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Nicolas Cage Will Always Go Big
Nicolas Cage has made a career out of not subtle, unrealistic, big characters like Longlegs. The risk is the point.
Whether contemplating his suitably hard-boiled voice work as Spider-Man Noir in the Spider-Verse movies; his existentially disappointed character in Pig, somewhere between an indie drama and a parable; the gothic action-horror excess of Mandy, origin point for the Nicolas-Cage-bathed-in-blood image now available in T-shirt and pin form; the exuberant over-the-topness of Cage’s Dracula in the vampire comedy Reinfield; the ripped-from-the-spleen creepiness of his lead performance in the H.P. All of those things were a perfect storm of that stuff.” The ’90s setting of Longlegs, as well as some of the performance and directing choices, channel The Silence of the Lambs(problematic for its politics — the murderer was a man with a “gender identity problem” who wanted to wear women’s skins) and the so-called Satanic Panic of the ’80s and ’90s. In his wailing, pained psychosis, he approaches the danger of comedy.” Cage’s inspirations included Giulietta Masina’s performance in Federico Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits and an early childhood memory of his mother, Joy Vogelsang, putting cold cream on her face.
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