Despite All My Rage...Buying Stuff From Nicolas Cage

Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen...Into My Price Range. - Homer Simpson

The knowledgeable reader might recognize the above quote. The hilarious little quip in question comes from a Simpsons episode where Homer and the family go to Ranier Wolfcastle's Estate sale when Ranier went bankrupt. Well, I recently went to my own estate sale of a bankrupt A-List Hollywood action star. I am of course referring to the one and only Nicholas Cage. How does a huge Oscar-winning star who makes 10-20 million per movie go bankrupt? Gambling and an expensive wife is what I'm told, but I don't much care. The point is that I get to rummage through his shit and take a little piece of Cage for myself. 

Nicolas Cage is a national icon because of the extreme duality of his movie career. He's managed to stay relevant and a top earner because you can put his top five movies up against any other actor in Hollywood and he compares favorably. Whether you're taking his five best (Moonstruck, Adaptation, Leaving Las Vegas, Matchstick Men, and Raising Arizona...apologies to Red Rock West and Lord of War) or his five most enjoyable blockbuster films (The Rock, Face/Off, Con Air, Kick Ass, and National Treasure) he's tough to compete with when he's at his best. However, what truly separates him from the Russell Crowes and the Hugh Jackmans of the industry are just how bad he sinks when he's making a bomb. Clearly this estate sale means that he's in constant need of income and liquid assets and there isn't any need to read a script when some suit is waving 15 million dollars in front of your face. I don't even know if Pauly Shore can compare when you go in the opposite direction and play Cage's worst five films (difficult to pin down but I'll go with Bangkok Dangerous, G-Force, Season of the Witch, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, and The Wicker Man...with apologies to Knowing, Drive Angry, and Deadfall). 

But that's where his cult status comes from. He can't just be bad in a bad film...he gazes deep into the shitty script that he's selected and realizes that the only way to salvage this situation is to try and go with the "So bad it loops back around and becomes good again approach". And it almost works sometimes...almost. Vampire's Kiss probably succeeds. Bad Lieutenant definitely succeeds. Next and Knowing...not so much. The Wicker Man...well, it has it's moment. So basically, you get a man who has launched himself to a new level of stardom simply by inventing his own school of acting...which looks a lot like this:

And that's what makes this estate sale even more special. That clip doesn't even show him playing the role of a skeleton with it's skull on fire. This is a man revered on reddit simply as The One True God. Nobody cares if you have Jason Statham's coffee table or Denzel Washington's wine rack. Hell, I know for a fact that there's a guy out there, in Wisconsin no less, who has failed with pick-up line: "Would you like to see Brett Favre's pick-up truck?" Apparently, it's a little short on the pick-up. But anything owned by the Cage is guaranteed to make the ladies swoon and the fellas jealous. So I of course made a short list of what I hoped to obtain from Cage Manor. I'm always looking for new art to add to my apartment's ever-growing collection (more on that in a future post). Any furniture that wouldn't break the bank would certainly be welcome (this idea was quickly scrapped...homeboy has some expensive tastes). But most importantly...I wanted the man's silverware. As much of it as I could get my grubby, little hands on. I wanted to be able to have separate silverware for special occasions like the top-flight muckety mucks do. "Oh...we're having company. Bring out the Cage silverware!"

Sadly my dreams of snagging Cage's silverware were not to be. You have to get up pretty early in

the morning, or at least skip work and go on the opening Friday, to snag the good, affordable Cage commodities. But there were still some decent pickings on Saturday. RJ, Bley, Erin, and myself left fairly early on Saturday morning. We picked up Erin at about 10am and while we waited outside for her we were treated to the sight of a woman blatantly shitting in the alley across the street. There was no sincere attempt to obscure her actions. She just dropped trou, leaned against the wall, and had at it. I'm not sure if this tidbit of information is apropos of anything, but we certainly didn't need a bad omen like this when right before heading into the jaws of Nicolas Cage's estate. I don't know what horrors have taken place at his Hancock Park mansion, but let's not forget that this man bought Madame LaLaurie's torture house in New Orleans. He purchased the house of a serial killer who is currently a character on American Horror Story, a show whose first season is about a house filled with ghosts who murder the inhabitants of their haunted house. But who am I to throw stones? These are the kind of ill-advised investments that afford me the opportunity to walk away with his loot.

When we pulled up to the Casa de Cage we were immediately greeted by the crown jewel of the sale, the Burgundy pick-up truck that he got from the film Amos and Andy. As much of a steal as this customized gem was at a cool $15,000...the fact that I'll still be paying off my 2005 Honda Civic for three more years means that I'll have to look for some more reasonably priced wares. The furniture wasn't going to fall into this category either. My man likes Corinthian leather. Perhaps if somebody were to introduce him to an IKEA, he'd have a few less estate sales. I scoured the art collection for a piece that would work well the pieces that I already have hanging on my walls. The vast majority of his art is Oriental. I'm guessing Charlie Yeung's underwear wasn't the only souvenir of his time filming Bangkok Dangerous. There was also a drawing of Winston Churchill, done by Winston Churchill's daughter. That one cost more than I make in a month. However, in what appeared to be his study I found a framed needlepoint of an old man smoking a pipe. It's not exactly in line with what I currently have, but I recently got two pointillism pieces that I really dig, and a needlepoint fits well with those. I had to get it. 

I was understandably disappointed that there was no silverware to be had, but there was some

swank blown glassware to be had. So if I want to pour myself a frosty one, I can do so in the same chalices that previously adorned Cage's dining room. In his son's bedroom I found another gem. I love myself a good board game. I'm always down to play Settlers of Catan, The Resistance, Trivial Pursuit, Scattergories...or even Risk if I've got a fortnight to burn. I'm consistently looking to add to my board game collection, and at $4.00 how could I not snag Caster Troy's copy of Clue? Or was it Sean Archer? And the last piece I added to my collection was a chest. The seller wouldn't expressly confirm it, but I'm fairly confident that this is the same chest that he used to store his bow and arrows from The Weatherman and collection of erotic City of Angels fan fiction. RJ also got a nice little haul. Primarily this globe lamp that dates from 1992. I can tell that because Turkmenistan is a country but Bosnia and Herzegovina is not (totally bragging). He probably got this during Honeymoon in Vegas and keeps it around as a constant reminder that Indecent Proposal totally ripped off the plot of his movie and not the other way around like everybody thinks. So now that I've got my own Cage Cache, you should be jealous. In the meantime, I'll be enjoying some Carlo Rossi Zinfandel out of homeboy's chalices and waiting for Keanu Reeves to go bankrupt. I saw 47 Ronin. It shouldn't be long now.