You know what they say: The family that watches Nicolas Cage movies together stays together. Oh, you were unaware of Nic Cage's power to unite families? Well, I don't see why — the dude did make a movie called The Family Man. The clues were right there all along, Mr. Policeman.

My daughter dances ballet for an hour or three every weeknight, while also assisting a class full of small children on Saturdays, and even that might be underselling how many hours she puts into the endeavor. It's a lot of work from September to June, and it culminates each year in a two-hour show in which my daughter and her fellow dancers show off their stuff.

When you're in as many classes as my daughter, you feature very prominently in the final production, and I would conservatively estimate she spent more than half of the show's runtime on stage. As evidence, I offer this photo of the pointe shoes she wore for her performance, which I should note were pristine when she left the house the morning of the show.

So yeah, that's a lot of jete-ing.

These shows have been happening for a decade now, and as such, we now have a series of traditions tied to my daughter's dance performances. We buy her a big bouquet of flowers to present her with when she emerges from the stage door. We take her out for a post-show meal, and given that my daughter is now a teenager and fully embracing the Diet of a Trash Panda ethos, that usually means a table at a T.J. McFriendlyBee's-style establishment. And that evening, the whole family unwinds by watching a Nic Cage movie.

You know, like Maria Tallchief used to do.

I really have no idea how Nic Cage became our family's spirit guide through the post-performance comedown. I assume my daughter demanded to see a Nic Cage, and because we are indulgent parents, we obliged her. One thing leads to another, and suddenly, you've seen more Nic Cage movies than you'd care to admit. The best family traditions, in my experience, are the ones that spring up organically without rhyme or reason.

There are some rules to selecting the post-ballet Nicolas Cage movie. We steer clear of heavier material like Leaving Las Vegas, and I would rather watch test patterns than take in a showing of 8MM with my daughter. Cameos, uncredited appearances, voice work — these are also not keeping in the spirit of Nic Cage Movie Night.

Even with these restrictions in place, our cup continues to runneth over when it comes to movies prominently featuring Nic Cage. Mr. Cage is a man of expensive tastes and thus not really in a position to turn down work. Last year, he appeared in two movies, which is a severe drop-off from the four films he made in 2024 and the half-dozen pictures bearing his name in 2023. We are going to be able to watch Nicolas Cage movies as a family long after my daughter's ballet career wraps up.

Past installments of the Nicolas Cage Ballet Film Festival have included, but are not limited to:

And now — 2026 was Con Air's turn in the barrel, which is really the apex of the Nicolas Cage Man of Action era. I'd never actually seen Con Air up until now, and if I had to describe it in just three words, they would be "Big, loud, dumb." That is not necessarily a criticism. 

It is worth noting that in a movie where Nic Cage is allowed to indulge in a lot of tics — flowing hair, Alabama-adjacent accent, killing baddies with dispatch and a quip — he still comes in second to John Malkovich in terms of total scenery chewed.

Picking apart the plot of a movie like Con Air is a one-way ticket to madness, but there is a contrivance in Con Air that bugged me to the point where it kind of took me out of the story. Early on in the picture, Nicolas Cage is dragged into a fight with a trio of local toughs, but uses his Army super-soldier skills to fend them off. Unfortunately, he kills one of the guys, clearly in self-defense, but nevertheless is convinced by his lawyer to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter. This displeases the judge, who not only sentences Nic Cage to serve the maximum sentence but also remands him to the custody of the federal penitentiary system because he should have known that he was an Army-grade killing machine.

I realize Con Air's screenwriters needed to find some way to get Nic Cage's character in the federal lock-up so that he could be on a US Marshal-run flight with other dangerous convicts while still letting the audience know that he was an OK guy. But c'mon on, I'm sure I'm not the first person to watch Con Air and spend the first half of the movie muttering about how the judge really overstepped his sentencing authority. I hope someone got fired for that blunder.

The New York Knicks won the National Basketball Association title this weekend, a development I have no opinion about one way or the other, thanks to an indifference to basketball that took root in the mid-90s and has only flourished since then. Still, the Knicks' winning made their fans and a lot of New Yorkers happy, and a not insignificant number of neutral third-parties seem on board, too. So congratulations all around — we all deserve something to be happy about sometimes.

Rodger Sherman is one of those happy Knicks fans, and in the aftermath of Saturday's clincher, he was moved to post this on Bluesky:

I mean no disrespect to Rodger Sherman, who writes a very fine newsletter called "Sports!" in which you can learn fun facts like Shakira's World Cup appearances in the last 20 years outnumber Italy's. And I acknowledge his central point, which is that becoming a fan of a team is to sign on for disappointment after disappointment. It's a very one-way street in terms of affection — your team is never going to love you back — and the losses are going to far outnumber the victories in all but the most extreme of cases. But when the highs do come — and winning your first NBA title since 1973 certainly qualifies — they're made all the sweeter because you endured through all the bad stuff.

I get it. And I also violently disagree.

