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Films, cinema Biography, Literature & Literary studies Popular culture

AGE OF CAGE

Keith Phipps

Four Decades of Hollywood Through One Singular Career

An insightful and inventive look at the career and life of Nicolas Cage, perfect for fans of The Tao of Bill Murray, Chris Nashawaty’s Caddyshack, and Cary Elwes’s As You Wish.

Nicolas Cage has been called a lot of things. Icon. Celebrity. Artist. Madman. Has-Been. Genius. Love him, or laugh at him, one thing is certain: you’ve seen one of his nearly 100 films, and you certainly know his name. But who is he, really?

Critic and journalist Keith Phipps traces the enigmatic icon’s career through a detailed look at Cage’s life, work, and artistic choices and in doing so chronicles the transformation of Hollywood, from the teen comedies of the 1980s, to the indie and blockbuster worlds of the 1990s, through the video-on-demand world of today.

Sweeping in scope and intimate in its portrait of a fiercely passionate man and artist, Afe of Cage is, like the man himself, surprising, insightful, funny, and one-of-a-kind. So, snap out of it, and enjoy this appreciation of Nicolas Cage, a national treasure.

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Book Published 2022-03-29 by Holt

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AGE OF CAGE
Four Decades of Hollywood Through One Singular Career
Author: Keith Phipps
Kirkus
Review Issue Date: December 1, 2021
Online Publish Date: October 30, 2021
Publisher:Henry Holt
Pages: 288
Price ( Hardcover ): $27.99
Publication Date: March 29, 2022
ISBN ( Hardcover ): 978-1-250-77304-3
Section: NonFiction
Following the actor through the ups and downs in recent movie history.
In his first book, film journalist Phipps notes that many moviegoers have a love-hate relationship with the “intense, sincere, a little unreadable” actor Nicolas Kim Coppola (b. 1964). After a brief bio—the actor shed his uncle Francis Ford Coppola’s name early on—the author juxtaposes insightful analyses of Cage’s films with helpful film history about a fickle industry searching for the next fad or copying the latest hit. Teen-pleasing films were hot when Cage secured a small role in Valley Girl, then a better one in his uncle’s Rumble Fish. Committed to fashioning a mythology around himself, Cage’s fierce, expressionistic performance in Birdyarrived as filmmakers were in the process of defining film for the 1980s. Cage’s “memorably vulnerable creation” in Peggy Sue Got Married was his first “undeniable hit.” Mainstream movie comedies were in transition when Cage merged the absurd and heartfelt in Raising Arizona (he almost didn’t get the part). Moonstruck, thanks to co-star Cher’s support, was his first real mainstream film. That film, writes Phipps, “conferred on Cage the status of a sex symbol, and he didn’t know what to do with it.” Riding the wave of strange, independent films released in the 1990s, he created solid performances in Wild at Heart and the dark Leaving Las Vegas, which won Cage a Golden Globe and an Oscar. Then came the ubiquitous action films, including The Rockand Face/Off. Now an accomplished movie star, he demonstrated new confidence in The Thin Red Line and Adaptation. Among Cage’s recent misses lurk some genuine hits: the underrated Matchstick Men and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, as well as the inventive, animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, for which Cage provided his voice. “Simply by persevering,” Phipps writes, “he’s seen it all, and his movies capture the face of a changing industry.”
Cage fans will relish this refreshing, extensive assessment of the mercurial, prolific actor.

"..Keith Phipps, a longtime critic for The A.V. Club, has absorbed the whole of the corpus, from Adaptation to Zandalee, and lived to write about it. In Age of Cage, he eschews biography for filmography, setting the actor against the vicissitudes of an uncaring Hollywood to reveal much about both..."

In this exclusive excerpt from ‘Age of Cage,’ Keith Phipps chronicles how Hollywood’s most singular actor stepped into the role of blockbuster hero with ‘The Rock,’ ‘Con Air,’ and ‘Face/Off’
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Age of Cage: Four Decades of Hollywood Through One Singular Career
Keith Phipps. Henry Holt, $27.99 (288p) ISBN 978-1-2507-7304-3

Film critic Phipps debuts with an entertaining odyssey through actor Nicolas Cage’s rise to fame and his restless quest to create himself. Born Nicolas Coppola in 1964, Cage used television to escape life with a mother who was in and out of mental institutions. This led to an acting career that began in high school, and, later, the chance to flex his “dramatic chops” in the 1981 TV pilot
The Best of Times. Eager to gain his own notoriety (outside that of his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola), he began going by “Nic Cage” in 1985. In exploring Cage’s films from the 1980s to the 2010s, Phipps offers an entrancing look at the actor’s transformation, starting with Cage’s first hit, Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), which showcased the polarizing style of Method acting that became his trademark. Driven by “a need to reinvent himself,” he oscillated from playing characters who “glow with virtue” (in films such as 1992’s Honeymoon in Vegas), to playing bad guys (as in 1997’s Face/Off), and flirted with hokier roles (notably in the National Treasure franchise). Even in underlining Cage’s chameleonlike genius, Phipps doesn’t gloss over the actor’s missteps, including starring in 2011’s Trespass, a box-office flop that marked the beginning of “some of his least creative performances.” Cage’s legions of devotees are in for a wild ride. (Oct.)