Good ol’ Fred Topel just did an interview with Nicolas Cage for Screen Junkies, and he was cool enough to ask Cage about the concept of mega-acting:
SJ: I’ve been reading Outlawvern.com and he’s coined the phrase “mega acting” with regard to your work in films like Bad Lieutenant and Face/Off. The idea is it’s not overacting, because it’s intentionally extreme. Do you feel that’s accurate?
NC: Yeah, I think that makes sense. I often refer to it as outside the box, as opposed to over the top. The two things mean the same thing on one hand but one sort of celebrates the idea of breaking free and going into other forms of expression, whether they’re abstract or extreme or as this friend of yours calls mega acting. The other sort of implies you’re not being truthful to the part, but see, I don’t know how you measure something like that because life can be extreme and life can be mega. I wouldn’t do that to somebody in another art form. Not to compare myself to someone like Francis Bacon but just as a point of explanation, I wouldn’t say, “Hey, you can’t paint a screaming pope like that because a screaming pope doesn’t look like that naturally.”
When Cage is interviewed most of the time he’s probly sitting in front of blownup movie posters talking bullshit with local news people who still watch Entertainment Tonight every night. What’s cool about Fred’s interview is he comes from appreciating the odd sides of Cage’s work, so that’s what he asks about. Check out the whole thing for some more interesting insights.
thanks to Fred for doing the interview and Tommy S. for sending me the link
One day several years ago I was waiting for a bus near a book store, and in the window there was a book about the philosophy of THE MATRIX. There’s more than one book like that, and I can’t remember which one it was that I saw that day, but it got me thinking: there should be a book like that, except it’s entirely about THEY LIVE.
I want to tell you guys about a new book I got called DESTROY ALL MOVIES: THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO PUNKS ON FILM, edited by Zack Carlson and Bryan Connolly. I guess you might’ve already heard about it because some of the other movie websights beat me to posting about it, but you know what? The tortoise ate the hare, the boy who cried on the wolf, etc. Anyway I’ve been looking through it for a few days and I want to discuss it with the ladies and gentlemen of the outlaw community or whatever, because this is one of those passion project books printed with special blood sweat and tears based inks, and those deserve recognition.
It’s not clear yet when ROLLING THUNDER can be ordered, but THE OUTFIT is already available 
The internet belongs to the nerds. Or to the geeks, I forget which one. I always get alot of grief for getting the lingo wrong, I mix up “nerd” with “geek” and I say “comic strips” instead of “illustrated graphic novels for grown adults” and I say “Ziggy” instead of “Tom Wilson’s Ziggy.” I’m either confused or sometimes just jokin around but I mean no harm and people still get upset. Especially if I do it on The Ain’t It Cool News everybody acts like I yelled out the n-word or something. I would write several paragraphs of detailed and thoughtful analysis laying out a series of arguments and backing them up with examples but if I chose “comic strip” instead of “comic book” to describe a stapled together pamphlet of non-comical drawings then that would be all they would respond to and declare my input invalid.
Has everybody here seen 
More horror movie recommendations than you can shake an ax at
Yesterday it was reported that Jean-Claude Van Damme suffered a mild heart attack while in New Orleans filming for WEAPON, a movie where he’s co-starring with Scott Adkins. Van Damme is reportedly okay and has returned to Belgium. If you need any more reassurance, LIONHEART director Sheldon Lettich 
While THE SOCIAL NETWORK seems to still be the conversation topic-of-choice among movie buffs I know, there’s one obscure side-issue buried in there that I haven’t seen discussed: the evidence that George Miller did know what he was doing with that JUSTICE LEAGUE super hero movie that he wasted years of his life doing only to have it cancelled. The reasons it never happened I’m sure had to do with budget and studio politics and disagreements about the best ways to utilize the corporation’s valuable licensed properties and many other factors. But I’m sure epic negativity and whining from every single comic book fan plugged into a computer didn’t help. 
