Topic: Nic Cage is eating my brain. Someone help me.
So I'm about to go off and watch "Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance", largely because Cage is the star. I am inexplicably drawn to Nic Cage. There's something about his overall instability in a film that excites me. He could be mid-line in a dramatic scene and suddenly explode into a spastic overacting tantrum of awesome. I have gone out of my way to watch movies that I know would end up being terrible simply because Cage is in it.
And everyone else hates him for some reason.
The reasons I most commonly see for people hating on Cage is his weird hair, his involvement with The Wicker Man and his penchant for suddenly screaming at people for no particular reason. But I have the exact opposite reaction to those stimuli. I want to know if there's some way to quantify this. I know there are a few other people like myself who actually like this sort of thing. I want to know if there's some kind of pattern to this. Something that people like myself and Brad Jones have in common.
We both kinda like cheesy flicks and B-movies. We're both fans of the Asylum. But not really in an ironic sort of way. It's not like these things are so bad they're good. Rather, they make a certain type of movie, and we can allow ourselves to ignore the badness and actually enjoy the movie as it was intended to be enjoyed.
Example: US Seals 2. I will absolutely agree that it's a terrible film and only makes sense if you've recently suffered severe head trauma, but I consider it to be one of the better action films I've ever seen. Not only can I enjoy the movie in an ironic sort of way (the phone-call scene, the "I always loved you" scene), but I genuinely like the action and the overall fun mood of the movie. I think a lot of 80's action movies basically have the same tone. You allow them to get away with stuff that doesn't make sense because the part of your brain that's getting off on the action and fun is getting so much stimulus that it's drowning out the part of your brain that's more concerned with whether or not any of it is making any amount of sense.
This movie I'm about to go see currently sits at 15% on Rotten Tomatoes, and less than 50% audience rating. That's heinously bad, and I would normally avoid a movie with that sort of rating like the plague, especially an action movie. But I can't, because I know a lot of that rating has to do with Cage, and a lot of it probably also has to do with Neveldine/Taylor, who are an acquired taste on their own. I wasn't a fan of Gamer, but I liked the two Crank movies - the second more than the first, if I'm being entirely honest. Again, I know those movies are bad in a general sense, and the first Crank is the better movie if you're rating them on general film-making terms, but I like them.
My problem here is that every time I go to a Nic Cage movie, I end up thinking about this sort of shit. I question why people don't like Cage. It's honestly a completely foreign thought for me. I cannot conceive of what it would be like to not love Nic Cage. I seriously doubt that it's his hair or crazy-ass acting that turns people off. I've had guys tell me that it's cause he plays the same character in every movie, and that's OK to a certain point, but I don't honestly believe that. He's got his own quirks that show up in a character, but a lot of his characters are played differently. He's not been in buttloads of shitty movies, either. He's had his fair share, I guess, and a string of them in the mid 2000's, but his worst movies are just kinda mediocre. Only a couple of them are actually "bad" and not "bland".
Fuckin... I dunno.
Explain! Why do people hate Nic Cage so much, while a small group of us actually love the shit out of him? And is this common? Are there any other actors who are almost universally hated but are adored by a small subset of people?
