35
    Does not read Sutter Cane The Mike's Avatar
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    I just saw this, and kinda had my mind blown. Biggest surprise in a long time.
    The Mike

    It's very very horrible, sir. It's one of those things we wish we could disinvent.

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  11. #36
    What is best in life? D_Davis's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Ezee E (view post)
    I also think D-Davis may like this a lot.
    I did like it it quite a bit. It's interesting.

  12. #37
    Does not read Sutter Cane The Mike's Avatar
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    Though, it did one thing that always bothers me about sci-fi flicks with the final shot.....

    [
    ]

    Just sayin'.
    The Mike

    It's very very horrible, sir. It's one of those things we wish we could disinvent.

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  13. #38
    Replacing Luck Since 1984 Dukefrukem's Avatar
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    Heh. My hometown is featured in this. It's actually a good shot of the Lincoln Labs observatory. I didn't think they would actually film there but they did. The rest of the movie was filmed in Australia as you can tell by the police vehicles and ambulances but the characters are based in my hometown. Kinda cool but it makes me wonder how Hollywood knew about this little gem of my town and why they decided to write it into the script. Who had that idea from the writing team?

    This was a relatively entertaining and spooky Cage flick. Had a sense of the Forgotten mixed with typical Cage drama. Unspectacular but an OK popcorn script. The last shot was a little though.
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  14. #39
    Since 1929 Morris Schæffer's Avatar
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    I enjoyed it. It has at least one hair-raising action scene, the movie certainly pulls no punches with its finale and certain things are kept deliberately vague so as to not render the movie overly preposterous. But yeah, that thing with the kids at the end...
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  15. #40
    Moderator Dead & Messed Up's Avatar
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    This flick has a great 70% in the middle, where the flick is just building on the mystery of the numbers. The beginning scenes with Cage in class are straight-up absurd, and I'm not sure of the coda, which is intriguing in theory.

    In general, plays like a dumbed-down but good-hearted Childhood's End.

    Will post more thoughts after work.

  16. #41
    Moderator Dead & Messed Up's Avatar
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    Okay, but let's seriously unpack how profoundly bad the classroom scene with Nic Cage is. He's a professor, and then he starts asking if the universe is deterministic or "chaotic." (You know, instead of determinism vs. free will.) When he discusses determinism, he suggests that it means everything happens for a reason. (He should be saying that everything has a cause.) When he's talking, he discusses whether or not events are "accidents." (He should be saying "incidental," because "accident" presupposes an order that was disrupted and an intelligence that disrupted that order.) When he discusses life on Earth, he suggests that it's a strange coincidence that the Earth just happens to be in the exact spot needed to foster life...

    And, argh, the anthropic principle. Okay, look. It took ten billion years of a lifeless universe before, as best we understand, the Earth formed. And even then, it took nearly a billion years for the first prokaryotes to arrive. And after that, nearly two billion years for the first eukaryotes to evolve. Nearly two billion years of single-celled life. How the hell can we argue that the Earth is specifically tailored for the emergence of life? What it actually looks like is that life barely happened over and over and over. A series of incidental turns. And even then, the principle itself is silly, because if conditions were different, we can't say a different kind of life wouldn't emerge - they might in fact look something like tardigrades, actual animals who have little need of the precise conditions us mammals require.

    UGH.

    [Sorry, that went long, will come back to this.]

  17. #42
    Moderator Dead & Messed Up's Avatar
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    All right. All right.

    So, something that drove me mildly batty about the film was its epilogue.

    [
    ]

  18. #43
    Moderator Dead & Messed Up's Avatar
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    SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT...

    What really worked, though, was the brick-by-brick buildup of the code. When it was written. How it was written. The secret numbers in the door that come back in the end. How Koestler first notices patterns - it's a hilarious coincidence (the water-stain from the glass), but that absurdity felt endearing enough to offset the contrivance. And then how he has the insight to find the meaning of the number strings that follow the date/death strings. Just happening to be a few blocks from an imminent disaster was tough to swallow, but the actual epiphany when looking at the banal GPS on his dashboard felt right (and the plane crash luckily is dramatic enough with its faux-Lubeszki camera movement to paper over the coincidence (or is it something more? ooohhhh....).

    Additionally, this is a disaster film where the disasters escalate effectively. One of the noticeable issues with Roland Emmerich is that, while he can stage his apocalyptic shenanigans with enormous scale, clarity, and a sort of gallows-humor misanthropy, he tends to fall into the Poseidon Adventure trap of peaking in the middle. The flooding of New York in The Day After Tomorrow is a good example. Emmerich tries to find new stakes with escaped wolves, which shows how poorly he thought out the stakes of his story. Similarly, the peak of 2012 is undoubtedly the glorious destruction of Los Angeles, but after that... why bother?

    But the airplane is a terrific inciting disaster, the subway sequence is a bit smaller in scale but larger in tension and impact (as it makes firm Koestler's impotence). And then it's a slow march forward to the heat death of the Earth. Setting the end-of-film large-scale scenes of panic to "Symphony No. 7" feels super-hacky in theory (the cue's a half-step above the eye-rolling ubiquity of the Ninth or Toccata and Fugue)... but it works because Proyas drops out the diegetic sound altogether and just lets us watch the planet die. Koestler looks out his car window and sees his buddy (Ben Mendelsohn) recognize him amid the clamor. They just look at each other, and that's that. I like that fatalism.

  19. #44
    collecting tapes Skitch's Avatar
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    I liked it.

  20. #45
    Replacing Luck Since 1984 Dukefrukem's Avatar
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    I rewatched this. Enjoyed it much more the second time around. It's going in my collection.
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  21. #46
    collecting tapes Skitch's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Dukefrukem (view post)
    I rewatched this. Enjoyed it much more the second time around. It's going in my collection.
    I need to bust this bluray out again.

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