ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Experts warned that if re-elected, former President Trump’s stringent border policies could prevent thousands of Canadian girlfriends from making it to American proms this year, acne–covered sources report.
“Trump’s strict border security measures are going to ruin the prom experience for many young men,” said an anonymous immigration official. “For years, boys have relied on their Canadian girlfriends to not only validate their romantic tales but also save face during prom season. These relationships, which blossomed over one magical summer, are now in jeopardy. Imagine telling your friends that your date can’t come because she was stopped by border guards—nobody’s going to buy that!”
Many high school boys across the country are very worried about the possibility they might not be able to show off their potentially fictional girlfriend to their classmates.
“My girlfriend, Chloe, she lives in Toronto, we’ve been planning for her to come to prom for months,” said Derek Thompson, a junior at Lincoln High School in Alexandria, Virginia. “We’ve even picked out matching outfits and everything. But now I’m freaking out that she won’t be able to make it because of like fascism and stuff. I couldn’t wait to see Alex Fazio’s face when she showed up. Man, I wish I was old enough to vote!”
Trump, never one to shy away from controversy, doubled down on his stance.
“Only American girls should go to American proms, we have the best proms here. I was Prom King many times, many many times, when I graduated they still wanted me to be Prom King, this is true, I get a call each year from my high school asking, and they say this with tears in their eyes, ‘Mr. Trump, can you be our Prom King?’ And it’s tough to say now,” Trump declared at a rally in border state North Dakota. “Besides we got the best girlfriends right here in the U.S.A.—the most beautiful, the smartest, the best of the best. Why should we be letting Canadian girls come in and take away the spotlight from our incredible American girls? Like my daughter Ivanka, now that is a woman. These girls, they cross the border illegally, they want to take jobs from American teenagers, and even these Canadian aliens will eat your pets given the chance.”
As of press time, some boys are worried that even if the borders remain open, their wild Canadian girlfriends will all get grounded anyway and still can’t come.
Paul Radin is an asshole who tries to trick three enemies from his past into apologizing to him by making them think he and his survival shelter their only hope for salvation from the nuclear apocalypse. When they refuse to apologize and request to leave because he is just that much of an asshole, Radin is driven insane by the revelation that they would prefer to endure a nuclear holocaust than be trapped in a confined space with him. The episode itself is fine overall, but as far as acting challenges go the role of Radin would be a dull slog for a thespian of Nic Cage’s caliber. With the exception of what would undoubtedly be a classic Cage meltdown performance when Radin loses his mind the rest of this episode gives the man little to work with.
Jason Foster is soon to be dead. And to ensure that the self-absorbed fucks that he calls a family really earn their inheritance he makes them all wear grotesque-looking masks, neglecting to tell them that the masks will transform their real faces into facsimiles of their real personalities. As Foster, Cage would add a much-needed sense of “more yelling at my shitty, shitty children” than the episode originally intended. The only deterrent here is that he might also request to wear a mask, which could be more confusing than anything.
Any genie story is like catnip to Nic Cage’s tabby-like persona – and yes that analogy fell apart as soon as I typed it, but much like the incomparable Mr. Cage I have learned to embrace my mistakes. Speaking of mistakes, the main character in this one makes a lot of them as he imagines the different wishes he would ask of the genie (who just so happens to be Grandpa Joe from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”). The third act when Nic Cage pretends to be the President during a UFO crisis and later just takes over being the genie isn’t exactly high art, but something we want to see nonetheless.
Look, we have no intention of slandering the great William Shatner – but the cold hard fact is that Mr. Cage could act the pants off of every character that Shatner ever played. That’s just how good he is. So while in the original episode we’ve got Willy S. chewing the scenery over a fortune teller machine that’s taking him for a ride, in our reimaging Nic Cage somehow convinces the fortune machine that it’s actually the one that’s crazy. Honestly, it wouldn’t take much for him to pull it off.
