Nicolas Cage Really Loves His 'Pig'
#137: "Pig," "Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain," "Space Jam: A New Legacy," "Shampoo," "Okja"
Edition 137:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
In this week’s newsletter: I’m reviewing that crazy Nicolas Cage pig movie, plus the Anthony Bourdain documentary and the Space Jam sequel slash catastrophe. As always, some streaming suggestions for you and then in this week’s “Trailer Watch” Matt and Ben are back and donning chainmail for an ambitious medieval drama.
Pig
(In theaters)
Nicolas Cage has, at one point or another, been at every station of the proverbial cross in Hollywood.
He grew up the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, had a non-speaking part (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), was a breakout star (Raising Arizona), won an Oscar (Leaving Las Vegas), did a body swap (Face/Off), played two versions of himself in the same movie (Adaptation), became a world-conquering movie star (National Treasure), went a little crazy (The Wicker Man), went A LOT crazy (Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance), and in recent years has offered up his brand name and meme-able face to just about any project no matter how incredible or terrible.
Which is why, when we saw a trailer pop up in which a big-bearded Cage lives in the wilderness with a truffle-hunting pig, it’s easy to jump to the assumption that this is just Cage being wild ol’ Cage. When the pig gets stolen in the trailer, I immediately assumed Cage would go full-on John Wick and start hacking and slashing his way back to his beloved oinker.
That couldn’t be further from the truth in Pig, a movie that starts from a ridiculous premise as if intentionally, to explore emotional depths and complexities no viewer would expect.
The pig is a metaphor, more or less, and though I won’t spoil what it represents here it isn’t exactly rocket science to figure out as the narrative unfolds.
Of course, making a metaphorical pig movie is an extremely hard bargain, especially one as patiently paced as this. But first time feature filmmaker Michael Sarnoski is someone who will demand my attention moving forward, because of the way he keeps viewers one step behind the unfolding action with no idea where things are going next. I often talk about how rarely I get surprised by movie plots, and yet here I never had any idea what direction the movie was going. That’s a huge compliment.
It’s no spoiler to say Cage plays a famous chef, and chefs make for excellent movie heroes. In fact, they come second only to boxers among professions every actor wants to play (a short list of cinematic chefs include Meryl Streep, Bradley Cooper, Jon Favreau, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and perhaps most notably a CGI rat), because chefs have what amounts to a superpower but they’re usually pretty emotionally damaged, and are known to rule their own little kingdoms of the kitchen with an iron fist. What happens when a control freak gets out of control?
One option is to leave it all behind and go live out in the wilderness with a pig, I guess.
Of course he eventually returns to the city, sans pig, less as a vengeful marauder and more as a righteous crusader. In one of my favorite movie scenes of the entire year, he confronts the chef of a popular gastronomy restaurant and completely exposes the man’s soul, a moment as profound as it is laugh-out-loud funny.
It’s a sad movie on the whole, but there’s more than enough laughs to keep people on board. Most of that humor is the result of excellent timing from Cage, who gives an A++ performance. He shows excellent chemistry with young Alex Wolff, who holds his own as a Watson to Cage’s Sherlock and receives his own quite satisfying emotional arc.
To top it all off, the movie is a sensory feast, with incredible visuals of Portland and a way of presenting food that will almost bring you to tears (don’t worry you’re not alone, one character literally cries after a bite).
On the whole, the movie is a true revelation, the exact archetype of something that would pop at a big film festival, get a modest release, only to be discovered slowly over time by word of mouth. It does not have nearly the popcorn entertainment value to appeal to a mass audience, even with a great marketing campaign from NEON (the company behind Parasite and Palm Springs, to name a few big successes).
Luckily for you, if you’ve read down this far, you’ve now officially been tapped on the shoulder. Hey, don’t miss this movie! It won’t end up among the best movies of the year when it’s all said and done, because of how many great projects are coming in October, but as of now it’s hovering around the back half of my top 10.
That’s more than enough reason to head out to your local theater and watch Nicolas Cage take care of a pig.
Something New
Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (Theaters): A really good documentary leaves little room for analysis, and make no mistake, Morgan Neville is one of the best documentarians in the world (20 Feet From Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead). The film manages to achieve a perfect tonal balance between the celebration of Bourdain’s incredible life and the tragedy of his death, providing an educational and unsurprisingly very emotional journey through the chef-turned-author-turned-TV-host’s adventures and psychology. Bourdain achieved fame and status, but even from that perch the impact he had on a whole generation of creative people was outsized, which got me thinking a lot about why the way in which people die (think Kobe, Paul Walker, or Amy Winehouse) deeply affects their legacy.
