Previously on Cage Match.
Hold on, I want to back one thing up.
So when I mildly touched on Pat Morita's accent, I was racist?
Italians aren't people.
Okay. As long as we've got that out in front.
Oh god. Oh my god.
Make sure everything is recording properly.
Bottom bosoms, bottom bosoms, bottom bosoms.
Butt boobs? Nice. It's two things I enjoy.
Together at last.
One of my buddies used to always talk at work about front butts and back tits.
Welcome back to Cage Match, calling around about meeting Nicolas Cage.
I'm Sean with my co-host Nick. I'm Nick.
And this is a bracket-style podcast where we take 64 Nicolas Cage's best movies.
And we're going to figure out what the all-time most cagey Nick Cage film is, as decided by us.
Yeah, some real professionals.
Yeah.
I like that we decide best by just saying his best movies are, I don't know,
just not the one third of the movies that aren't included.
Which also include a lot of new things, because we're not updating our list.
Yeah, I mean we did start this a year ago now.
Oh, happy anniversary, guys.
Happy anniversary, guys. We're still amazingly doing this.
And you guys are still weirdly my friends.
Yeah.
And we're right back to sweaty man episodes, as it's really humid in your apartment.
Oh yeah. Now we're back to the summer.
Yeah, summertime in Sean's apartment.
It's where you take your top off.
Yeah, we might lose some clothing this episode.
I'm wearing very loose pants, but I'm not opposed.
Let them breathe.
Well, speaking of war crimes, Lord of War and Captain Corelli's Mandolin are the movies we're talking about today.
What seat is this, Peter?
So it's a four and a 13, I believe, and we are in the serious bracket.
Well, they are serious movies, and they do seriously act.
Yes, there's a lot of acting that happens in one of these films.
But we're going to talk about Lord of War first.
I don't know what that means in context of where people act.
No, that is exactly what I was getting at.
Oh, OK. So Lord of War, you want to give us the short on that?
Nicholas Cage plays Yuri Orlov.
Nicholas Cage plays Yuri Orlov, a Ukrainian immigrant who in his early 20s,
starts selling guns to mob and that quickly grows in him selling guns to war criminals and governments
and just becoming, you know, all around kind of likeable sleazebag.
Yeah, he's an arms trafficker.
Arms trafficker, which takes him on a wild ride from the fallen Soviet Union to Africa and back again.
All the while, things with his wife are not great.
Yeah, that's a pretty mild way of putting it.
Yeah. Also starring Ethan Hawke as DEA agent Jack Valentine and Jared Leto as Vitaly Orlov, Yuri's coke addict brother.
And who plays the wife?
Bridget Monahan, Monahan, Monahan, kind of like Bobby Monahan, but they don't look alike.
And I don't think they're the same person.
Plays Eva Fontaine.
I've never seen them in the same same room at the same time, though.
True.
OK, well, it took me a second to figure out who Bobby Monahan was.
That would be a better movie.
I don't know if it would be better, but it would actually be more interesting.
Yes. Nicholas Cage, Yuri.
Yeah, so he's he's not like a good guy, right?
I mean, he's a arms dealer.
Yeah. This character, Yuri, he's a he and his actions are based off of a lot of like real world arms traffickers.
And most famously, the arm track figure we traded for a Britney Grindr.
Grindr.
Britney Grindr is a different thing.
I was watching an adult documentary before he came over.
All right. So this movie opens up.
It's just all voiceover pretty much with Nicholas Cage talking about his family fleeing from Ukraine.
They pretended to be Jewish so that they could get out and away from the USSR.
They established themselves in New York.
The family owns a restaurant, their little Crimean restaurant.
Brother works in the kitchen.
He is apparently a terrible cook because Nicholas Cage says that he eats there for free and even he doesn't eat there.
Good, good review.
Yeah. This is where we start to see Nicholas Cage get his first like gun deal.
Like he uses a connection from his father's like Jewish temple to get his hands on his first Israeli Uzi.
And that gets him his first sale where he kind of kind of blunders it,
but makes it out in the end with a couple of bucks realizes there's too many middlemen and he's not making enough money selling single guns.
So he gets his brother involved and they start going big time.
They go to like the Berlin Arms Expo.
They see a lot of cool guns.
I do want to say, though, like this isn't a kind of rags to riches.
Like he had to make this choice.
We're seven minutes into the movie and he's already like we can sell guns bigger.
Like he is not really relatable at this point yet.
I don't think he ever makes himself a relatable character.
But yeah, they they go to this arms dealing expo and conference and they try to make contacts.
It doesn't work.
They basically get shot down pretty hard by this guy, Simeon, who played by Ian Holm.
I like him. Yeah, he is like the big time arms dealer in the in the game.
I just want to point out the name of the arms fair salesman, the one that tries to sell them an old rocket launcher that well can't take down a fighter jet.
Definitely take down a commercial airliner.
Oh, yeah. It's played by Jeremy Crutchley.
Who's that? I don't know, but I like the last name Crutchley.
I thought for sure this was going to be a burn notice drop.
I thought for sure it was going to be something that pertained to the podcast is not my job here.
So they meet with him, but he blows them off our necklace cage decides, fuck it.
We're going to do things differently. We're just going to sell to everyone.
Well, in Holmes's whole argument is you pick a side in a war. Yeah.
And the cage is like, you know, we're just going to everyone gets guns.
Yeah. So from there, you know, you kind of get just the flash forward of, you know, business going down and it's, you know, shots of him selling guns in the Middle East.
But he talks mostly about in the movie, mostly surrounds activity in Africa, specifically Libya and eventually some Sierra Leone and things like that.
This movie mostly takes place in the mid 90s. It jumps a few years early on. Yeah. But he does talk about how it's like, you know, I sold guns to Al Qaeda, but I never did business with the song bin Laden.
Not for moral reasons. He was just bouncing a lot of checks in those days. Yeah.
I don't know if there's really much that needs to be talked about in any specific scenes.
