LGM

Brad Silberling's City of Angels has been playing on TV for the past week or so. You may remember it -- Nicholas Cage plays an angel, Meg Ryan plays a surgeon (!). What you may not know is that it's actually a remake of a German film by Wim Wenders called Wings of Desire. In that version, the angel falls for a circus worker - an acrobat, I think.

Anyway, Suzy and I saw City of Angels in the theater and enjoyed it enough to buy it on VHS back when that was the thing to do. I've sort of thought of it as one of "our" movies since then.

So it occurred to me when I saw it the other night that it was a perfect role for Nic Cage - to play something not quite human, a little cold and distant, wanting to be normal but not being able to pull it off. It also occurred to me that City of Angels might be the last good movie Nic Cage was ever in. He seems to have just given up and gone from interesting, sometimes experimental actor to professional paycheck whore. I mean, have you seen some of the stanky stank bombs this guy has been in over the last decade? It's like he's not even looking. He just gets driven from one set to another, fitted with one terrible (and I mean terrible) wig or another, is pointed toward the camera, and someone yells, "Action."

So I look on IMDB and find that the actual last good movie NC was in (if you are generous with your definition of the word "good") was either 2005's World Trade Center or 2003's Matchstick Men. So, at best, it's been seven years since Mr. Cage has appeared in something that didn't drip a rich and robust lame sauce.

Out of curiosity, I looked up a couple of other former greats who have floundered, sputtered, or otherwise petered out. Harrison Ford? His LGM was What Lies Beneath (2000) and before that, Air Force One (1997). Not a good track record for the last twelve years.

Mel Gibson. Ol' Mel, as you may recall, was one of the biggest stars in the world in the 80s and 90s. He was cool on screen and off. A family man with with a kajillion kids and the same wife he started with. He's totally blown that and just gone bonkers, but what about his acting career? I'll go ahead and say that Apocalypto, his Mayan chase movie, is totally awesome. It's bloody for sure, but also absolute proof to me that someone with a brain and a budget could make really great movies out of the Book of Mormon if they wanted to. Anyway, he only wrote and directed that one so it doesn't count. I'm talking good movies that people want to see this person in. What was Mel's LGM? 2002's Signs which, coincidentally, is also director M. Night Shyamalan's LGM. Ten years of crappy for both of them.

Fascinating, isn't it? For some people's careers, you can point to an exact date in time and say, "Yep, that's the last time they got anything right."

So, what actor can you confidently point to that has a distant LGM?