Hello, World!

My name is Allen and I wanted to catalogue my journey of collecting every single Nicolas Cage movie released. Gosh, that sounds like I am in a support group needing intervention. Anyways, I want to start out by talking a little about what has led to this project and what I hope to get out of doing this.

I remember one of the first paychecks I received from my first job and I remember it well. I remember it because I spent it all in a week. I was still in high school and living at home, so this was warranted in my mind. One of the items I spent that paycheck on was The Wicker Man (2006). I had decided shortly after starting my job that I wanted to collect the entire filmography of an actor - this would be the measure of success that I would attain in life! Nicolas Cage was memed heavily online, and the task of choosing his career to follow seemed like an easy one at the time, there were only 63 credits to his name at the time, so that was a slam dunk... or so I thought. Very soon I learned the reality of saving money for college, so the collection idea progressed at a more glacial pace than anticipated. But I persisted in the effort, nonetheless. I would have friends over for "Cage-a-thons", thinking that I had limitless potential for entertainment, but as more people moved away for college or other pursuits, that tradition has since passed.

An example of the chaos, slightly shifted 
to be photographed easier

Many years later... I recently decided to clean up my office, which after two years of owning my home, still wasn't clean enough for me to do my work. I have had many attempts over the years of making some sort of inventory of the movies and TV shows that I owned, but none of those attempts were backed up thoroughly on various platforms and a very rigorous search on my local and cloud storage locations turned up zilch. Nada. Nothing. All of that "hard work" over the years? Gone. As a distraction to the mounting stress that my work was providing me, I decided to wrest some control in my life back into my hands and clean a significant portion of the mess at the same time. I took a picture of every movie spine on my tiny bookshelf and went to work typing each name into a spreadsheet. After the work was completed, 348 different titles sat on my shelf (not including television seasons).

Nic Cage movies removed
from general population

The game was afoot! I had a more manageable task to accomplish, and the act of doing something for myself helped me get past the wall in completing looming deadlines.. I would work on something small every day, giving myself motivation to be in my office and making sure that school was taken care of and feeling less burdened about the mounting piles of neglect that seemed to confine me before. I separated the Nic Cage movies that had been haphazardly profaned by the common films for years into their own sort and threatened a group of friends with a good time over text, stating that they were going to experience wonderful things in the future.

I'm not sure why "The Old Way"
isn't red, but at this point I'm
too afraid to ask.

With a little browsing, I learned how to do some conditional formatting in my spreadsheet to compare the list of credits on Wikipedia to my master list of movies. This allowed me to quickly determine how to populate a third column manually with whether I owned the particular title or not (I spent way too much time trying to figure out why the formatting wasn't working comparing the two lists of movies and I couldn't be bothered to figure out how to automate this last step). Once that was complete, I could count the Yes/No responses and create a handy-dandy pie chart. I did some investigating to remove documentary appearances where no new material (commentary) from Cage himself, or remove titles that are not longer obtainable by conventional means. This gave me a list of 110 items that I was confident on collecting, including in production and yet to be released titles. I chose to include the titles not yet released because until Nicolas Cage decides to retire, I cannot obtain all of his complete corpus of work.

I started the spreadsheet with 69% owned but
after some selection criteria was applied, and 
I was able to purchase some titles for cheap,
I now sit at 78% at the time of publishing

Now that you all have an abbreviated history of my borderline obsession with this actor, the question remains: Why am I doing this blog? I thought it was sad that I collected these movies, but have only seen about half of them. I wanted to do something with them instead of making sure they looked pretty when I eventually place a shelf above my workstation for the sole purpose of showcasing my vanity project. I thought it would be fun to republish a review that I wrote in 2014 for the movie Rage, I watched Willy's Wonderland and thought, "I have about a month where I do not have any classwork, why not write some reviews on movies I had missed?"

So yeah, why not? I don't know how consistent I will be in maintaining the blog, but I wanted to be able to share my thoughts with the outside world once again. I used to host a movie podcast from 2013-2016 (original, I know) with my brother and a couple of friends. That was a fun time, and I wish life didn't become complicated and responsibilities didn't get in the way so that we could all do it again. But this is what I have right now and I wish to just do this at my own pace and have some fun on my Nicolas Cage journey!