No, as far as him like selling guns like he's a con man. Yeah. He you get a lot of scenes of him like basically just trafficking the weapons, like how he gets them places like they're on a boat.
And he's always being hounded by Interpol agent Jack Valentine.
And they get a tip that Valentine's coming for him. So quickly they changed the name of the boat and have to scramble to fly a French flag sideways to make it look like a Dutch flag.
You know, they get off because the containers are filled with rotten potatoes, which throw off the agents and wackiness.
And then, you know, later he's flying airplanes. And for the most part, it's not it's not terribly interesting.
Like it's I found it fine the first time. It was fun the first time. It was fun the second time. But it I don't know.
You seen it and it doesn't amaze you. So it's interesting that it's a four seed because I kind of had higher expectations of it.
I'm not that the four seeds are like all bangers, but I sort of thought that it was going to be better. It's well acted.
That's the thing. Like I thought it was well acted. It's well written. It is well written.
So this is 2005 film and it has good flow. It's got really good.
It's hard to describe just because it is such a series of like it's just a little bit.
I mean, we do get some looks into his personal lives. You know, he's really close with his brother played by Jared Leto.
From the outset, he talks about how he's been obsessed with Ava since he was 10 and uses at the start of his career,
uses what resources he has to rent out an entire hotel, spends twenty five thousand dollars because she's a model to book her for a modeling gig at this hotel
and then pretends that the photographer got caught up in Miami.
There's no flights home till Saturday, so he offers to give her a flight home on his private jet, which the people working at the airport,
he paid them off just to like spray his name on the back of the jet. So as they take off, it starts to like smear.
Yeah. Paint wasn't even dry yet when they take off.
But it didn't matter because by the time they landed, she was his. She was just looking at my eyes.
Nice. You know, there's a lot put on. He has his family, has his wife. He looks he has a son he clearly cares about,
which is kind of tries to get to the heart of the matter once he starts seeing boy children soldiers and watching kids get murdered in Africa.
There are a few moments where he looks at his son and kind of thinks maybe twice.
He goes into a sunroom one night to kiss his son good night after his son's going to bed.
His son has a little cowboy repeater toy and he throws it out because that's not appropriate.
I don't know if they're trying to like put a little moral like give him a little bit of morality, but he doesn't have it.
I mean, it ultimately leads to the death of his brother and his wife turning him into the feds.
Yeah. And it's kind of interesting now, like with all of this, what like it's it's well written, it's well acted.
But I think the thing that I don't get out of this is any kind of like emotion.
Like he never like to the end really ever seems to regret now being an arms dealer.
I mean, even after even after his wife leaves and he's like taking that other job or like getting out of jail.
It's like he doesn't seem to care.
Like he calls and what not, but leaves a message on the voicemail.
But no, there's definitely he's definitely has some disconnect from all of that. And I mean, it's just hard to be sympathetic with a character who doesn't operate in a human way.
So this is 2005. This is kind of Nick Cage is still writing that he's mostly he's been in a lot of good stuff.
I don't feel like we're at the point yet where his name is just associated with subpar turned out. He's in everything.
Like this definitely has a feeling of it trying to be a I mean, it's clearly not going for an Oscar, but it's it's trying to be a prestige movie of some sort.
Oh, yeah. Interesting. Due to the subject matter could not get any funding from American producers.
So it's all funded from like outside of America. Interesting. They worked with actual the director says they worked with actual arms dealers, including the tanks from the Soviet base.
They're not Soviet base, but when they go to the arms conference, like those were actual like they got those on loan from actual arms dealers that had to be returned by Monday so they could be sold to they were told to.
Yeah, they had to contact NATO at one point for the scene where they're like lining up all the tanks.
They needed to contact NATO like we are filming a movie. We are doing this. You can send someone out to check just in case a satellite picked up all these tanks like amassing that they weren't like bombed.
Sure. There's a lot of interesting stuff that went into the making of this film. But you're right. There isn't much of an emotional core of the film.
The form is the film is mostly about arms dealing is bad and it's mostly done by governments like the US and US and Russia and China sell the most guns and that's bad.
Yeah, that is how the movie ends to with that little written like, oh, yeah, they do a title card at the end that tells you about, you know, the major like the entities that sell the most weapons are actually the, you know, top where the five permanent members of.
The UN Security Council and I will say in terms of pacing, like you said, it is a lot of vignettes. There are there is a lot of good setup and payoff in this film early on. He's selling to Colombian drug lord who like shoots him in the stomach.
Yeah, and he said, like, you know, the first rule of arms dealing is never get shot with your own product. And then what wines getting him caught in the end is his brother has a totally has a change of heart.
When he finds out that guns are going to be used to kill a bunch of innocent kids and stuff. Yeah, kids in Africa. To be fair, he did also just watch some kid and some girl get hacked up with machetes by a small mob.
And yeah, no, that's enough to like start making you think otherwise. Rightfully so. Yuri or not Yuri. Vitali is actually the most like relatable character. Does he actually have a moral compass? Yeah, I mean, kind of.
It's hard to tell because it's like his character is being told from his brother's eyes. So there's a lot of like he doesn't know what his brother's motivations are, things like that. And he makes those statements to in narration.
Yeah, he is kind of he is kind of the moral center of this film, and he's one of the biggest problems even from their first sale. When they're lining up a bunch of kids at a at a firing range, he wants to get involved and he tells me you can't. There's nothing you can do.
So when Vitali sees the kid get hacked up, he like tries to talk his brother out of the deal. Yuri's like, hey, man, there's nothing we can do about this now. Like those people are either going to get slaughtered with these weapons, slaughtered with other weapons, or if we back out, we'll get killed.
So it's like the only way for us out is to sell the guns and leave. So Vitali kind of gets in line and he's like, oh, OK, fine. Oh, I'm in. I just misunderstood the deal talking to the guys from Sierra Leone.
