{"id":10121,"date":"2018-09-12T05:00:28","date_gmt":"2018-09-12T09:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=10121"},"modified":"2019-01-12T14:43:40","modified_gmt":"2019-01-12T19:43:40","slug":"review-mandy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/review-mandy\/","title":{"rendered":"REVIEW: <i>Mandy<\/i> Offers Peak Nic Cage, for Better or Worse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>Mandy<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0stars Nicolas Cage, with Andrea Riseborough as his wife, the two of them living a lumberjack\u2019s life in the Pacific Northwest in 1983. Intercut with scenes of their idyllic existence, reading fantasy novels and talking about which planets are their favorites, are scenes of a cult leader (Linus Roache) and his dimwit followers occupying the same woods. The inciting incident occurs at the halfway point, making it a spoiler to tell you what the movie is about, but suffice it to say that Cage becomes hell-bent on revenge and that Riseborough is only in the first half.<\/p>\n<p>The filmmaker is Panos Cosmatos, whose <em>Beyond the Black Rainbow<\/em>\u00a0is a good litmus test for <em>Mandy<\/em>\u00a0and its trippy LSD heavy-metal aesthetic, ponderous synthesizers, and unnatural colors. The first half is too somnolent for my tastes, but when it does eventually kick into high gear, Cage delivers the loudness and craziness his fans have come to expect. Indeed, you don\u2019t even have to sign Nicolas Cage to star in a movie like <em>Mandy<\/em>. Just start filming and he\u2019ll show up, summoned by the vibrations in the air. It\u2019s about a man and woman who run afoul of cultists, and it ends with a chainsaw fight, and also there is a tiger <em>for no reason<\/em>. Nicolas Cage couldn\u2019t not star in this if he wanted to, which he does not.<\/p>\n<p>P.S.: I\u2019m going to need a comprehensive list of movie cult leaders named Jeremiah.<\/p>\n<p>P.P.S.: I\u2019m going to need a comprehensive list of Nicolas Cage movies in which someone is set on fire.<\/p>\n<h3>Grade: <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">B-<\/span><\/h3>\n<h5><em>2 hrs., 1 min.; not rated (but it&#8217;s R)<\/em><\/h5>\n<hr \/>\n<div><em>Join our <a href=\"http:\/\/crookedmarquee.us16.list-manage.com\/subscribe?u=dc6679cd997ec610eeaf50562&amp;id=db71dbf4c3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mailing list<\/a>! Follow us on <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/CrookedMarquee\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter<\/a>! <a href=\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/writers-guidelines\/\">Write<\/a>\u00a0for us!<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mandy\u00a0stars Nicolas Cage, with Andrea Riseborough as his wife, the two of them living a lumberjack\u2019s life in the Pacific [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":10122,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}