You Haven't Seen Braveheart?!

Leaving Las Vegas is a movie wherein Nicolas Cage wears “alcoholic” make-up and moves to Vegas to drink himself to death, all while terrible music plays.  (Seriously, if the soundtrack isn’t Sting, it’s inappropriately placed 50s covers.)  Nicolas Cage won an Oscar for his performance.  The director, Michael Figgis (also the brains behind the loathsome Timecode) was nominated for an Oscar.  He also composed the score.  And play trumpet on the score.  And keyboard.  Sure.

Since winning an Oscar isn’t a very trusty barometer of cinematic value, I consulted the critics.  Most reviews I found online were positive, words such as “haunting”, “poignant”, and “heartbreaking” surfaced again and again. I love this review featured on Rotten Tomatoes from Variety: “The film pulls no punches, takes no prisoners and flies in the face of feel-good pictures.”  What?  This movie did literally nothing.  There was no plot.  And remember— Sting was covering 50s love songs for most of the soundtrack.  It ranks a couple notches below Pretty Woman on the Feel-Good Films involving Hookers List, and only that far down the list because of the “gritty” rape scene.  What am I missing?  Is this film that dated or would critics still find it “uniquely hypnotic” and I’m just a cynic?

I have to assume the former.  So why am I torturing myself with dated 90s films?  For the most part, these are films people reference and even though I know I won’t LOVE them, I’m still curious.  But in particular, I wanted to see Leaving Las Vegas after watching this, and saw a bunch of quotes were clearly from LLV.  I know it’s becoming increasingly trendy to make fun of Nicolas Cage, but we started our fascination years ago.