And then he goes back to the truck under the auspice of like checking on something for Yuri, opens up a box with a couple of grenades, tosses one grenade into one truck full of arms. And as he's running to blow up the other truck, you know, you know, truck one explodes.
Vitali is running across. He just gets shot down by the guys from Sierra Leone. And then Nick Cage has to finish the deal for half of the blood diamonds that he was going to get paid because he pretty much gets paid in blood diamonds for African work.
This movie is about pointing out like the weird fucked up world of guns.
Unregistered, untraced guns, and they take advantage of that to make this film. Yeah, it's it actually like comes really close to talking about something that would have been talked about during that time, but like would get more.
Attention like in the last like five years, and that's like what happens when a government leaves a war zone and all the stuff that they just leave behind. And that gets into the subject of burn pits, which is something that John Stewart's incredibly passionate about.
And for good cause, it's fucking people up. But like all these like military guns, like they just leave cars like it's cheaper to just leave it. Yeah. Well, they're not going to bring it. That was their first big haul is the it was cheaper to leave the gun center, fly them back out.
So after the desert storm or something, Yuri and Vitaly are selling guns by the kilo. Ultimately, Ian Holmes character shows back up because now the cage is running the show. It's like we should team up. He's like, no, you were right. The first time. I'm not good enough for you.
So Ian Holmes tries to have Yuri killed, but inadvertently blows up Yuri's uncle. So Yuri is responsible for the entire implosion of his family. Like his mother says, both my children are dead after Yuri gets caught bringing his brother back in the country.
So he paid off a doctor to give him a fake. Yeah. Pull all the lead out and give him a fake death certificate. But he missed one bullet under the rib cage, which got caught in an X-ray when they were bringing the coffin back in. So, you know, I checked it out.
I did have another quote picked out, but rewatching that scene last night when he gets brought in, probably the better quote is at the airport. It's like, Mr. Orlov, I'm from what is it? Alcohol. They have alcohol, tobacco and firearms. And Nick K. just goes.
I'm assuming you're not here to talk about the alcohol and tobacco.
This doesn't seem like a movie filled with a laugh out loud quotes or just like really poignant shit or anything. I mean, if you're dark enough, he says some things that I'm well.
He says a lot of things that would fit really well in those like subreddits of like I'm 14 and this is deep. So this is something I actually do want to talk about. You say this is well acted. I don't think it's poorly acted, but I don't think it's.
There's no depth to anyone's performance and Nick K. just monotone the entire time. And maybe that goes to the character sociopathic nature.
There's not there's no emotion throughout this film. Ava Bridget Moynihan probably gives the best emotional performance in this.
Yeah. Well, the only two people who have like emotional characters would be Ava and Vitaly. Everything is kind of from Jack's POV. So some of these characters, you know, might not get the chance to have an emotional moment or an emotional growth just because.
Like, I mean, his parents, yeah, they're not in much of the movie. Now, I mean, you see the mothers and fathers like distress in the end when they disown him, but they don't have any other like scenes.
Vitaly, I think there's like a little bit of mystery in the character and his motivations. I don't think he had a drug problem until he started to see the atrocities that were wrapped up in his brother's trade.
And that's why he like numbing himself. He just took these drugs and like ran off because he didn't want to be surrounded by the darkness of his brother's life. And he gets found and gets brought back into it.
They take him back to America and put him in rehab, which doesn't help because the next time you see him at he shows up at cage's house.
He's obviously on it again. He goes right back to rehab. Not long after that. Not helped by the fact that every time they came to drop him off at rehab, he gives him a bump just to get him out of the car.
Yeah, I did like when he got out of the car the second time, though, and he was just like, Hey, Charles, just saying it to the orderly is that I think that there is just a subtler performance from Jared Leto, who I'm not going to spend too much time praising in life.
In this early, mad that you don't have a cult. I'm just mad that he never called me back for that role in Morbius. But I thought we could have been great together.
Which role? The love interest, obviously. I don't know enough about Morbius to keep this joke going. I don't either. I'm assuming it's blood. I was going to play the role of blood.
Yeah. Peter, you have to Photoshop this. Oh, yeah. Just a small pool of me. A puddle of Nick. A puddle of Nick. And Morbius. Yep.
But I think he gave us a more interesting performance than we give him credit for it in just that everybody here is working on the fringe of the narrator.
It's hard to, I'm assumed, put anything more into a performance that because it's not written. I don't think that exists for the characters and the actors just had to kind of find it. It's my guess.
I mean, that's just me justifying kind of liking the acting.
The director. So I looked up the director. He's only done like 12 things. This is the only one I've heard about. So I'm wondering if it's more... What's his name? Andrew Nicole.
Give me one thing that he did that I'll never know about. Oh, no. Actually, he has done something we've heard about. He was a writer on the Truman Show. And Gattaca. He directed Gattaca.
OK. So but I'm just like... Ethan Hawke tying. Yeah. Well, maybe that's how we got Ethan Hawke on this. Well, let's do quotes real quick. My actual written quote for this was in a voiceover when he gets to Soviet warehouse of AK-47s in Ukraine.
The Soviets had guns coming out of the demon hole. Yeah. Which I would love to see the demon hole. I just want to look at it. I think it's in Ohio.
That tracks most demon holes I've seen came from Ohio.
All right, Nick. Yeah. Mine was just again in a voiceover because that's what the movie essentially is. They say, evil prevails when good men fail to act. What they ought to say is evil prevails.
That line's right after his brother gets killed and the guns he sells that are left wipe out that camp that his brother was trying to save. Yeah. Yeah. Well, because it's kind of a bleak movie. He said, you know, Vitaly was right.
They wiped out that camp, but there were 12 other atrocities in that part of Africa that week.
So this was a weird one for me and the good cage, good movie, bad cage, bad movie, good, bad, bad, good. I think all in all, this is a good movie. I think it's a really weak performance by Nicolas Cage in that he just kind of reads the dialogue, but doesn't give us much of a performance.
