Elliott Kalan of The Flop House fame returns to the pod to fully usher our boys into the era of Bad Movies and Bad Hair! First up is The Taking of Pelham 123 , Tony Scott's penultimate film and a remake of the 1976 thriller classic about a heist aboard a New York City subway train. But this time, the slow-burn tension and grimy tale of a Big Apple suffused with sleaze and danger is replaced by a slick, post-9/11 NYC and John Travolta in Orange County Chopper cosplay doing The Most. Not even Denz...
Feb 02, 2022•1 hr 21 min
Film critic and author Jason Bailey ( Fun City Cinema ) hops on the Amtrak Acela Express with us, as we bounce between the Big Apple and Baltimore for a decidedly cacophonous double feature! First up is Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center , which trades in Stone’s signature conspiratorial thinking for an earnest, if narratively stagnant, disaster movie about the real-life tale of two Port Authority police officers (Nic Cage and Michael Peña) trapped in the rubble of the World Trade Center on 9/11....
Jan 18, 2022•55 min
Nathan and Clint ride alone this week for two movies about going very fast - one for the kiddies, one for angsty Hot Topic teens! First up is Ghost Rider , Nic Cage's first foray into the world of Marvel's very own bike-riding Spirit of Vengeance. The good news? Cage is really fun, injecting no small amount of Elvis-y elan to the deeply weird Johnny Blaze. The bad news? It's written and directed by Daredevil 's Mark Steven Johnson, so literally nothing else works -- from the mall-goth villains t...
Jan 05, 2022•51 min
This week, Jordan Morris (Jordan, Jesse, Go!, the new graphic novel Bubble ) comes back to the cast for a decidedly cursed double feature to end 2021: Wild Hogs and The Ant Bully ! In Wild Hogs , Travolta plays second fiddle to Tim Allen, alongside Martin Lawrence and William H. Macy as a quartet of sad, middle-aged weekend warriors who flee their hen-pecking wives for a wild cross-country road trip on their hogs. Naturally, this means 100 minutes of saggy gay panic jokes and boomer humor so ach...
Dec 22, 2021•1 hr 10 min
This week on the podcast, actor, comedian, and podcaster extraordinaire Jon Gabrus ( Drunk History, The Action Boyz Podcast) joins us to talk Cage's The Weather Man and Travolta's Lonely Hearts ! In The Weather Man , Cage continues his mid-aughts exploration of sad, moody middle-aged antiheroes as a Chicago TV weatherman shrugging his way through his midlife crisis. In lesser hands, that'd be insufferable, but with Cage in one of his saddest, most wearied performances and Gore Verbinski's deadpa...
Dec 09, 2021•1 hr 16 min
This week on the podcast, Screen Junkies writer and Binge Boys host Lon Harris joins us for another case study for why the mid-2000s were so good for Cage, and so. very. bad for Travolta: Lord of War and Be Cool ! In Andrew Niccol's Lord of War , Cage plays an unscrupulous arms dealer with a calculator where his heart should be, tracking him through his nefarious, cold-blooded life as a weapons merchant. It's a searingly prescient, post-9/11 take on American imperialism and the intersections bet...
Nov 24, 2021•54 min
This week on the podcast, Nathan and Clint go it alone for this double feature about AmErIcAn HeRoEs - National Treasure and Ladder 49 ! First is National Treasure , one of Disney's most successful post- Pirates bids to chase the big-budget family-friendly adventure dragon. This time, the theme is America , with Cage as a boy-scout adventurer determined to steal the Declaration of Independence so he can find a secret treasure trove of riches with ties to America's origins. It's rollicking good, ...
Nov 10, 2021•47 min
We’re back after another short hiatus! This week, Daily Grindhouse’s Preston Fassel joins us to talk about two films featuring our heroes in erstwhile dysfunctional families: A Love Song for Bobby Long and Matchstick Men! In Love Song for Bobby Long, Travolta plays the titular Southern-fried English professor, a hard-drinking, hard-living man dealing with his itinerant ways in N’Awlins, only to have to grow up when a young girl (Scarlett Johansson, not quite yet playing black widows or Japanese ...
Oct 21, 2021•1 hr 9 min
This week, we're dealing with a decidedly idiosyncratic double-feature, with We Hate Movies perennial Stephen Sajdak along for the ride! First, there's the 2004 version of The Punisher, the Tom Jane-led throwback to 70s action movies mixed with the best 2000s buttrock post-9/11 society had to offer us. Oh, and Travolta's there as a sleepy, uninspired bad guy. Luckily, to dull the pain, we've got Spike Jonze's Adaptation to dig into -- the delightful, mercurial movie about the nature of adaptatio...
Aug 25, 2021•1 hr 15 min
This week on the podcast, we’re joined by film critic Robert Daniels (of 812filmreviews and a contributor to RogerEbert.com, NY Times, Vulture, and others) to break down an exceedingly strange double feature in our heroes’ oeuvre! First up is Basic, the final film to date from John “Die Hard” McTiernan, which sees John Travolta return to the military-legal-thriller well after General’s Daughter. Here, he plays (no shit) Tom Hardy, a sardonic crooked DEA agent roped into a murder investigation of...
