Nicolas Cage Awesomeness Graph

Christopher Orr had an entry the other day titled "Is Nicolas Cage the Worst Movie Star Alive?" While that's clearly a bit of an exaggeration, Cage does have quite a career. And not in a good way. The rate at which he's been putting out movies in this decade is astonishing. Yet even more astonishing is how uniformly terrible they are. OK, scratch that. Adaptation is great. National Treasure is watchable. And Gone in 60 Seconds is very entertaining, albeit an objectively poor film. But that's not very high praise for a man who has made twenty-six films since 2000.

More interesting perhaps is how well Nic Cage's career fits into the format of a three-act play. From the early 1980s until 1995, you have the Still Has a Modicum of Subtlety edition of Cage. Raising Arizona and Moonstruck. In 1995 he flukes into an Oscar for Best Actor, and then proceeds to become the action star in Hollywood. The Rock, Con Air, and Face/Off all flood out within a few years. All are awesome. Stuff like Gone in 60 and Snake Eyes are certainly not bad, but are manifestly on the downslope of his career.

And then Cage makes The Family Man. And for the last 10 years, he has been, while one of the most omnipresent actors in Hollywood, also one of the worst. The Wicker Man, Next, Knowing, National Treasure 2, The Weather Man, Lord of War, Ghost Rider... the list is almost endless. He is slated to make 5 movies by the end of 2009, all of which will undoubtedly be terrible.

So here, I present to you the Nicolas Cage Awesomeness Graph.