Yeah, I can see the the thought of it being like he's just reading the dialogue. It's to me, it's more of just like a one sided conversation.
Like, maybe this is just him clearing out his conscience or, you know, trying to have you understand that, like, you know, he did bad things, but he did them for like whatever.
Yeah. Like I said earlier, it doesn't feel like he read it to me or it doesn't feel like obviously he read them.
No, he improv the whole movie. Everything. I mean, I understand what you're saying. No, I don't mean like he read it, but just I didn't find anything really in his performance that made me appreciate his performance or like believe him as a character versus his.
It just felt like very for me, it felt very just like Nick Cage and not like Nick Cage, but not quite the not quite the highs of his more serious roles and not quite the highs of a strung out character.
And there's there's an argument that, you know, for some more strung out scenes in this, I would have liked more because I did like the film.
Yeah. As far as pushing it further, though, I'd probably argue that would be in bad taste just because of how much of this is attributed to or, you know, based on actual events.
I don't need a joke right before some child gets slaughtered.
I just wanted, you know, I just more emotional response. Just more emotion, just more emotional acting from him.
I see that. I understand what you're saying. I feel a little different just that it's OK to be mid because it is.
Well, people are more mid. That's also true. That's fair. And in something so like realistically based, I feel like it would take away the gravitas of the grander story.
The movie is more about the message than the characters. I will agree. I will. That is true.
So on that note, then, I mean, we did talk about this in this week in Cage several months back or whatever, but they are making a sequel potentially to this.
So in 2018, Kevin Smith asked Nicholas Cage which of his movies he would like most to make a sequel to.
And he said Lord of War. He would like to really see the relationship between his character and his son 20 years later.
And the writer heard that was like, that sounds awesome. And it started writing it. And Bill Skarsgard is attached to play the song.
Do you guys think that this is a necessary movie potentially or going back to what we just talked to her?
I'm like, I'm I personally a little more interested in the emotional like stakes of these characters that message.
I wouldn't mind seeing a more character focused version of this guy.
What if it's just Bill Skarsgard with like a fat fucking cigar shooting AKs all the entire movie?
I definitely want to see that. I do want to see that, actually.
You know, I rewatched this last night and enjoyed it just as much. My critiques aside, I thought the whole the thing as a whole is a quite compelling.
Yeah. For a number four, I thought it felt a little short for me, but it holds my attention when I watch it.
It's hard to talk about, but I liked it. I thought it was a good movie. I thought Nicolas Cage did a good job in it.
So our next film up is Captain Kareli's Mandalay, a film about a woman who wants to fuck a mandolin.
Let's get back to this comedy podcast.
I think Cage is at least somewhat charming in this movie, but not a ton.
Yeah. So this film is in the broad strokes, Italian occupation of a Greek, Italian occupation of a Greek.
There's a lot of hand gestures going on around my face right now and I'm uncomfortable with it.
You can't say broad strokes, Sean. Yeah.
Lady strokes.
The Italian occupation of a Greek island during World War Two, Nicolas Cage plays the eponymous Captain Kareli and he brings his mandolin,
who you think would be the star of the show, but really isn't it that much.
I expected like an animated mandolin, like dulling out wisdom and like singing songs about, you know, how we're all like the same.
Was that only in the blu ray? Because I got all of that. God damn it.
Again, mandolin fucking. What are we doing? Captain Cantonelli's.
Yeah, Captain Canole is mandolin. There we go. That's what I wanted to get at. Captain Canole is mandolin.
So we've got this Greek island and a little like slice of life story in the opening with young Grecian woman.
So John Hurt. I'll just go through the cast real quick.
Perfect time to do it right in the middle of the sentence.
We're describing the characters. Oh, man. I have Honeymoon in Vegas pulled up still.
So I was like, Mahi, Mahi. I don't remember.
So Nicholas Cage plays Captain Antonio Correlli. Mahi, Mahi was the German captain.
Penelope Cruz plays Pelagia. John Hurt is Dr. Yanis. Christian Bale as Mondros.
And a bunch of Italian actors. I'm not going to attempt to pronounce their name.
I think the only other one that stood out to me was David Morrissey.
David Morrissey is Gunter. Is Gunter the German captain.
Yeah, I thought he was well cast.
I'm just going to get this out of the way right now so it can be edited out easily.
This movie tries real hard to make a sympathetic Nazi character and like all media, completely fails at that.
I don't think they tried too hard on that one. I mean, they want you to not hate him.
They want you to not hate him the least. Right.
I think what they wanted was to be like, hey, guys, like this is the whole theme of the movie.
Fascism is complicated. Yeah, that is kind of the entire gist.
Yeah. You know, living through the fall of Western civilization, I don't know if it's that complicated.
Oh, also almost always going to take it. Just because the accent work in this movie is atrocious across the board.
I feel fully fine with us doing any bad accent that you want to do, even if it's really bad.
Oh, I'm going to. OK, because they're all terrible.
We should just put a stinger in the beginning where you explain that it's OK.
No, the stinger is you just take my clip from last week saying Italians are people.
Yeah, exactly. That's the way we start everything off every week.
Previously on CageMatch, Italians are people.
Fuck!
Oh, I'm not saying don't do it, but don't do it.
I mean, I kind of think that's the perfect way to open it up.
It's pretty good. Yeah, I mean, it's a strong start.
We're not big in Italy right now, so we're big with Germany.
If you do do that, you have to keep this little riff in. Oh, absolutely.
Otherwise, we just look bad.
We don't look like anything. It's an audio only format.
All right. So, Nick, bring us through the quick plot line.
Boy, where did I leave off? Oh, yeah. The first sentence.
So it's about.
Did you know Irene Pappas was in this?
I am going to unplug your microphone.
I'll stop.
Starts out just giving us a story of a father and daughter.
He's the doctor on the island.
She's kind of like learning from him.
They have kind of a, you know, quaint little life.
It's in the shadow of World War Two.
Her boyfriend played by Christian Bale, Mandras, kind of is a big man child.
