Author: nik dirga

I'm an American journalist who has lived in New Zealand for more than a decade now.

Concert Review: Shonen Knife, Auckland, March 9, or, finding that happy place

Sometimes I like to listen to depressing songs. Sometimes I like to listen to happy songs.

I’ve got my Cure, my Joy Division, my Depeche Mode and Leonard Cohen. And they’re great when I’m in the mood for it. 

But other times I just want a happy sound – and there’s few more unabashedly happy bands out there in the world than Japan’s Shonen Knife. An all-girl band who marry Ramones thrash-pop with Beach Boys-style wistful harmonies all twisted together with a healthy dose of colourful Osaka charm, they’re a delight to see live. 

Heartbreak? Depression? Shonen Knife don’t do that. They sing about their favourite foods, cute animals, and the silly happy things that, in the end, kind of make this life worth living. And they do it while kicking out some thrashing power chords and rocking with incredible style, dressed in often matching colour-coordinated outfits that seem retro and futuristic at the same time. 

For a band that’s been going for more than 40 years, since the women were all teenagers, Shonen Knife still make a tremendous racket, headbanging hair and all. I’ve been a fan since they broke through a bit in the US in the alternative music-ruled 1990s with celebrity fans like Nirvana and Sonic Youth. They’ve carried on for a pile of albums, rarely altering their sunny, hook-filled sonic approach, and they’re all the better for that. 

Sisters Naoko and Atsuko Yamano have been the core of the band for most of its long run, with excellent drummer Risa Kawano on sticks these days. I’m old and creaky and so I’m kind of out of it with the hip pop music the youth listen to these days, but the appeal of a good cheery song is universal. 

The packed gig at Auckland’s underground Whammy Bar was probably the first time I’d been in a crowded basement club environment since the pre-pandemic era, and it was kind of invigorating to feel that sweaty, borderline uncomfortable shared experience, for a little while. 

Song titles like “Sweet Candy Power,” “Afternoon Tea” and “Banana Chips” give you the overall vibe of a Shonen Knife show. I can’t think of too many rock gigs I’ve been to where the audience is led in an energetic singalong chant of “Candy! Candy!” 

In a fun interview over at my day job RNZ, Naoko said, “I like to make people happy through music and if our audience or listeners get happy through our music, it’s my happiness too.”

Perhaps it’s just my mood in the very stressful vibe the 2020s have proven to have, but sharing a little happiness no longer seems as corny as it might have once to me. 

In a world as askew as this there’s something blissful about celebrating the little things, whether it’s a funny-looking jellyfish, wasabi being hot or one Shonen Knife song whose chorus is simply, “it’s a nice day!”

And you know what, sometimes it is. 

Yeah, OK, the Oscars are silly. But I still love to watch.

Yes, the Academy Awards are self-indulgent, pointless arbiters of artistic excellent, a vapid popularity contest, constantly make the wrong calls, et cetera. But still, for nearly every year of the last 40 or so Oscars, I watch them. 

For the third year in a row, I’ll be live-blogging the action over at Radio New Zealand on Monday our time, and I’ll admit I look forward to it – it’s a welcome break from political chaos, climate apocalypse and general creeping internet-induced psychosis and hate. 

I’ve watched the Oscars since I was a fidgety pre-teen, and still remember my first, the 1982 Oscars. It was the year of Best Picture winner Chariots of Fire – a movie I’ve still never seen – and that plinky inspirational piano theme felt like it was played every five minutes. 

It was so long ago the host was Johnny Carson! The ceremony, 40+ years ago, seems weirdly low-tech now – dig the grainy still photos to introduce the Best Picture nominees – and how is it that Raiders of the Lost Ark received the least applause of the five? 

I watched early Oscars celebrating what seemed like, to me, boring adult movies like Gandhi and Terms of Endearment, and liked the novelty of seeing, in a pre-internet age, movie stars outside of their day job. It wasn’t until 1988 or so and Rain Man that movies I had actually seen started winning the top gong. For a kid who was just getting interested in movies, the Oscars felt like a Cliff’s Notes course introducing me to a wider world, and how movies were put together. (You could win an award for sound? For costumes?) 

A lot of folks whose film takes I respect still loathe the Oscars, but I don’t know – it’s the kid in me who was mesmerised watching actors in tuxedos and fancy frocks all those years ago, I suppose, but I just find it a fun moment to pause and celebrate the existence of movies.