Perhaps the lack of opportunity for nit-picking is what set off the film’s “controversy,” though keep in mind, as I’ve said many times, any good and popular thing MUST have at least one controversy these days. There are three segments in the movie in which Neville decided to use a computer-generated AI version of Bourdain’s voice to narrate lines he had written in books or emails. I think what upsets people the most isn’t that the movie did that — after all, editing a man’s life down into two hours is already pure manipulation, and these were words Bourdain “said,” just not aloud — or even that the film didn’t alert viewers in any way about the fabrication (which would’ve been nice), I think people are upset they could not easily separate the real from the fake. To date, only one of the three sections has even been identified, and the implication of this new technology can quite easily be understood to present actually misleading information in the wrong hands. It’s scary stuff, but don’t hang any technology paranoia on this beautifully crafted film.
Space Jam: A New Legacy (Theaters, HBO Max): I won’t sit here and pretend that the original Space Jam is some incorruptible cinematic gem, because it’s not. But any time the limits of commerciality are pushed in a movie I cannot help but wince a little.
This sequel is not a movie at all, it is a two-hour infomercial, first for its star Lebron James during an extended opening montage of his basketball career (which makes no attempt to connect to the movie’s plot), and then more importantly for Warner Media. At various points it literally resembles a slide show presentation for children on what all properties are owned under the Warner umbrella, and the tour through everything from Casablanca to “Game of Thrones” leaves a viewer almost disappointed when the story settles its attention on Bugs Bunny and the Tune Squad.
Any of the more objectionable aspects of this movie — from the lazy writing to the CGI gobbledygook and absolutely shameless promotion — are unlikely to affect the enjoyment for the movie’s intended audience, being anyone under the age of, say, 14. That crowd might not even realize they’re missing 100% of Billy Murray on the golf course yelling, “IT…IS…ALIVE!”
Something Old
Shampoo (1975): I’ve become fascinated recently in the “New Hollywood” era of the 1970s, when a wave of young directors emerged and seized total artistic control over large studio budgets to create their dreamlands — Scorcese, Lucas, De Palma, Coppola, Altman, Carpenter, Lumet, the list goes on and on. The inmates were running the asylum.
How else do you explain a movie that’s a social satire of Nixon era America through the lens of 70s matinee idol Warren Beatty as a womanizing Hollywood hairdresser, lampooning his own playboy reputation? It has big Uncut Gems energy, a non-stop chaos of interlocking affairs all through Beverly Hills, including no less than Goldie Hawn, Julie Christie and Carrie Fisher. And what a symbol of messed up 70s gender politcs — Beatty has sex with the wife, mistress AND daughter of the man he wants to invest in his own barber shop, and at the end of the movie the guy is like oh well boys will be boys and agrees to invest anyway! Yikes.
Something to Stream
Okja (Netflix): The most obvious comparison point for a movie like Pig, seemingly ridiculous on the surface but increasingly profound as you drill down, is this 2017 allegory from director Bong Joon-Ho.
I’ve advocated for this movie several times in this newsletter, but if the human-pet connection is something you want more of without having to watch the new “Turner and Hooch” reboot on Disney+ starring “Drake and Josh” ex-star Josh Peck (puke), then you cannot do better than this fantastic story of a girl who’s giant pet gets chosen for an international competition, raising questions of animal rights, climate change, and corporate greed. If that doesn’t entice you, does Jake Gyllenhaal with a mustache and a safari hat, or Tilda Swinton with matching white dress, hair and skin tone do the trick?
Trailer Watch: The Last Duel
When I heard that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon were going to be in a movie together for the first time since Good Will Hunting (not including the fake sequel scene from Jay and Silent Bob), I certainly was not expecting a medieval drama with #MeToo undertones.
But here we are! With the electric Jodie Comer and undeniably transcendent Adam Driver to boot! It’s an incredibly ambitious project that’s just as likely to create disparaging memes these people will never outlive as it is to net them all Oscar nominations. With director Ridley Scott at the helm, I have some faith that it will be the latter.