He goes off, you know, after getting engaged with Pelle.
Pelle.
I sanctioned these stereotypes.
He goes off and fights off the attack.
He beats off the Italians on the mainland or on another island,
like eight thousand Greek boys beat off about 14000 Italian men.
That's how it went.
Then she's writing in letters, but like never hears anything back.
The Italians, Hitler isn't going to let his boys, his buddies, boys be beaten down so easily.
So he sends the Italians in to occupy this Greek island.
They do. That's how we get Nicholas Cage's Captain Kareli and the mandolin played by a mandolin.
Yeah. Played by a sitar. Weird.
Great. They were trying to be inclusive, taking jobs away from mandolins.
This was before the Supreme Court repealed affirmative action.
It's been from 2001.
So they arrive on the island.
There's a little bit of back and forth.
He's supposed to stay at the doctor's house.
Pellegrino.
She doesn't like having him there.
So there's tension.
They eventually kind of start to like each other.
This stuff happens in the general fog of war.
The Italians surrender and he leaves the island.
But there's a tiff.
Some people get hurt and eventually he comes back and he and San Pellegrino kind of have like a relationship.
I think it's fuzzy at the end for me.
They reconnected.
That's kind of where we.
It's a long movie and it is very slow.
This is two kind of slowish two and a half hour movies or whatever.
Like two fifteen movies.
I think I decided the order to watch this because this one was two eleven and Lord of War was two hours and seven minutes.
I'm like that's shorter. I'm going to watch that first.
Slightly shorter. That's a credits shorter.
I went for Captain Canole first and I do not regret my decision.
Captain Canterbury's marionette.
The wild wilder berries.
Is that a thing?
Thornberries.
There you go.
I wasn't allowed to watch TV growing up so I don't know these things.
This explains a lot.
Yeah.
OK.
We got to talk about the accents.
Let's just kick it off with that because they're.
Which part do you want to talk about first?
So they cast almost exclusively not Greek, Italian or German people for the main speaking roles.
There's lots of Greek actors in this.
Yeah.
In auxiliary roles, but like everyone who's a main character, John Hurt, Penelope Cruz, Christian Bale.
And the best accent, Nicolas Cage.
As a guy of Italian descent, like it's a shitty Italian accent.
I wish he had done this accent in Moonstruck.
Me too.
Moonstruck, an aggressively Italian movie and this one a movie with Italian aggressors.
I said I wasn't going to do the joke, but I did it.
You got it in there.
Don't worry.
We always have the opportunity to edit it out.
That's true.
I have that power.
The worst part about this.
Don't say it in front of me.
She's mean.
Well, turn around.
The worst part about this movie is there's a scene where Nicolas Cage is like translating Greek for Germans and he reads a message.
Somebody else is just like, what?
Well, yeah, I was I was very confused by this and tell it my rewatch.
I'm like, is this like Disney's Pocahontas where there's like magical English, where everyone speaks English, but everyone speak in a different language?
Because there are times where Nick Cage will translate for the Italian officer to the crowd, but that Italian officer will speak English to Nicolas Cage.
Yeah, it's incredibly puzzling.
It's befuddling.
Like the scene you're talking about.
Yeah, it's like it's when the Italians, they march into the square and they're going to take their get the surrender from the mayor of the island.
That mayor rules that mayor rules.
I'm going to get my quote right now because my quote is Nicolas Cage's second line in the film.
But the Italian general goes up to the door.
The mayor comes out, hands him a note, which is in Greek that he can't read.
So Captain Crowley has to go and translate it for the Italian soldiers.
Second line, his second line of film.
He reads it.
Fuck off.
In a British accent.
Yeah, I think he just couldn't say the line.
Like it didn't exist in his mouth properly.
He couldn't get it out right without it sounding.
What if he had done it in an operatic way?
Fuck off.
Pretty good, but it wasn't written that way.
He would have to leave forty five and a half bars for the orchestra before he said fuck off.
So when you were talking about his second line, Peter and I were busy just making motions and talking to each other about his first line, which is just so good as he
he and all the Italians are entering the city and they see
Peppuccini over to the right and he just says Bella Luna, like three o'clock.
Then like orders all of his men to like salute her until like he walks by.
Just left face, which I mean, there's one guy in that march who's like has his eyes crossed.
I think it's so funny because like obviously I've been involved in industries that are not always
we don't like openly catcall anybody, but if we see somebody who's attractive, sometimes you make sure other people know that you see an attractive person.
I don't know if this is just like the eye test that you go to the optometrist for a while, like just to prove that you can see things or or that you're a straight white male.
But you don't get to woo with that, Sean.
Those are our things.
Melan American. Sorry.
But like as a stagehand, we used to use terms like trust moving and things like that, things that you would say that people are supposed to
like take note of because it's health and safety reason.
They just call that out and everybody would kind of take it.
Take a look at wherever you are and scope out the hotties.
So I enjoyed Bella Luna.
So he's got this fucking mandolin, right?
Like obviously that's a big piece of his character, but he just has like a rope sling around his shoulder.
It would be a gun. It's in a rucksack.
So weird to make one step closer to being just a bindle.
And so I've got to say, I appreciate the fact that Nick Cage actually learned to play mandolin for this.
Not surprised. Of course he did.
But like he's not very good at it.
Yeah, no one has probably ever heard of mandolin.
I'm sure Greek people have heard mandolins.
Greece and Italy aren't that far away from each other.
And European history kind of intermingles for about a thousand years at this point.
There were a lot of Greek boys and Roman boys all over each other.
So, you know, you know, if this movie had a little more of that, then probably less death in the back half.
That's true. Now there'd be something in the back half.
Speaking of a wild tonal inconsistencies, the wild tonal inconsistency of this film.
Yeah, describe it to me. I want to know.
So this movie starts off as kind of a weird like, yeah, it's a wartime.
It's a wartime love like movie kind of comedy like Christian Bale's introduced to us by having like a cannon of rocks for children shot into his ass.
