Hacker Cinema
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
2022 · Film · 107 min
Directed by Tom Gormican
Creatively unfulfilled and facing financial ruin, Nick Cage must accept a $1 million offer to attend the birthday of a dangerous superfan. Things take a wildly unexpected turn when Cage is recruited by a CIA operative and forced to live up to his own legend, channeling his most iconic and beloved on-screen characters in order to save himself and his loved ones.
4 positive1 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
Recent good movies, just going in release order off my letterboxd, although I have to be careful to include only "Hollywood" here:
- 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple - beautifully shot and a beautiful theme about what humanity is
- One Battle After Another - it's PTA, all his movies are good
- Bugonia - incredible dark comedy
- Weapons - fun little horror comedy movie
- Sinners - just won an oscar for the soundtrack, not a perfect movie but a fun watch with some incredible scenes
- Companion
- Nosferatu - incredibly atmospheric
- The Surfer - total trip with good old Nicholas Cage
- Love Lies Bleeding - just a fun, a bit crazy movie
- Dream Scenario - another trippy Cage movie
- Poor Things
- Oppenheimer ...
- Renfield
- The Menu
- The Banshees of Insherin
- Barbarian (same director as Weapons)
- Prey
- Bullet Train - fun action movie
- The Northman
- The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
- Everything Everywhere All At Once
- The Invisible Man - most effective horror movie I've ever seen
- The Gentlemen
- Joker -how close can you get to looking like Taxi Driver without being Taxi Driver ...
- The Vast of Night - some scenes that really draw you in and pretty nostalgic
in 2019 now, so I won't continue, but there are plenty of good movies made nowadays, and I won't say I've seen even a close amount of them from the past few years. Of course I'm watching these at home, not in theatres, so that's certainly an argument.
Cage can laugh at himself, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unbearable_Weight_of_Massive_Talent
I think he just likes making films.
Hahaha, I expected the criticism of my comment to be that too much of what I was counting as good is "high brow", in fact. Too artsy-fartsy. Leaning too much toward "The Green Knight" and not enough toward "Jaws".
[EDIT] Here, lemme just list the 2022 movies that I think were worth a watch if you're at all into the kind of thing they were doing:
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Glass Onion Top Gun: Maverick Bullet Train All Quiet on the Western Front Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio Crimes of the Future Death on the Nile Everything Everywhere All at Once White Noise Nope Prey The Sadness You Won't Be Alone Dual The Northman The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (arguably just a less-exciting RRR, but hey, it makes up for it by also being shorter and non-horror comedy *is* a bit weak lately, so it gets in) Watcher Dashcam (one of the most interesting movies I've seen in a long time—you may hate it, but you'll feel *something*, damnit!) The Banshees of Inisherin
This is just ones I've seen (I usually manage, like, 1/2 of the films in a year that I want to watch, at best) and excluding a few that did in fact suck or that I didn't think quite merited inclusion (e.g. The Menu) or that are good for what they are but are pretty narrow in appeal (Violent Night). Like, I hear Cyrano is great, Emily the Criminal, Bodies Bodies Bodies, The Whale, and a bunch of others, but haven't made it to them yet (and, inevitably, I'll end up never watching some of them).
"Quite a few of those are sequels, remakes, or adaptations! White Noise was a book! Death on the Nile! One of those is a marvel movie!" yeah, I know—good luck finding an era in Hollywood when a ton of the films, and even a ton of the good films, weren't such. I reject that as, specifically, a complaint about this moment in cinema (it has more merit as a criticism of cinema in general)
I really don’t think this is a coincident either. But I think it is more nefarious then you suggest. I blame the USA military. Too many movies that come out today are paper thin propaganda/recruitment tool for the USA military. If your story involves the military in some way, includes some military tools in the set design, etc. and you want the military to help you with that, then you must hand over editorial rights to the military (i.e. you must opt into censoring).
This creates an interesting phenomena where you are either more creative with your screenplay (and restrictive with your budget) or you cave in to censorship. I feel like most of the time Hollywood picks the latter.
That said, Hollywood is still making good original action movies (the most recent being The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent), they are just really scarce among a plethora of military propaganda and/or superhero sequels (e.g. Top Gun: Maverick).
If you enjoyed The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, you might also like JCVD [0] with Jean-Claude Van Damme.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JCVD_(film)
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent just came out this year. The plot was a bit over the top, but that was the point, and it was thoroughly enjoyable. Blackkklansman came out the same year as this article, and even though it was more comedy drive then most action movies, it had a down to earth plot of a black policeman infiltrating the KKK organization.
I agree that most action movies today have a pretty seen-it-before grandiose plot. But movies with down-to-earth original plots still come out (occasionally).