Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) - Review

Credited as "Brad's Bud" 

Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a year in the life snapshot of a group of characters hoping to find love the way their culture tells them they should, among other day to day struggles they find themselves in. Judge Reinhold and Jennifer Jason Leigh play Brad and Stacy Hamilton, respectively, an older brother who is facing the reality of life outside of high school as the end of his term is staring him in the face, and a younger sister who desires to experience sex and intimacy like her friends but needs help finding out what that means to her. Brian Backer plays a shy and awkward teen, Mark, who is trying to get the attention and approval of Stacy with the help of Robert Romanus' Mike Damone, a sleazy ticket scalper who tries to take advantage of any situation he's in to turn it to his benefit. Sean Penn portrays "the stoner", Jeff Spicoli, who thinks he has found a way to live the easy life at others' expense, most often his overqualified history teacher. Forest Whitaker even stars as this high school's star football player.

Fast Times remains a classic, even 40 years later. This movie is a testament to the fact that no matter how much the world changes, the struggles and desires that teens face remains the same. The movie zips through a school year and a variety of situations that never seemed to go too slow, or too quickly. The pacing is wonderful, and it never feels as though scenes were crammed in or removed to come to a satisfying conclusion. I was surprised to learn that the story came from Cameron Crowe, writer of other classic films (Say Anything..., Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous, Vanilla Sky, etc.) - of which Almost Famous, my father introduced to me far earlier than I could have enjoyed it. Fast Times strikes the fine balance between being about nothing, but about everything at the same time. As a final note of praise for Fast Times, I really found one of the final scenes in the movie involving Brad and Stacy outside of an abortion clinic very heartwarming. I appreciated the fact that Brad was nonjudgmental and non-moralizing of his sister and her situation, but decided to love her and give her what she needed in one of the most difficult moments in her young life. 

The movie has a few non-speaking appearances for Nic Cage, his earliest in his listed credits on Wikipedia and other information sources. I included this movie in my project not just because the actor was present for a few frames, but also because the movie is still really good. It may be slow toward the beginning, but the movie does come to full steam and stay there until the final moments. Fast Times is remarkable in the way it delivers the story, but also the talent that came together to produce the final product. Not everyone had an illustrious career after this movie, but there are a surprising few that have contributed their tremendous talent to this film and many others in subsequent decades.

Moonstruck (1987) - Review

Moonstruck is a 1987 romantic comedy film starring Cher, Danny Aiello, and Nicolas Cage. Cher plays Loretta, a 37 year old widow living with her Italian family in Brooklyn Heights. She and Danny Aiello's Johnny get engaged before he must fly to Italy to be present for his mother's impending death. Before he leaves, he asks Loretta to help him reconcile with his brother Ronny (Cage) so that he appears at their upcoming wedding. While trying to reconcile the siblings, Loretta begins to fall in love with Ronny, and must figure out what she really wants for love. Meanwhile, various members of her family are grappling with their own understanding of love and how that affects their lives. 

I am an absolute sucker for movies that show a slice of life. There is minimal exposition, and it is fun to learn more about the characters as they go on about this moment the movie selected. The movie walks its way through a normal day for Loretta and her various family members before throwing in complications that show both how normal and abnormal the family is. The dialogue is real and actually funny at times, which is not the primary intention that modern movies have grown accustomed to. Moonstruck explores some complex themes, like love, family, and guilt/shame in a very human way. As stated above, the characters have to navigate their issues on screen and come to their own conclusions and it is charming to see them all grow and discover the relationships that mean the most to them- even in such a time frame as short as a few days. Not only do Cher and Cage give fantastic
performances, but the supporting cast does as well. It is really difficult to manage that feat, regardless of what era of film you observe.

Moonstruck is one of my favorite movies of all time. I think that it is one of the more perfect movies that I have ever come across. It is a movie about romance that shows perspectives of love and life with love, allowing someone to empathize with at least one of the characters. In an earlier review I stated that there are few movies that I am willing to watch again given enough time in-between, however this movie I have seen on my shelf many times over the years and I not only have a fondness for it in the moment, but I lament that there are few opportunities that I have to watch it. I truly do recommend that anyone watch this movie if they haven't already. Not only are the themes simple and universal, the performances of anyone on screen tend to suck you into the action. Even being removed from the release of the movie by almost 40 years and I have never visited anywhere near the setting's location, it breeds feelings of nostalgia and familiarity. This lends to the timelessness of the movie; and I am certain that this movie will hold up in this way for many more years to come.

