Cage of the Week
At DigiPen, I hosted Cage of the Week, the club where we watch Nicolas Cage movies every week.
Cage is a meme and all, but the guy genuinely puts his all into every performance he gives, and I can respect the heck out of that.
Here are some of my favorites, as well as my thoughts on them:
Willy's Wonderland is absolutely my favorite of the bunch, and I think speaks to who I want to be as a game designer.
Objectively, it's not a showstopper; it's not winning any awards. But, it promises you one thing: Nicholas Cage beating up haunted animatronics, and man, does it deliver. It's just one of those movies where it's far better than it has any right to be.
I want to make those kinds of games: The ones that are amazing for no real reason aside from the passion of the people making them.
Mom & Dad falls into the same camp of Willy's Wonderland, but it doesn't play for the ironic angle; it goes for its premise of the parental instinct being reversed completely straight, and it completely succeeds in that regard.
Funnily enough, Pig is actually quite similar to Paddington 2 of all things, which is a recurring joke in the last movie I have on here. It's just a guy going around and finding the best in people and wanting them to be happy; it's honestly just feel-good stuff. Something I can aspire to myself, as well.
Oh, you thought I WASN'T going to put the movie where Nicolas Cage plays Nicolas Cage??? Come on, this was bound to be one of my favorites no matter how bad the movie was. Turns out, it was pretty good, which was a relief!
This was actually the first movie the other members of Cage of the Week and I got together to see in a theater, since we'd been online due to COVID, so it has a nice little nostalgia bonus in there too.
Of course, I'm nothing if not predictable, so I also made a Nicolas Cage lore chart, involving reincarnations and time travel.