I never really counted on Nicolas Cage for much. He's a quality actor by all accounts, and most of his movies have enough entertaining moments to make a viewing worth viewing. Among Cage efforts, Raising Arizona ranks up there with my favorites movies ever made, and while I consider it a Coen Brothers flick, its success was in no small part due to Cage's performance. On Saturday, I decided to take in a matinee of the newest Cage vehicle called Adaptation.

The intrigue for seeing the film was as much because it re-teamed screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze. They first collaborated to make the movie Being John Malkovich in 2000 (another movie I enjoyed to a disturbing degree). Adaptation deals with a screenwriter who struggles immensely trying to adapt a book about orchids for the silver screen. Cage plays the neurotic, balding screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman as well as his twin brother Donald. While it is admittedly perverse to put yourself in your own screenplay, it is even more bizarre to make up a twin brother who also wants to be a screenwriter.

Cage does well in the dual role, and the whole movie goes along in intriguingly bizarre fashion until the last twenty minutes. Everybody ends up in the swamps of Florida for no good reason, and while I appreciated the weirdness of the movie, the final section left me walking out of the theater somewhat disappointed. A good movie, but not one that will end up in my top notch category.

My day went on, buying groceries, cooking dinner and staying warm. As a strange coincidence, the movie Valley Girl played on the American Movie Classics channel that evening. Made in 1983, the movie starred a young Nicolas Cage in his first lead role as a young suave punk. Basically, it's a Romeo and Juliet story with a punk and a valley girl finding love despite their different backgrounds. Lots of oh-my-gods and striped fluorescent clothes that signified the early 80s fashion and kept me cracking up. It was one of the first movies I ever saw that used the word fuck freely, as well as one of my first exposures to a girl's (any girl's, for that matter) breasts. For a ten-year-old kid, these are life changing moments, and I wore out the illegally-copied beta tape in my collection, dreaming of the day I found my very own valley girl.

As a complete twist of irony, AMC not only edited the feature "for television" but also included commercials and a group of actors doing a painfully long tie-in skit during the movie. As a result, the hour-and-a-half bubble gum feature became a two-and-a-half hour epic endeavor. Nicolas Cage's "fuck yous" were dubbed by a slew of "forget its," there were no bare boobs and I had to sit through way too many commercials. Most movies edited for television are all right until the most important moments when people are cussing, taking off clothes and otherwise getting to the heart of the matter. That's when TV gets out the cutting knife. All I can say is "Forget it!" Good thing I memorized the movie back in puberty.

I swear I didn't know what I was going to do when the day began, but the entertainment gods decreed it Nicolas Cage Day. The guy has been making movies for twenty years, and I can honestly say I liked his first and last efforts about the same. The guy played a good hunky punk about as well as he played a neurotic screenwriter. Although he will get more acclaim for the most recent movie, there's definitely something appealing about those cheesy high school get-the-girl, lose-the-girl, get-the-girl-back flicks.

What does this mean in the long run? Not too much. I've seen thousands of movies between my first and latest viewing of Valley Girl. There will no doubt be other days when I accidentally watch two movies made two decades apart which star the same actor or actress. When those days happen, however, I can't deny the effect they have on me. I was writer-watching and relating to the torment of screenwriter during Adaptation. I was a ten-year-old kid watching valley girls and punker boys trying to get together in the crazy 80s world. I escaped into worlds very far from my own, and that's all I really wanted to do in the first place.

What's the real point? Movies save my life on a regular basis, and on a lazy Saturday in February, it was Nicolas Cage's turn to perform. Thanks guy, you were up to the task. Just for that, I'll go see your next movie. No questions asked.

Chris Jungle is the made-up twin brother of a screenwriter.