Consider Nicolas Cage. Any Nicolas Cage. Ghost Rider Nicolas Cage. Fancy Nicolas Cage. Nicolas Cage in a wifebeater. It doesn't matter which one. Nicolas Cage with a mustache.

As you'll soon see, no matter which Nicolas Cage you choose for this particular experiment, the outcome will remain the same. Do you have your Nicolas Cage? You do? Good. (It's mustache Nicolas Cage, isn't it?) I caught the trailer to Nicolas Cage's next movie, Knowing, the other day, and I've reposted it below.

There's nothing too remarkable about this movie on its surface (well, apart from Nicolas Cage's absurdly boastful claim to his son that he's going to make sure he never lets his son die. Not to doubt your parenting skills, but telling your child that he's never going to die is a lie, no matter how you spin it). The trailer is otherwise a typical modern action-thriller. To be fair, I watched it with the sound off and while also watching something else on television, but I caught enough to conclude that it's a movie about Nicolas Cage saving, solving or destroying the world using math.

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I watched the trailer and evaluated the different circumstances that would be required for me to watch that movie. I concluded that: A) I would never pay a dime to see that movie. B) I would never actively pursue that movie, nor rearrange my schedule in any way to catch it. C) If it came on television somewhere down the line (probably TNT), I would watch some of it if and only if I didn't have any new movies, it was too late to go out and House wasn't on. I felt safe in this conclusion because, since House is rarely not on, it seemed unlikely that I would ever see Knowing, and I decided that if I died having never seenKnowing, I could easily consider it a life well lived. Reaching this conclusion brought on a startlingly realization: I had the exact same brief mental conversation for all of the Nicolas Cage movies that existed in my immediate memory. Sure, I know he did some earlier stuff that maybe wasn't terrible, but it became immediately apparent that for maybe the last 10 or 15 years,