Trespass (2011) - Review

Trespass is a 2011 homme invasion movie starring Nicolas Cage, Nicole Kidman, Ben Mendelsohn, and Liana Liberato and is the last film directed by Joel Schumacher. Nicolas Cage stars as Kyle Miller, a diamond broker, Nicole Kidman as his wife Sarah, And Liana Liberato as the daughter Avery. The family seems normal, yet dysfunctional - Kyle obsessing over his work, Sarah trying to manage the teenage daughter all by herself, and Avery trying to live her life to the fullest while she is still young and protest her parents telling her otherwise. Ben Mendelsohn leads a group while they lead a home invasion to steal diamonds and cash from the well-to-do Miller family. Nothing is as simple as anyone had planned, and the two groups find themselves at odds while trying to get what they want at the expense of the other parties. 

This was a long 90 minutes, and I do not mean to compliment anyone. Less than 20 minutes into the runtime, the home invasion starts. While Nicolas Cage's Kyle Miller is doing everything he can to stall the would be thieves, the thieves have competing sets of loyalties and goals that they are trying to achieve, further complicating the robbery. This would be a normal part of a movie in this genre, but the movie has to think of contrivance after contrivance to string the viewer along. No information about the family is exposed upfront, leaving the backstory woven into revelations later in the movie - one red herring here, one explanation there, etc. It becomes very tiresome soon after the first 30 minutes of the movie. Even more damning to this film's credit is the fact that I didn't care what happened to anyone after a certain point - the only characters that garnered any sympathy from me were Kidman and Liberato's characters. When I find it really hard to sympathize with the main characters, and the movie is trying really hard to have you do so, something along the way has gone horribly wrong. It has been a while since I have reviewed the classic Nic Cage "freakouts" because I find that to be quite reductive, but in a movie that is driven solely on his ability to act absurd to string the villains along, it shows hope of delivering any payoff but fails when you're wanting the invasion to end. Even the more memorable lines of the movie is stated with such deadpan that might have to do with the character's exhaustion, but I had high hopes of witnessing the "etymology of the word diamond" monologue that I had a sort of Mandela effect placed upon it; I had thought that Cage would have delivered that line in a Deadfall-esque manner. (Edit: Deadfall is a 1993 Michael Biehn movie that Cage stars as a secondary antagonist. His character's blowups in that movie are quite legendary in my household). All in all, Trespass may be good for one viewing if you were really hard up while looking for another home invasion movie. Otherwise, it is a hard pass for me recommending to anyone.

The Old Way (2023) - Review

 The Old Way is Cage's first tradiitonal Western. He plays a former outlaw, Colton Briggs, who at some point after his introduction in the beginning scene settles down and starts a family. When a batch of outlaws come by his ranch, led by the son of an accused man shot to death by Briggs, they murder his wife for retribution for Brigg's past. Briggs and his daughter Brooke (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), set out to find the men who  took their wife and mother from them.

Watching this movie reminded me of the other movies that Cage has had a role in from Saban Films: it feels overproduced. While the film makers capture the spirit of the western, the production value of the movie is way too distracting. By all means and measures, the movie looks great, but it lacks imperfections or grit to what is seen on screen and how the characters progress. Cage is wonderful in his role as an otherwise cold and unfeeling robot of a man, hiding his true feelings from his daughter after the death of his wife, and struggles with the notion that he has to still care for his daughter while returning to his lawless past. There is a point in the movie where he realizes that his daughter may have the same emotional deficit as himself, but tries to impress upon her that she must feel emotions for other people's sake if she wants to navigate the world. In this way, the acting by Armstrong progresses in quality as her character is continually allowed to feel emotions and manipulate those around her. There are a few points in the story where I felt that it went beyond cliché and into something different, but there was not enough time to sit and get to know the full cast - whenever something became interesting to me, the plot moved right along, knowing that its runtime was catching up to it. Given a larger script and allowing the characters to really fill the screen might have eliminated some hesitation that I have to really beam about the end result. The Old Way is a good movie, one that you can see had potential to be even better.