Yes, yes, there are far more important things in the news universe, but a bit of levity doesn’t take away the gravity of other events. Stories keep us sane. During the freaky otherness of the pandemic, one of the happiest moments for me was when we finally got to go to the movies again.

Now, I’ll argue about the actual winners, losers and snubs at the Oscars till the cows come home, but I don’t get mad about it. We’re all too mad in general these days, aren’t we?

Forrest Gump’s Oscar doesn’t really take away a thing from Pulp Fiction being the infinitely better, more memorable film, does it? CODA was an amiable optimistic film, but Jane Campion’s The Power Of The Dog was tougher, smarter and visually unforgettable. Martin Scorsese should have a dozen Oscars by now, not just one for The Departed. The great directors who never won a Best Director Oscar is a list of the greats – Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Lynch, Kubrick. Meanwhile, Kevin Costner has a Best Director Oscar? Et cetera, et cetera, you get the point.

The Oscars get it “wrong” more than they get it right, I admit. Yet there’s been plenty of times I’ve cheered to see a film or a performance that grabbed me recognised, from Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first woman to take Best Director for The Hurt Locker to foreign film Parasite’s plucky Best Picture win to the beautiful good cheer of Ke Huay Quan going from that kid in The Goonies to an Oscar winner last year. 

I am trying to gripe and be mean less in an age of meanness, but I’ll admit one thing that always gets my goat is the arbiters of “what matters.” Multiple things can matter in this world. The Oscars are not the final word on anything in the world of film. But I’ve had a blast watching them most years, even at their most tedious, pandering and predictable.

There’s a lot of self-indulgent talk about the “magic” of movies this time of year, which makes it sound like movies cure cancer and balance the national debt all at the same time. 

But you know, you take a blank screen and add some moving pictures, sound and a few sprinkles of humour, horror or heartbreak, and it makes a story, can draw a portrait of a life. When you really think about it, if that ain’t a little magic, I don’t know what is. 

A gay old time: Revisiting Three’s Company in a changing world

“Come and knock on our door. We’ve been waiting for you. Where the kisses are hers and hers and his, three’s company too.“

Could there be a more swingin’ 1970s TV theme song? Come on, you know the words. We all do.

So while on holiday recently I was feeling a bit under the weather and, as you do, one evening I ended up watching four or five episodes in a row of ‘70s-‘80s camp sitcom Three’s Company in a row.

It was the first time in years I’d actually watched the show, but I admit that like most kids growing up in the ‘80s, I watched Three’s Company all the time. We watched everything, from classics like M*A*S*H and The Brady Bunch to also-rans like What’s Happening! and Manimal. That’s what we did in the olden days, before the eruption of a sprawling multiverse of entertainment options 24-7, when you simply watched ‘whatever was on’.

Watching a slew of Three’s Company in my vaguely sick bed recently was bizarre – I have trouble remembering what I ate for lunch yesterday, but as these goofy sitcoms unfolded I nodded in recognition – ah yes, here’s the one where they went to the farm; here’s the one where Jack makes a mob boss linguini. How the hell do I remember a sitcom episode I last watched in 1983? The inanity of childhood sitcoms, the quintessential comfort food, imprinted itself on my brain. 

The 1977-1984 run of Three’s Company seems a strange relic now, nearly 50 years (!!) since it debuted, a broad bawdy farce perched between the groovy ‘70s and a more uptight ‘80s Reaganland. The premise is pretty much the definition of problematic by modern standards  – hep cat Jack Tripper (the late, great John Ritter) pretends to be gay so he can live in an affordable apartment with two attractive young single women (Suzanne Somers and Joyce DeWitt) without offending their prudish landlord Mr Roper (Norman Fell). Hijinks ensue, somehow for eight entire seasons! 

Loose-limbed and amiable Ritter was a national treasure, of course, and like John Cleese in Fawlty Towers he carries the show on his shoulders. The women of Three’s Company fared less well; I know we were all supposed to like the late Suzanne Somers but I found her blonde ditz irritating and Joyce DeWitt’s Janet was often just a straight woman. I rather liked Priscilla Barnes’ Terri, who replaced Somers in the later years, and seemed a bit more sly and unpredictable. 

The central homophobia that drives Three’s Company is incredibly dated, but the show, mostly, was lewd and campy rather than hateful, even though there’s plenty of cringe-worthy farce humour revolving around gay misunderstandings and affairs.

Unfortunately, a lot of the ‘humour’ relies on the premise that the worst possible thing would be for Jack to actually be gay.

