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Blackfilm.com reports that at a recent press conference for his flaming-skulls-and-motorcycles movie Ghost Rider, Nicolas Cage started things off by demanding to know if any of the gathered reporters were from Entertainment Weekly, "clearly indicating that he's not a fan of their magazine." Pressed further for what EW—who generally demonstrate an "up with movie stars!" editorial bias—might have done to earn the ire of the Inscrutably Hairlined One, Cage instantly launched into a diatribe about narrowmindedness and the nature of true art:

'Entertainment Weekly' hasn't done anything to me. Someone just asked me a question about whether I think comic book movies get a bad rap. Someone mentioned to me that there was a blurb in 'Entertainment Weekly' that said very condescendingly, 'We get a kick out of watching Academy Award winners being in movies that they have no business being seen in.' I thought, 'Well, okay. That's really shallow thinking because they can't get outside their own box.' They don't understand the concept of what I would say is art.

You have different styles and you can choose to be photo-realistic like 'World Trade Center' or you can be pop art illustrative. Why limit yourself to one style of acting, and especially when you look at 'Ghost Rider' you see a comic book story structure which digs a little deeper. It doesn't take itself too seriously of course. It's funny, but it's coming from classic themes like Faust with Goethe or Thomas Mann or 'Beauty and the Beast.' It's fascinating to take those story structures and reintroduce people to it in a pop art contemporary manner and especially a comic book no less. It's just fun and reaches a lot of people, but 'Entertainment Weekly' is the kind of magazine that is very condescending and they think in a very narrow box and they always have. So that's why I would recommend that if you want to really get your information and know what movies to go see I wouldn't resort to that particular publication because they are pretty shallow.

The EW editors couldn't have known at the time of their dismissive appraisal of the subject matter that Cage's project would be deemed so artistically ambitious by its studio that it needed to be withheld from such narrow-minded critics until the last possible moment. It was, in effect, a slight as grievous as writing off neo-paganist masterpiece The Wicker Man because "an Oscar winner has no business running around for an entire movie in a bearsuit punching girls."