Film Life Is Only A Cage, And All Inside Are Players

Not only does Nicolas Cage have a new movie out, “Kiss of Death” opposite David Caruso, but he has a new marriage to celebrate.

“It feels good, it feels correct,” the 31-year-old actor told USA Today of his sudden wedding with old flame Patricia Arquette, 27. “Ultimately, I married a woman who is my friend and also the person I would want to be if I were a woman.”

OK, but what most people want to know is what are the chances of success, considering just a few weeks ago Cage was at the Academy Awards with longtime steady, Kirsten Zang.

“These two people are together who were never together, except for three weeks eight years ago,” Cage said. “Now that we’ve done this we have to make it work, take it slow and all the harmonizing has to come in time.”

Loose talk

Composer and Sex Pistols founder Malcolm McLaren on being asked to write a song for the candidacy of Jacques Chirac for president of France (in The New Yorker): “I thought, ‘Why would they be phoning me?’ You’d think they’d be phoning Jean-Michel Jarre or Michel Legrand.”

For $20 million, she’ll broadcast her celebration party

Barbra Streisand turns 53 today.

Anytime now, expect the cream pies to start flying

Think things are comfortable between all those guys sitting with O.J. Simpson in court? Think again, writes Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker. “The defense table is like the Thanksgiving from hell,” reports Toobin. “They have to sit there with each other, but they can’t stand it.”

One question: Is that glass bullet-proof?

Living in L.A. pleases actress Helen Mirren, but she can do without the anger. “And I don’t mean the anger of the dispossessed,” she says. “I mean the anger of the very rich ladies in their BMWs with their manicured fingernails who scream at you if you change lanes in front of them. You see these coiffed women in their Armani suits and their faces just distorted with rage screaming at you from behind the glass.”

A beer would be OK, as long as it was in, say, Sydney

Facing 100 hours of community service and fined $500, Pantera singer Phillip Anselmo apologized on Tuesday for hitting a security guard with a microphone during a concert last June. “I’m unbelievably sorry,” Anselmo told Joseph Lewis in a Darien, N.Y. court. “If that happened to me, I’d settle for a beer and handshake.” Lewis wants $1 million.

No, snicker her fellow stars, of course it isn’t

“All My Children” star Susan Lucci, nominated 14 times but never chosen as Best Daytime Actress by Emmy voters, doesn’t feel like a loser. “My goodness, I’m so deeply honored by the nominations from my peers,” she said. “I don’t know how that ever got twisted around and made into some sort of joke. Because it’s an honor, it’s not a joke.”

No, because it’s hard to speak when overcome by nausea

Ivana Trump is set to marry Riccardo Mazzucchelli? What will she be called? “I might handle it with Ivana Trump-Mazzucchelli. On the other hand I go out and it’s just ‘Ivana.’ People don’t use my second name.”

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Dan Webster