I grew up in a world where “fag” was the number one insult of choice by and for teenage boys. I got called one an awful lot for a few years and I’m ashamed to admit I probably called other kids it too a few times. It was stupid. 

Jack’s homophobic landlords, despite usually being the butt of the joke for their overwrought gay panic, do leave a bit of a sour aftertaste. Even watching the show as a kid, Stanley Roper and Mr Furley’s limp-wristed gay-bashing jibes seemed forced and unfunny to me.  Norman Fell’s oily Mr Roper always struck me as a little too nasty and sinister. You felt he meant it. Knotts’ goofy Furley, on the other hand, definitely felt like a closet case, and the show eased off a lot on the gay panic as it ambled along. The series ended with Jack Tripper, of course, marrying off to a nice girl. 

Did gay characters actually ever appear on Three’s Company as more than a punchline? I don’t have enough of an encyclopaedic memory to recall if they did, but the show was far more about the idea of being gay as some strange unknown rather than any kind of cultural exploration of what that meant in 1978. 

While there’s a lot of things about the modern world that are pretty terrible and backwards still, the gentle wave of gay acceptance just during my adult life makes me feel a glimmer of optimism sometimes. A good half-dozen or so of the friends I grew up with in high school later came out as gay, and I was overjoyed to see how happy and complete they seemed. I can’t imagine what it must have been like trying to keep that quiet in the ‘80s, which feels now the last real gasp of generally accepted wider cultural homophobia. 

Still, there’s plenty of people out there who still see nothing wrong with calling someone a “fag.” It’s nowhere near good enough today, of course, and a lot of people want to roll the clock back or worse. 

Three’s Company was a flimsy, unsubtle and silly show that didn’t intend to change the world like so much of today’s “prestige, event TV” – honestly, spending 800 words or so going on about it seems wildly overegging it – but at the same time, gazing back from what seems the impossibly futuristic date of 2024, it kind of shows how the world has changed, slowly, ever since Jack Tripper first knocked on that door. 

Shh, I’m on holiday. But say, have you bought my book?

Technically, I’m on holiday! But here’s an update on a few miscellaneous projects I’ve been involved with to share so I can keep my Social Influencer TM status:

Thanks to everyone so far who has ordered the amazing, spectacular Best Of Amoeba Adventures Book which is now available on Amazon worldwide as a dirt-cheap shiny paperback or a deluxe fancy-pants hardcover! In case you missed my shilling for it before, it’s 350 pages, more than a dozen stories from my 1990s small press comics and a great introduction to the Prometheus the Protoplasm comics I’ve somehow spent almost 38 years (ugh) dabbling in. If you haven’t ordered it yet, give it a shot and help me support my expensive habits. It’s tax deductible!* (*Might not actually be tax deductible.) If you have ordered it, please leave a review or star rating on Amazon to keep the algorithm overlords happy!

Meanwhile, over at the hip website Bored Panda that all the kids are into, I was interviewed for a little piece this week on the aesthetic of one of my fave filmmakers, Wes Anderson – go read it here!

Back to comics, perpetual motion machine Jason DeGroot has been organising a massive jam comic featuring dozens of small press creators, The Sunday Jam! A lot of these projects fizzle out but this one has been barrelling along all year with a new page each week, and I was pleased to take part with a page back around Christmas. Coincidentally mine is the last page in the new Collected Sunday Jam Volume 1 gathering up the first 28 pages of this epic, oddball and sometimes totally insane adventure! You can order the collected Jam for a mere $5 right here, and enjoy a mad sampler of small press talent, or give the project so far a read if you’re jam-curious. Do it!

More regular blog posting will resume in March!

Announcing: The Best Of Amoeba Adventures book!

Here’s what I did over my Christmas vacation: I’m happy to announce the release of a new book containing nearly 350 pages of classic Prometheus the Protoplasm stories from the 1990s, THE BEST OF AMOEBA ADVENTURES! 

Back in print for the first time in decades, it’s my curated pick of more than a dozen of the greatest Amoeba Adventures stories dating from comics I did in high school all the way up to the award-winning small press era! 

It’s available right NOW worldwide over on Amazon in a gorgeous paperback for a mere US$19.99, and for the fancier folks there’s a hardcover variant for US$29.99. An e-book will be available soon.