There's a lot of just not intentionally. He didn't ask for it.
But there's a lot of like there's a bit of slapstick in the beginning.
It starts with John Hurt like pulling a pea out of someone's ears, being like deaf out of his left side his entire life.
That guy. I like that guy a lot, too.
I was saying I liked when they were at the like festival or something and somebody was saying something to him from his left side and they were just.
Yeah. And he looks at them and very calmly says, you don't have to yell.
I'm not deaf. So director of this also directed Shakespeare in Love, which is kind of what I went into the singing.
And there's a lot of just there's a lot of humor in the first scene.
There's the occupation, which, again, starts with the words fuck off and just it's wacky.
Captain Kareli shows up. He's charming and it's silly.
And then once the Italians bring prostitutes with them, I'm using the word that pepperoni used.
Oh, OK. So give me those damn prostitutes then just hang out on the beach.
They sing opera and it's and then once Italy like surrenders to the allies and the Germans kind of come in,
then it becomes just a fucking war movie with some really graphic violence, including someone getting shot in the head, people getting mowed down,
lots of blood, Nick Cage being left in a pile of dead bodies, a woman being hung by the neck till dead.
Like there it's just I have no problem with like if there were violence in the film. Fine.
But it's horrendously graphic, shockingly graphic. It's pretty intense.
And then like it all comes in a pretty quick sequence.
So it's true. It's not a very long.
It's not like all throughout the movie. There's like two scenes with some violence.
That's about it. No. But again, someone gets shot in the head directly.
Like you see the bullet hole. It has a little extra spurt.
Yeah, I was a little shocked by that. I thought that was just going to be.
Yeah, you could have you could have cut it away.
I'm saying where this movie starts and where this movie goes is just I don't know the words are whole but beautiful.
Bella, hola.
And then and then ends and then the movie ends with the guy asking if he can get the pee put back in his ears because he's tired.
His wife, bitch. Yeah. Yeah.
It ebbs and flows is what I'm saying. It's an interesting movie overall.
Cage's crew, all these guys like they're not fighters at all.
Now, they've never seen real action. They don't shoot anybody.
They just sing and love opera. Yeah.
And I did really enjoy that part. And actually my quote from this movie.
So he gets this new guy who's like added to the regimen, big beefcake dude named Carlo.
And Cage comes up and it's like explaining how the singers and everything in Carlo is just like, what the fuck is all this?
Cage is like shaving and singing and all the boys are singing and he's explaining the rules of being part of the crew.
He says these are the rules of engagement.
One, all of those called to musical fatigue shall be obliged to play a musical instrument, spoons, the helmet, comb, paper and so on and so on.
Two, anyone who says that Donizetti is better than Verdi shall be required to sing Funiculi, Funicula and other songs about railways.
Three, three.
Yeah. Ah. And that was it.
There's no three. Yeah. That's good enough. Two is good.
Two is good. There is just a problem with this film in sympathy.
I just can't get over the fact that it is just Germans bad, Italians good.
But they're both axis, like fascist led countries that committed atrocities.
It's just because this guy hasn't shot anybody.
But it's like, are we seriously using the just following orders argument?
Because that's not a good one. I don't think that's right.
Like they really try to make you not think about the Italians role in World War II.
Even the one soldier who has seen combat, it's like he saved 50 men, never fired a shot, never took a life.
Yeah. I mean, it is still a movie about fucking World War II. Yes.
And you don't see a lot of like World War II movies that intentionally portray axis members in sympathetic and lights.
Now, that being said, I'm going to talk about one of my favorite scenes when Lemony Lemony Lemony.
I think it was Lemony. The little girl Lemony finds a mine out on the beach.
And so Nicolas Cage and his little troupe of opera singers goes down there and they're like, oh, yeah, it's a Turkish mine floated up from World War I.
You know, we'll get rid of it. It's probably full of explosives. We'll get rid of it.
So there's just a scene of all of his boys down there like whistling and singing and like passing sandbags up and they're building a little bunker.
And Nicolas Cage gets the explosives and he sets them up all around the mine.
And before he runs the deck toward back to the bunker, he he gives this speech.
And this is my my favorite line from this. We are going to explode the bomb.
It will be a fantastic explosion. And when the time comes, nobody is to come down to the beach.
And it cuts to a POV from the ridge line where everybody is watching and it's just indistinct audio because nobody can hear what he's saying.
And you can kind of hear him like muffled down there.
And then he starts rolling this deck toward back and then it ends like 20 yards away from the bunker.
He just sits there and looks at it, looks at the deck, looks at the bunker.
And then it goes right back to a scene of all the Italians passing sandbags down the beach as they move the bunker.
And you're talking about like totally consistent.
Yeah, absolutely. It's it's got little kind of corny fun things inside of a wartime drama.
Yes, I appreciated the comedy in it. Oh, I do, too.
I it is like watching two different movies, even if one of them is just a short film.
I do like the juxtaposition of when the Italians come marching into the city, like their occupation forces, as opposed to when the Nazis do, when the Germans do.
Because when the Italians do, like they're all like just walk marching in like cat calling women and they have like these little what look like metal slug tanks, just tiny like one man like tanks.
Different game for them for sure.
How did the same like? Yeah. Well, the Germans brought like an extra element to to land war that I don't think the Italians ever had.
What did you guys think about the romance between him and like most Nicholas Cage like most Nicholas Cage romance films?
There comes a scene where the lead female actor is told to just fucking get on with it.
Yeah, like she it's not kissing. She is kissed.
Yeah. Well, yeah. And there's just there's a lot of them sniping each other.
She likes is she's engaged to Batman.
He's got those deft mandolin fingers. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, he's got like a depth of character and that her dummy boyfriend, her dummy fiance don't.
Yeah. A growth. He's a fucking mature adult.
Like he has fun, but it's not like Mandra's who distracted her while his friend tied her dress to a chair.