We really didn’t mean to go back to back with the “Star Trek” cast members in this ranking, that’s just how things shook out. But seriously, how cool would it be to see Nic Cage and George Takei act off of one another? Adding to the fact that this episode is a stark depiction of racial disharmony after wartime you really have something to sink your acting teeth into. Shit, should we just cast Nic Cage in “Star Trek” too? Well, we guess we’ll save that for another list sometime.
When two state troopers stop at a roadside diner to investigate a UFO sighting, paranoia ensues as the occupants speculate wildly as to which of them doesn’t belong. Now, of course Mr. Cage will be playing the role of the alien – but with his subtle facial cues and not-at-all-gargled tone of voice, will you even be able to tell that it’s him?
Once again we have a main character having a complete mental breakdown, but this time it’s because twenty years prior he left a bunch of his navy buddies to rot in a submarine and now their ghosts are back to drag him into a watery grave. You know, PTSD metaphors used to be way less subtle, and really, it’s a point in television history that we could all do with a revisit to. Also, Nic is gonna act the fuck outta this role.
A lone man wanders an abandoned town with seemingly no reason for his solitude and eerie allusions to his situation from the very environment he’s trapped in. Fortunately for Nicolas Cage, screaming about his deranged loneliness in a ghost town is second nature to him. Just look at his most recent arrest after accidentally ingesting bath salts in that derelict pioneer village – it won him an Emmy somehow!
Commander Stansfield is a man in love who also happens to have terrible timing. He’s about to leave Earth for a forty-year space flight which he’ll spend in suspended animation, but, not wanting to have to bang an old lady when he gets back, removes himself from hibernation as she ironically puts herself into hibernation. What would Nicolas Cage do when left to his own devices in outer space for four goddamn decades? We’re going to take the high road on this one and guess he would use that time to perfect his poetry, all of which would be about old boobs and that one dinosaur skull he got sued into returning to Mongolia. Clearly the man’s range does not stop just because the cameras are off.
Nicolas Cage often works best when a scene is wall-to-wall panic with weird xenophobic undertones strewn all throughout. Well in the classic episode “The Shelter” he’ll have no shortage of inspiration as a group of neighbors desperately try to break into his bomb shelter only to then discover that this nuclear false alarm made all of their uninstigated racism somehow even more uncalled for.
What would happen if Nic Cage was a meek little man who suddenly became obsessed with the lives of dollhouse figurines? Actually, wasn’t this already a Nic Cage movie at some point?
Mr. Cage has his choice of meaty roles in this episode. Should he play the stoic, godly leader of a town eradicated by nuclear fallout? Or the desperado-like army officer who tries to seize power and drink radiation-tainted liquor? Or the insane supercomputer who lives in a cave and rules the remnants of humanity like a god? Let the man explore his options!
Though it may seem counterintuitive to have Nicolas Cage play a role where the entire intent behind it is that he’s a character that isn’t allowed to speak, trust us, that energy is going to come out in other ways. And the idea of Nic Cage throwing himself around a glass jail cell, unable to speak, trying to win a bet against an arrogant socialite is exactly what this episode needs.
Edward Hall is convinced that if he falls asleep he’ll die. Why? Well obviously, because “the Cat Girl” is going to make him ride a roller coaster until his heart explodes.Look, this show doesn’t always make the best sense – but if you need an actor to make watchable something that is otherwise incomprehensible gibberish, Nic Cage is the man for the job.
Here we have kind of a difficult episode to approach. A group of petty thieves find a camera that takes pictures of the future. What really makes this a tough situation is that everyone, literally every person in this episode, is fucking stupid.Now we have no reservations that Nicolas Cage is perfectly capable of playing any of the dumbest human beings ever put on film. The real question is, in what ways does this episode improve when even just one of its protagonists is being played with anything other than what we would describe as “rock chomping stupidity.” Our best guess, Nic Cage actually figures out how to replace the film in the camera. Miraculously this is a huge plot point in the episode.
