Who is popular today?

The actor plays a dull academic whose image somehow arrives in millions of sleeping minds in a combination of Freddy Krueger and Leonard ZeligNicolas Cage has perhaps never been Nicolas Cagier in what could be his Nicolas Cagiest performance ever. This is a surreal fantasy-satire about the unsafe space of social media and the nature of viral fame, something to be aspired to – or dreamed of – by everyone: the democratised and accessible stardom that can happen to anyone, despite or in some way because of their lack of achievement. This kind of fame can be alchemised from ordinariness, a fame produced and consumed on smartphones and capable of getting inside people’s heads because they can imagine, in fact want to imagine, the same thing happening to them.Cage plays Professor Paul Matthews, an academic with a decent but unexciting career lecturing on biology and how animals evolve to avoid the mortal danger of standing out from the herd. Cage shows us a dull guy, balding with glasses, habitually wearing an anorak with a furry collar. Privately, he is eaten up with rage at his lack of publications and his career stagnation. Meanwhile, a former colleague has become a huge success with ideas very similar to his, while a college contemporary is a fashionable media academic hosting smart dinner parties to which Paul and his wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson) are never invited. Continue reading...