Let me throw out a scenario here, crazy though it may seem. Let's say you root for a baseball team that finds itself occupying the less glamorous half of a two-team market. Even in a world where success is guaranteed to none, triumph is especially hard to come by for this team, which finds itself underfunded by its owners and thus unable to retain the copious amounts of talent that pass through its clubhouse. And yet, you still go to the games and cheer — you even had season tickets back when you had more time on your hands and no mortgage sucking up your disposable income. You kept being a fan of the team. And then, one day, the billionaire who owns the club decides the team's host city isn't taking enough tax money from schools and roads to buy him a new stadium. So he up and skedaddles to a city far more willing to roll over and play dead on his command. Should you still be a fan of that team?

I would suggest that you should not. Or at least, you would be perfectly within your rights to take your fandom elsewhere.

This ripped-from-the-pages-of-my-life example is an extreme one, but really, no reason is too small or too petty to give up on a sports franchise that's done you wrong. 

Did the team sign a wife-beater to a big, fat contract? (Hyperlink to specific example not available because I was overwhelmed for choice.) Eighty-six those bums. 

Has that team been chugging beers with Kash Patel? There are other athletes with better character to root for. 

Hell, before this whole Oakland Athletics thing, I had grown up a Los Angeles Dodgers fan, a status that I pulled the plug on immediately in 1998 when Rupert Murdoch bought the team because I will be good and goddamned if my interests align with that ghoul's.

As always, I turn to this Da Share Zone meme when I weigh the price of loyalty.

If it sucks, hit da bricks. Don't mind if I do.

Disneyland had its 70th anniversary in July 2025, though by Disney's math, anniversary years actually last around 18 months, which is why you're still seeing Disneyland70 logos. To that end, there's a documentary that started streaming on Disney Plus this year called Disneyland Handcrafted, which provides yet another telling of the Disneyland origin story, this time in the form of footage shot during the park's construction.

That sort of stuff is catnip for Disney Parks sickos like myself, though I don't know how interesting it would be to you normies. Certainly, there's nothing in the voice-over interviews that play over the old footage that anyone familiar with the park's construction doesn't already know backwards and forwards. Much of what appears in the documentary also gets covered by Disney's Land, an excellent history of how the park got started by Richard Snow, though I guess it helps to now have pictures to accompany his words.

But there's a part of Disneyland Handcrafted that caught my eye, and it comes right toward the end of the documentary. We get to see footage of some of those initial rides taking their test runs for friends and family of the company — the railroad winding its way around the park, the Mark Twain steaming down the Rivers of America, the teacups in full spin. And the cameras manage to capture the looks on the faces of the people on board those rides, kids and adults alike. You get to see moments of joy and wonder as people experience a moment of being transported out of a paved-over orange grove in Anaheim to some place deep in their imagination.

I sometimes struggle to put into words why I like Disneyland so much, why even in my 50s, it's a place I love to go back to, even with the unbearable crowds and skyrocketing ticket prices. From now on, I'm just going to point out the looks on the faces of the people riding those first few rides at Disneyland. Because that's what I experience, too.

It’s been a quiet week on the publication front, if not necessarily on the writing front. (I’ve got something big cooking, believe me, and the deadline for that project may help explain why this week’s newsletter is showing up a little later than usual.) For now, you’ll just have to content yourself with a new Magnum, Podcast episode with a surprise appearance by a far more popular member of the Michaels family. Plus, there’s an Incomparable episode about All the President’s Men where I make an appearance.

Incidentally, another project in the works involves creating an online portfolio of my work so we can drum up even more content for this particular space. If you’ve had any experience putting together such a portfolio, send some tips your old friend Phil’s way.

Since there’s nothing else of mine to promote this week — <angrily taps on inbox waiting for responses to pitches to arrive> — let's promote the work of some other folks.

This has been a media-consumption-heavy newsletter this week, and I apologize for that — I swear I have other interests. But since I'm writing this while waiting for the final Season 1 episode of Apple TV's Widows Bay to drop, I figure I'd add my voice to the chorus of people — including one of the internet’s leading lights — who’ve been lauding this comedy-horror series.

Frankly, I'm a little bit surprised to be so taken with Widow's Bay as I'm a big scaredy-cat who doesn't much care for the horror genre, all those Nic Cage movies above aside. Fortunately for my delicate nerves, Widows Bay does a good job of balancing the yuks with the yucks, with enough genuine laughs to take some of the edge off the creeping sense of dread.

As an example, consider the second episode of this season where Matthew Rhys has to spend the night in a haunted bed-and-breakfast on the show's cursed island. While rummaging through the shelves in the B&B's library, he finds a stash of vintage board games with names like Daddy's Home, She Shouldn't Have Said That, and perhaps most disturbingly, Teeth. I swear I'll never balk at playing Monopoly again.

As a reader of this newsletter, you are definitely a person of discerning taste, so I have little doubt you're already watching Widow's Bay. But if you aren't, take steps to rectify that now, especially since Apple's OK'd a second season of the show.

And that's the Phil for this week — thanks for reading.  I think next year I'm going to push for Raising Arizona, but I have a sinking suspicion I'm gonna get stuck with Face/Off.