The link: The Best Of Amoeba Adventures TPB/HC

Here’s more about what’s inside: 

Nik Dirga’s Amoeba Adventures was one of the most critically praised small press comics of the 1990s. Now, for the first time, the best of long out-of-print stories by Nik with additional art by Max Ink are collected along with bonus rarities and more, including guest pin-ups by Dave Sim, Sergio Aragones, Matt Feazell and Stan Sakai. Dive on into the story of Prometheus the Protoplasm, Rambunny, Spif, Ninja Ant and Karate Kactus, and meet some of the strangest heroes and villains of all time as they battle toxic mushrooms, gorilla gangsters, time travel to the dinosaur age and even appear on David Letterman! Collecting material from Amoeba Adventures #1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11-13, 16, 17, 21, 22, 27, Prometheus The Protoplasm #4, Prometheus: Silent Storm; Prometheus Saves The Earth and Amoeba Adventures Fifth Anniversary Special.

Buy it now, buy two and invest in the future, buy three and pay for my mortgage!

As always thanks for your support and enjoy!

RIP Dick Waterman, keeper of the blues and my favourite columnist

Dick Waterman and Son House. All photos C the estate of Dick Waterman.

Mississippi blues writer, photographer and keeper of the flame Dick Waterman has died, one of the most extraordinary columnists I ever worked with in all my years in journalism. He was 88. 

Dick worked with some of the great blues legends starting in the ‘60s like Mississippi John Hurt and helped “rediscover” the forgotten Son House. He gave many struggling blue legends a second chance at a career and some sort of justice and support. He also photographed and hung out with pretty much EVERYBODY in the music scene at that time – Dylan, Jagger, Bonnie Raitt, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Janis Joplin. 

This picture of Mississippi John Hurt is probably my all-time favourite photo of a musician. C Dick Waterman.

There will and should be some fine obituaries taking in the whole sweep of his career. (Such as this excellent Washington Post one or this fine one in The New York Times) But when I met Dick Waterman, he was a columnist for the weekly newspaper I started working at in 1994, Oxford Town. It was the very beginning of my post-college career and I knew everything and nothing. The editor Chico had hired him and it was one of the best things he’d ever done. 

Almost every week Dick would drop these fascinating columns and stories about his life in music, tales of the legends and the forgotten geniuses, peppered with his gorgeous black and white photos. His columns were candid, backstage stories of what the blues legends were really like, or about his own life. When I was asked to take over as Oxford Town editor, visits from Dick were always a highlight.

Not that it was always smooth – Dick Waterman would turn in his column as late as humanly possible, shuffling into the old-school layout room close to midnight with a sheath of pages, while the pressmen could be heard loudly grumbling in the back. Once he discovered fax machine technology he pushed it even further. I attribute my skill at editing some copy very, very fast to some of his columns.

But he was unfailingly gentle and kind, with a bit of the “distracted professor” vibe around him. His photograph stash was an astonishing treasure trove that he had really just started to understand and promote in the 1990s. At one point he let us use an amazing photo of B.B. King on the back of an Oxford Town t-shirt. 

B.B. King, 1968. C Dick Waterman

I was just a rather self-important and fumbling 25-year-old editor dude at the start of my own weird journalism career but Dick was always good to me, and honestly, it took me a long time to fully understand what an amazing “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” type character he was in the ‘60s music world. I’ve never met Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters or Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, but hell, I knew Dick Waterman.  

When I left Oxford Town around 1997 to sow my wild oats back in California, Dick Waterman for some reason singled me out in his column in what is still, coming up on 30 years on, one of the kindest single acts of writing anyone has ever done for me. I include it not to brag, but to show what kind of man Dick Waterman was. 

He wrote about a Mississippi journalism award I won and said, “For the second year in a row, the Best General Interest Column was won by Oxford Town editor Nik Dirga. To appreciate this feat, you have to understand that he doesn’t even think about his own column until the rest of the paper has been completed. Nik has already announced that he is leaving in a few weeks and my sadness at his departure is mixed with the joy of having had the pleasure of working with him.”

“If Tiger Woods is the best golfer in the world at the age of 21, I can only hope that I stick around to see what literary accolades will come forth for Nik Dirga. The best part of working with Nik is that he honestly does not know how talented he really is. I am over twice as old as Nik Dirga and he is the best editor with whom I have ever worked. 

“I wish him well in his travels and know that I will be reading his byline out there somewhere.”

He didn’t have to write all that about me, I know now, and I’m sure no Tiger Woods. But he did write it.

I wish you well in your own travels now, Dick, where ever they may take you. 