He was kind of a dick. Yeah. And then let her stand up and then just laughs at her.
She has a chair attached to her. The deepest thing he's ever probably said to another human being.
Yeah. Like confessing her love for her in front of the entire island.
It's like, haha, I made you look dumb. Just as a distraction.
Yeah. And he was just a big man child.
He like he writes her a song and plays it for everybody one night.
And she's embarrassed and runs away because he says it's her song.
That song sucks. Yeah. And the next time they see each other, you just like, I love you.
I don't care who knows it. And then they fuck. Yeah, they do.
And her dad knows right away. Yeah. Her dad's just straight up like next time you see him, tell him I have his mandolin.
Her dad had also established like he was in like the same situation as Cage.
Not wartime criminal stuff, but in that like he fell in love with somebody who was already engaged.
And that's how he and Puppuccino's mom got together.
That's the best one. Puppuccino is a good one.
I do. I do love that speech. I wanted to thank you for bringing that up because I do love when he's talking to Captain Corelli about that,
because he gives him the speech about like how, you know, if you love someone, it shouldn't matter.
And then he was like, this island's known nothing but war and disaster for centuries. Don't make any plans.
Yeah. So the Italians have to like surrender their arms to the Germans before they can go home.
And yeah, so the Germans show up and make them do it at gunpoint.
The situation is the Italians have surrendered. Yeah, Mussolini surrendered to the British and the Americans.
So they're all going home because they're out of the war. But Germany's just like, hey, you can't go with your guns.
Like, we're not going to let you take these guns back to Italy.
And we're not going to let some smooth talking arms trafficker come in afterwards and sell your weapons to the Greeks.
We found the connective tissue. Yeah.
The threat of arms trafficking. Great job. Yeah, I do.
Who would have thought that a movie about war and one called Lord of War would be tied in by war?
So they say like you have until this day, like on this day, you have to surrender your weapons as you leave.
And they come around and try to take the weapons. They're like at gunpoint, like Germans hiding on the ridge.
Like, yeah, fuck. Like the Germans show up and, you know, Gunther is just like, no, it's fine.
Orders came from on high. And then even like, it's like Antonio, when this is over, we can still be friends, you know, after before.
And Kevin goes, fuck you. Yeah. He's the first to lay down his arms.
His soldiers do it. And one Italian soldier licks a cigarette butt at one of the German soldiers.
That German like gives him a push. He's like, don't fucking touch me.
And then the Germans just mow down three Italians.
And that's how we get to the inciting incident where the Italian army, the Romanian Italian army decides to like hold the island and join with the Greeks.
Yeah. Fuck the Germans up. And they don't. No, no.
And afterwards, the remaining Italians get captured.
They are driven away as prisoners of war.
And then some boxes just pop open and get mowed the fuck down by like German artillery.
Also, OK, I don't know how the human body works with like taking a bunch of bullets in it, but the big dude, Carlo, saves Nick Cage by giving him like a big bear hug and absorbing all the bullets.
But they were shooting like heavy machine guns into him.
He did. Cage did have bullet wounds. Yeah. He had some bullet wounds.
Some went through. Yeah. But even still, it seems like a lot more would have.
Probably slowed them down a lot more so that they don't have quite a concussive.
So we have like we have these very kind of serious rough scenes.
Nick Cage survives, found by Mondras and returned.
And then Mondras does something good. Mondras helps Cage get off the island and back to Italy.
And when asked why he did it. Mondras. The hand of fate. Mondras.
Wait, no. That's Manos the hand of fate.
I have no more funny names for Penelope Cruz.
Pickleball. Pirulini.
When she asked like Mondras, like why he let him live.
It's like I wanted you to love me again. And he like reads her final letter to him, which is just like, I never loved you.
Porta Bella. Porta.
I'll tell you. We'll allow that one.
The next scene is war's over. We're all fine again.
All right. Movie's over. And then John Hurt is writing a letter to Nicholas Cage
because they get a record from Italy with no note inside of it.
But it's Pellegrino's song.
I'm doing it now. And John Hurt's writing this letter about how it's like we can only we if we can help if we can cure someone, we have to.
And they've mentioned that, you know, Greece is known for earthquakes.
Earthquakes happen. The island is leveled in an earthquake.
And then we cut to everything's fine again.
I'm assuming the earthquake was in the book. I'm assuming maybe that was longer.
The earthquake does nothing for this movie.
It wasn't the book because John Hurt dies. Yeah, it was in the book, but it's also chronologically out of order.
Yeah, exactly. It happens in the real world in like 52 or something.
53. Yeah. And they made it in 47.
So I love the idea. So when the earthquake happens, I'm an earthquake purist, please.
This is a history pod. When the earthquake happens in the movie, we're all about moving or shaking.
It's John Ham's voiceover interrupting Sean of a letter he's writing to Jeff and Corelli about like how, you know,
I don't know who like I don't know who set the record.
I don't know if it was you. I don't know if this will get you.
But it's like him voicing over writing a letter, more voiceover.
And then it's him at a writing desk writing something.
Then the earthquake happens.
Catherine Carly shows up things like I got your father's letter that could have just been a voiceover.
He could have just been writing a desk.
And then he's like, did he save the letter?
If he didn't save the letter, did he write a new letter and forget to mention the earthquake?
Why didn't he just add at the end of this letter? Oh, P.S.
Oh, shit. It's an earthquake.
I am actively in an earthquake.
When you come to find my daughter in an, you know, sometime next year, the house is no longer there.
There was an earthquake.
The handwriting is just the Richter scale.
It got real illegible in the middle, but you brought it back.
It's just as flexible as the movie starts and lemon is old.
Lemon is there.
But then by this point in the movie, it's two hours later.
I forgot about the P guy. Oh, yeah.
And it's just this like little gag of like, can you put the P back in my ear?
I'm sick of hearing my wife, bitch.
I'm like, this movie. Yeah.
I know this is not a good film.
I enjoy a lot of it.
