A Nicholas Cage Double Feature!

Before I even get STARTED, watch...this!!!

OK. I think now we're in the mood. I don't know what happened to Nic Cage Coppola (if you didn't know this by now, there's some nepotism for you). I loved Adaptation. Really, I did, and he was truly fantastic. And yet, somewhere after the film's release, Cage actually lost his fucking mind. There are now two Nicholas Cages. The first Cage is a brooding, intense, yet thought-provoking actor who helps us respect our inner loser. Somehow, this Cage has decided to quit the acting biz.
And then there's the other Cage, who, in the past years, has given us The Wicker Man ("Not the bees!!! AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!), Stolen, Bad Lieutenant II(yep, that story needed a sequel) and...
Ghost Rider:Spirit of Vengeance and Season of the Witch!!! These films made me yearn for a Valley Girl sequel.
You have to hand it to the guy. No one has truly dedicated himself to a comic character that no one really gave a shit about like Cage does the poor Ghost Rider...at least not since the Affleck Daredevil snoozer.
Unlike Daredevil, where Affleck, and just about anyone with working eyes (pun intended- Daredevil's blind) could see what a piece of shit that film was, Cage re-booted Ghost Rider. The result is a ridiculous, buffoonish master-dump. The only thing Cage appears to enjoy more than Ghost Rider is his own scream. And he LOVES to scream, so much so that the director cuts into the flow of his "film" to present back story, complete with maniacal Cage screams. To his credit, these are the only redeeming portions of the movie. Nothing fills me with joy more than Nic Cage writhing in pain.
Here's the brief, yet concise, synopsis: Johnny Blaze sold his soul to the devil, now collects other souls for him. But he goes rogue! He is partly filled with the corrupted soul of a fallen angel, and must get it out( or convert it to a good fallen angel?), all the while saving the next Antichrist from merging with his devilish master. And get this: they're somehow in Romania. How does a guy who turns every vehicle he enters into a fiery hellish lump of mangled aggressive BULLSHIT survive a 10 hour flight to fucking Romania?!? "Attention, this is your captain. We are experiencing some turbulence due to our airplane suddenly morphing into a lava-spewing servant from Hell...please note the fasten seatbelt light is on, and remain out of the aisle...can the man with the flaming skull please extinguish himself?"
Somehow Idris Elba tripped into this movie, and I wept for him. My wife was very upset...
But not as upset as the day I made her watch Season of the Witch! This putrid abomination has everything, from Brooklyn accents in the middle ages, to extremely obvious plot points, to maddeningly poor acting. Did I mention his ridiculous hair piece, or easily slash-able chain mail?!? Or that the main twist of the plot isn't whether a woman is a witch or not, or the insinuations that she was raped by the only surviving priest, or why no one on the quest catches the plague (which they might as well rub on their balls, they're so up in plague). No, it's what kind of evil she is. Oh, the suspense!!!
No suspense here. There is nothing sorrier than watching a once-promising actor turn evil, which is the only other excuse I can offer him besides bankruptcy for making such garbage. He even made a David Caruso film watchable! Yes, THAT David Caruso! I can't wait to see what else is next for my boy Cage. OK, maybe I can.

John Carter

I generally dislike Disney films. There, I said it. Hurl your insults now!
OK, you can stop now. Stop it!
Now that we got that out of the way, seriously, I do. I even hated them as a child, because I don't need cartoons to teach me life lessons. Why? Because I knew they were cartoons, not people, and they always had a happy ending(insert joke here).
But this is about John Carter, the largest Disney dump of all time. I remember when John Carter was released, reading reviews which offered bad ratings not for the content, but its timeliness. You see, John Carter was written nearly a hundred years ago, when we still wondered if you could BREATHE on Mars. Well, according to this film, you can...and you can jump really high...and some people wears LOTS of henna. Lots.
 John Carter was a Civil War vet who, in the search for a cave of gold(?), finds a portal to Mars(and kills a dude). When he gets to this temperate( from where you can see Earth and the moon like they were right next to Mars. Remember that night you looked up at the sky and saw MARS?!?), he learns he can jump really high, gets a little stronger, gets captured by multi-armed aliens, and defeats everyone. With the help of jumping. Seriously, anyone out there remember how menacing FROGS are?!?
Once you get past the first few minutes of thinking, "Why the fuck would someone greenlight this hunk of shit?!?", and try to forget they're on Mars, you are immediately stabbed in the brain by the "writer's" insistence that you absorb the same running joke (they all call John Carter "Virginia". Fucking hilarious.) for a half hour. This is the skilled writing employed in most Disney films. Tell the same gag 30 times, and it will finally make you laugh. Disney films are a war of attrition, disarming you with repetition straight out of a Huxley novel, assaulting you with abject cuteness until you vomit happy butterflies.
Did I mention Taylor Kitsch is John Carter?!? Did I?
Holy shit! It's not bad enough that you write a film with a premise impossible to believe, you go and cast the Friday Night Lights TV show guy?!? Are you insane!!!! Someone somewhere in Hollywood uses this formula to choose films to produce: Awful leaden actor no one knows + cheap script no one will believe + wasting a shit ton of money= successful film!
And I mean a shit ton! Here's the hardest part to stomach: John Carter cost 300 MILLION DOLLARS to make! You could buy 600 thousand people a fucking BIG MAC for that, and their collective feces would be better than John Carter. 
So you should watch this. There are few, if any, better examples of a film made 60 years too late. In 1940, maybe 1950, this could have been a Commander Cody serial. instead, you get to see what kind of garbage you can buy for $300 million.