Mick Jagger. C Dick Waterman

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the internet…

It’s Oscar nominations day! Let us share in the joy of headlines that aren’t full of sadness, despair and such and celebrate what was actually a pretty good year for film. In my status as Radio New Zealand Official Academy Awards Correspondent (TM) here’s my take on the nominees and a look at a few New Zealand-linked possible winners:

Oscars 2024: Who will win, who got snubbed, and where NZ is in the mix

Meanwhile, I’ve also got a book review in this week’s issue of the New Zealand Listener magazine on Michel Faber‘s excellent new sprawling look at sound and our relationship to it, Listen: On Music, Sound and Us —

Review: Music-loving novelist Michel Faber on the psychology and sociology behind the sounds that keep us hooked (Paywall)

El Santo, perhaps the greatest superhero – and wrestler – of all time

He fought Dracula. He was a dashing international spy. He invented a time machine. He wrestled mummies, battled Martians, dropped a choke-hold on a werewolf, and inexplicably became a 19th century cowboy. And he did it all while wearing a shiny silver wrestling luchador mask that he never, ever took off in his films. 

I’m talking of course about one of the world’s most famous action movie stars of the ‘60s and ‘70s – El Santo, “the Saint,” aka Mexican wrestler Rodolfo Guzman Huerta, who parlayed his career into the ring into starring in a flurry of more than 50 movies between 1958 and 1982. While he is a cult attraction in the US, he was the king of the hugely popular lucha libre genre in Mexico, the MCU of its day. 

Santo did it all – the titles of some of his flicks are like little tastes of what to expect: Santo vs The Evil Brain. Santo vs Blue Demon In Atlantis. Santo In The Revenge of the Vampire Women. Santo In The Wax Museum. Santo Vs Frankenstein’s Daughter. Santo And Blue Demon Vs Dracula and The Wolf Man. (Take that, modern-day multiverses!)

Santo In the Treasure of Dracula is a fine example of the lunacy of Santo’s world. Clad in a flashy suit and his omnipresent mask, crimefighter Santo has somehow invented a time machine (Austin Powers fans will quickly note its design) and to test it out sends his girlfriend back in time, where she ends up meeting Dracula and falling under his power. It all ends up with a wrestling match battle against Dracula and his minions in the modern day to save Santo’s girlfriend. 

I’ve only seen six or seven of the more than 50 Santo movies so far, but they’re addictive goofy fun. You can see how the Santo factory became such a strange low-fi phenomenon in Mexico. Santo fits anywhere, whether it’s fighting drug lords or beating up vampires or just fighting all the monsters.

A key element in every Santo film is that other than a stray remark or two, nobody really blinks an eye about this stocky bruiser in a wrestling mask walking about fighting evil. It’s part of the Santo charm to see his silver mask blend in with spies or cowboys or government officials, simply part of the furniture like Batman. In Santo Vs The Riders of Terror, for instance, he simply shows up in an old-fashioned Western, unquestioned, helping the townspeople against a gang of bandits and lepers (!).

They’re not exactly great movies, but they’re fast moving pulp, and kind of exotically charming to someone who grew up on a steady diet of American action movie junk food. Some of the many movies filtered over to America, and have been coming out in several nice little boutique blu-ray editions recently, while dozens more flicks can only be found by hunting the internet. 

https://youtu.be/SJ0a2tr9PwQ?si=qS2zDsFrIM8wHIYN

And of course, like how a Rocky Balboa movie has to include a few ring matches, Santo movies will almost always find a way to include a professional wrestling match or two, in addition to Santo himself putting the smackdown on whoever his latest foe of the day is. 

Santo himself is a calm zen centre at the heart of these films. Rather than camping it up, Huerta was relentlessly calm and focused as his saintly alter-ego, which adds to his mysterious allure.

Despite Draculas and Frankensteins and mummies running amok, Santo simply is and always will be himself. He rarely shows anger or any signs of a real inner life outside his battles. 

In many ways, the Santo films feel like they were made by a talented 10-year-old boy deciding what would be the coolest movies ever made and executing his ideas.

And you know, that’s sometimes all you want out of cinema, isn’t it? 

60 years of Cage: Happy Nicolas Cage Day to those who celebrate

There are movie stars, and there are character actors, but in my mind the best are those who combine the two, and few actors have carved out as inimitable a career as Nicolas Cage, who turns 60 years old today.