I really enjoyed a lot of it, too.
It's a beautiful film. It's filmed beautifully.
I mean, like peaceful.
Well, the island is beautiful.
And I would love to see it someday.
I won't because I'm a realist and I'm never going to go to that specific island, but it's pretty in the movie.
So for me, in terms of both these films, these ones both came down to which one do I want to like more?
And I will say Captain Crowley's Mandolin was so much of an earnest attempt at making a movie.
I did like that the director's name is John Madden.
That's what I call war.
Yeah, we got there. Yeah.
I see the heart and love of all the performers, despite how bad they all are.
Yeah, that's the thing is like the acting in this for me fell short of Lord of War.
As the two movies go like the story, it doesn't necessarily make me sympathetic or anything to the Italian wartime ever.
But or Italian people.
But we've established they are.
I feel like really it's a more engaging story.
Yeah, and it's it's an easier one to sit back and think about and not even like a complicated emotion sense.
It's like I can I can see how the story works.
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, this is a love story.
Two people during wartime, the real world implications of World War Two.
Air quotes on people.
The the real world implications and knowledge of World War Two of Italianism, Italian, like Italian fascism and stuff.
Yeah, it does.
You know, it does make it kind of a hard sell to like want to like root for them.
You watch the movie in a bubble.
Yeah, you have to watch this movie in a bubble.
Despite the bad acting, I feel like everyone tried to bring something to this film.
Yeah. So it begs the question, what do you guys want to go on?
And like I said, this one's a tough one, because this is like, which one do I want to like more?
Like, I think I want to like Lord of War more.
But I think I like actually like Captain Kareli's Mabel in more.
Yeah, I'm I think I'm I'm going to push Captain Kareli's Lord of War was good.
Mm hmm. I just have a complicated, I don't know, time trying to like talk about it.
It's it doesn't upset me. It's just it's a it.
I mean, that's a film that has a lot of it has a lot of things to say.
It's got merit to it. Yes.
Just because it doesn't move on doesn't mean it doesn't deserve to exist.
And there's a lot of reasons why you should watch it.
And that's true with all of these films, except Primal.
Oh, shots. Hard disagree.
But it's a great white jag. White jag.
I will watch that tonight.
Crime. Crime. Crime.
Yeah, so I think we're good.
We're good. Yeah, I think Captain Kareli, it's it's charming.
It's silly. It's it's a lot of things, but I feel like there is a lot more
a lot more of the creative like interest in the film than the other one.
I feel. Yeah. Plus you get to hear him sing opera.
Well, not bad. It's also just I mean, it is fun to hear the really bad accents.
And it is kind of fun to see the stupid little sticks that they inserted into this movie.
A serious movie doesn't have to just leave me feeling drained.
This movie does a good job of giving a serious look at a serious subject.
And it doesn't drag.
Captain Kareli, you made it. Yeah, I finally made it.
You're going up against eight millimeter and the bad lieutenant semicolon port of call
hyphen New Orleans. Yeah, whichever one of those moves forward, the mandolin doesn't make it through the movie.
Spoiler. I love the mandolin. Yeah.
What are we what are we what are we doing next? All right.
Next week, we've got Wild at Heart and Knowing.
And for anyone who is listening to this back in time, you can watch Wild at Heart with Nick and Sean.
Tomorrow. Let's plug the thing.
You can do it. You can do it, guys.
So two weeks, two weeks ago, you could have watched this movie with us.
That's true. Enjoy that.
Most importantly, this will be the first time that we watch a movie together.
Yes. Yeah. Say no words to one another.
I mean, we won't be able to like. No worries about that.
I hate talking to you guys. This last year has been hell.
Well, you got another year of this, at least. Yeah, that's true.
And then you have our next podcast.
Unless I can come up with body doubles.
We've established people look like there's a lot of weird.
The hard thing is on an audio only format that doesn't really absolve me from much.
That's true. Yeah.
Just got to find somebody else who's close to magic.
Yeah. So anyway, thanks for listening. And please rate, review, subscribe.
We are on Instagram at Cage underscore match underscore pod because we are late to the game.
Also, don't forget to yell at your neighbors. We yell at shit at your neighbors.
We haven't done that in a while. Tell them all. Tell everyone.
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At some point, we're going to get better equipment and fund some other fun shit for you all to listen to.
The Burnt Notice podcast coming up. Burn notice podcast.
Well, drop down in the comments and let us know who has the best Italian accent.
Oh, do we want to do you want to give a quick read?
So they have something to share.
Wait, hang on. Let me let me give a let me give a shout out to the patrons first.
Do it in Italian. You do that. I'll find a sample.
A special thanks to our sparkle buddies, Josh, Sean, Jules, Rico, Matt and Adam.
Special thanks to our cage dancers, Ira, John and Freeman.
Cage dancers, cage dancers and gestures.
Thank you for listening.
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie.
And then we can all say that's amore together.
So everybody says when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie.
Yeah. And then and then all together we'll say that's amore.
So why don't you go for it?
All right. When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie.
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie.
That's amore.
We're sorry, Italy.
Thank you for listening.
Yeah, I do. Yeah, we're sorry, Italy.
I do. I do love Italy. I want to go back some day.
No one no one like a fucking pop filter.
Stop it.
OK, yeah. So what were you going to say?
What's it taste like, Nick?
Yeah. Your mouth. General foam.
Or my mouth. Yeah, I don't know who had this one last.
Let me try again.
Oh, it was Sean. That is a Sean.
Yeah, I know that one.
I'm caught in a crack. That's why I'm doing something weird here.
Yeah, right. Hang on. I'm still caught.
This is the episode that was all on patrons.
Yeah, exactly. No, we're going to get weirder new ones.
Good.
There's going to be a lot of cage dancers added.
Which is my sweet spot.
It's a good spot to be.
Yeah, I don't have a sweet spot. I have a slightly bitter spot.
But it's just as good for licking. That's my core.
Bella Hola.