The Weekend Alternative: Crazy Nic Cage

Exhibit A that "crazy Nic Cage" is not some sort of new phenomenon.

This chestnut from 1988 is a wonderful melange of New Wave aesthetics and undead morality.  Nic Cage plays a publishing executive with an impossible-to-place accent who thinks he's becoming a vampire.  When fangs fail to grow, he gets plastic ones.  Along the way he eats a live cockroach. 

You really owe it to yourself to watch this as soon as humanly possible.

Werner Herzog's exploration of "the bliss of evil" also features Nic Cage slipping in an out of a funny voice.  This time, though, he sounds (and has the posture) of Ed Sullivan.  And is on crack most of the time.

Already a cult favorite and loaded with sound-bytes, you might get more crazy Nic Cage per capita in this film over any other.  It also happens to be damned good, too.

Overlooked by some in the canon of crazy Nic Cage, mainly because it's the premise of Alex Proyas' lovable but flawed Knowing that people get hung up on.

But I say look again.  Who else but Cage can sell that floating black stones are out to kill us with math and make the sun explode and take our children to Pandora other than Cage?  No one, that's who.  And if he does it with his jaw wide open while falling to his knees before shouting "Noooooo!" than so be it.

It's almost inconceivable that we had to wait until 2006 to see Nic Cage punch Leelee Sobeiski in the mouth while wearing a bear costume.

All of Brian De Palma's fancy camerawork wouldn't mean squat if he didn't have a fun subject to shoot.

A kinder, gentler version of the "Bad Lieutenant" character caught in the chintzy glamor of an Atlantic City fight night, Cage strides, prances and shouts through nearly every frame of this unbelievably entertaining thriller.  It's enough to keep you occupied from the obvious plot twists.