Cage’s star has risen and fallen and risen again over the years, but in my mind, even in the worst movies he’s starred in – and there’s a LOT of movies, over 100 – he’s almost always watchable, and more often than not, he elevates the material. 

He’s been a meme, an indie film superstar, an action hero, an Academy Award winner and nominee, a comic genius and a steady presence in an awful lot of disposable ‘video on demand’ drek with one-word titles like “Arsenal”. 

In my younger, svelte days he’s the only movie star I’ve been vaguely told I resembled (it’s probably just the Nik/Nic names). I watched Vampire’s Kiss and Raising Arizona on VHS tapes and wanted to know who this guy was. I cheered when he brought his oddball sensibility to ‘90s actioners like Face/Off and The Rock. And I still will hit the cinema for most of his major movies, from his recent excellent loosely themed apocalyptic series of films to catching the trippy Dream Scenario just a few weeks back. 

To celebrate ol’ Saint Nic’s 60th, here’s my pick for 25 of my favourite Nic Flicks in chronological order:

1. Valley Girl, 1983 – All eyeballs and nose, an 18-year-old Cage kicks off his career subverting ‘80s teen comedies in this sweet goofy treat. 

2. Raising Arizona, 1987 – I don’t think I’ve ever watched a Cage movie as many times as this Coen brothers masterpiece. “You ate sand?” “We ate sand.”

3. Vampire’s Kiss, 1988 – In which Cage, as a man who thinks he’s a vampire, decides that you can never go too far over the top.

4. Wild At Heart, 1990 – David Lynch meets Elvis meets Wizard of Oz meets Cage. Neon noir carnage.

5. It Could Happen To You, 1994 – Gentle romantic comedy is something Cage is actually pretty good at, and he’s got great charisma with Bridget Fonda. 

6. Kiss of Death, 1995 – In a bulked-out, goateed supporting role, a terrifying villainous Cage steals the show.

7. Leaving Las Vegas, 1995 – Unlike most Cage movies, there’s no humour in this one, but his Oscar-winning performance is a heartbreaker.

8. The Rock, 1996 – The reign of Cage, unorthodox action star, begins, and his three-picture run of Rock, Con and Face defines some of the beautiful excess that a great action movie can be. It isn’t easy to upstage Sean Connery, either.

9. Con Air, 1997 – Insert Nicolas Cage hair blowing in breeze gif.

10. Face/Off, 1997 – It is a ridiculous movie, but it’s also John Woo’s Hollywood peak and so damned much fun. 

11. Snake Eyes, 1998 – Brian De Palma meets Cage, and this one is worth it for the bravura showmanship of the one-take opening scene alone. 

12. Bringing Out The Dead, 1999 – Martin Scorsese meets Cage in their only collaboration to date. Underrated and tense. 

13. Adaptation, 2002 – Oscar-nominated again for playing twins in a topsy-turvy meta delight. 

14. Matchstick Men, 2003 – A black comedy con-man yarn with surprising heart.

15. National Treasure, 2004 – Another try at blockbuster success, amiably corny Indiana Jones/Da Vinci Code style fun. 

16. Lord Of War, 2005 – This tale of a Ukrainian arms dealer has only gotten more relevant with age. 

17. Ghost Rider, 2007 – It isn’t a GOOD movie by any means but watching Cage overact his heart out turning into a superhero with a burning skull head is my idea of cinema. 

18 Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans, 2009 – Cage unleashed as one of the most corrupt cops ever seen on screen. 

19. Drive Angry, 2011 – Nicolas Cage returns from Hell to save his granddaughter in this insanely goofy potboiler. 

20. Joe, 2013 – Evocative Southern Gothic based on a novel by the late great Mississippi writer Larry Brown. 

21. Mandy, 2018 – Heavy-metal ultraviolent psychedelic revenge, and the beginning of a welcome new experimentalism in Cage’s picks. 

22. Color Out Of Space, 2019 – The cosmic horror of Lovecraft’s short story finds a welcome interpreter in Cage. 

23. Pig, 2021 – Just when you think all Cage does is go to 11, he delivers a wonderfully restrained and existential movie about a lonely man who loses his pet pig. 

24. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, 2022 – Cage embraces the memes. Chaos ensues. 

25. Dream Scenario, 2023 – In a movie that really should earn him another Oscar nomination, Cage channels Freddy Krueger, kind of. 

Celebrate the tidings of the season by picking your favourite Nicolas Cage joint and giving it a spin. What’s your top Cage Day pick? Comment if you’re keen below.