Con Air January 9, 2024

 In honor of yesterday being Nicolas Cage's sixtieth birthday, I would like to talk for a moment about one of his best movies, Con Air. It is not high art, but high fun. The action was fantastic, and it was weird how except for the accent Cage used as Cameron Poe, was the only thing crazy about his performance. He was almost the voice of reason in the crazy movie. John Cusack made a good sidekick as U.S. Marshall Vince Larkin, and John Malkovich was perfectly cast as Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom. The rest of the cast was fun, especially having Steve Buschemi as a serial killer that did nothing, Mykelti Williamson as Poe's cellmate, and Ving Rhames as Diamond Dog. The fight in the boneyard was stellar. The only thing that annoyed me a little was how Cameron was barely involved in the action, maybe because he was almost trying to be a normal guy in a crazy situation. A lot of the plot is confusing, like it is not smart to put the worst criminals in the country on one plane. Also, it bugged me how most of the villains used their Christian names, and most of the heroes used their surnames. I know Poe and Larkin sound cool, but so do Cameron and Vince. I know Cyrus sounds cool but so does Grissom. I'm only saying that, because when I first saw that movie, I was being bullied in school relentlessly for a variety of things, one of them was preferring my given name over an alias that means I'm rich. I had friends who did not try to get the people to stop with that and felt deflated. I then started referring to the people who picked on me by their surnames. A lot of them had cool sounding surnames, particularly Bobby Sulls, who I modeled several villains in The Covert Militia Campaigns on. Sulls in turn encouraged people who already picked on me in one of my few classes that did not look like a daycare room, and after he was kicked out, they got worse, and I had to transfer to a different period. I was often disgusted when I heard my teachers refer to Sulls by his Christian name, because if anything I felt like he was the Spawn of Satan, and that kind of name would not apply to him. Even so, that gave me material for books, and I thank people for that. If you are interested in reading them and any other Smashwords author click on the link. Smashwords.com