Jul 19, 2021•1 hr
This week, Nathan and Clint go it along for a decidedly humdrum double feature in Travolta and Cage’s careers — the early-aughts slumps Domestic Disturbance and Windtalkers! In Domestic Disturbance, Travolta squares off against a sleazy Vince Vaughn (still knee-deep in Gus Van Sant Psycho modes, channeling his blue-collar menace) as the latter weasels his way into Travolta’s family as the Fun New Stepdad. Well, as it turns out, the Fun New Stepdad has a secret, and one he’s willing to kill a way...
Jun 30, 2021•57 min
For this week’s decidedly strange double feature, YouTube video essayist extraordinaire Patrick H. Willems hops into the driver’s seat as we gawk at the baffling combination of Swordfish and 2003’s Christmas Carol: The Movie! First, we put on our wraparound sunglasses and low-rise jeans to time-warp back to the gossamer pre-9/11 months of 2001, where the world was still riding high from Matrix fever and Dominic Sena tried to hop on that bandwagon with the ridiculous hacker-action-thriller Swordf...
Jun 09, 2021•1 hr 13 min
Greetings, rat-brains! This week, we welcome puny man-animal Alonso Duralde for a double dose of religious-themed mayhem: Travolta’s Scientology-adjacent epic Battlefield Earth and Nic Cage’s erstwhile Christmas dramedy The Family Man! Battlefield Earth has long carved out a place as one of the great so-bad-its-good classics, as L. Ron Hubbard’s gargantuan pulp sci-fi novel turns into a messy, Dutch-angled workplace comedy with a mincing Travolta performance that must be seen to be believed. It’...
May 06, 2021•1 hr 20 min
This week, the realms of Travolta and Cage come perilously close to merging, as our double feature covers films directed by fillmmakers who either have or will directed the other! In The General’s Daughter, we’ve got a steamy, somewhat dated legal thriller/airport potboiler courtesy of Con Air director Simon West, in which a warrant officer (John Travolta) investigates the rape and murder of a young female captain on a Georgia army base. On the other, deliberately dumber side of the coin, we’ve ...
Apr 21, 2021•1 hr 7 min
his week on the podcast, comedian and podcaster Josh Gondelman (author of Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results) hops in the passenger’s seat for a wild night of good-to-great cinema with our two boys! First up is A Civil Action, the schmaltzy-but-scintillating Steven Zaillian legal drama starring John Travolta as a sleazy personal injury lawyer drawn to the allure of justice, surrounded by a murderer’s row of ‘90s character guys (William H. Macy, Tony Shalhoub, Robert Duvall, t...
Apr 07, 2021•1 hr 11 min
This week, Nathan and Clint go it alone for one of the podcast’s most curious double features — an art-film masterwork with barely any Travolta in it, and a fully-loaded grotesquery with more Cage than we can shake a snuff film at!First, there’s Terrence Malick’s 1998 war film The Thin Red Line, an elegaic meditation on man’s inhumanity to man, and the way war corrupts the majesty of nature — with an ensemble cast so sprawling even folks like George Clooney can just pop up for 37 seconds! It’s o...
Mar 24, 2021•1 hr 1 min
This week on the podcast, Vox culture writer extraordinaire Emily VanDerWerff hops on the campaign trail for an interesting, auteur-driven double feature mired deeply in the politics and aesthetics of the late ‘90s! First up is Primary Colors, a Mike Nichols-directed, Elaine May-scripted adaptation of the Joe Klein-penned roman a clef about the Clinton Years. Travolta does his best Alabama drawl as Senator “Jack” Stanton”, a Bill-esque figure whose political idealism is marred by the many person...
Feb 24, 2021•1 hr 11 min
This week, we (along with special guest, JumpCut Online’s Fiona Underhill) begin our post-Face/Off slide into the latter years of Travolta and Cage with two ‘90s artifacts, Mad City and City of Angels! In City of Angels, Nic Cage takes the ‘fallen angel’ baton from Travolta’s Michael, as a dewey-eyed angel who falls in love with a heart surgeon (a radiant Meg Ryan) and decides to become human to explore that. It’s a remake of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire that bumps the political dimension for ro...
Feb 10, 2021•1 hr 10 min
It's like looking in a mirror, only.... not. It's finally here, folks, the apex of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage's careers, American action cinema, and this podcast's stated mission! This week, the two realms merge with John Woo's Face/Off, in which Travolta and Cage play dual-wielding badasses on opposite sides of the law who find themselves swapping faces and lives as they continue their cat and mouse game. As a John Woo film, it's got all the doves, slow-motion dives, and incongruous Catholi...
Jan 08, 2021•58 min
Merry Christmas, you filthy animals! To help us usher in a decidedly bizarre yuletide this year, we’re celebrating a fascinating double feature: a bizarre, shambolic Cassavetes family affair and one of the great entries in the Dipshit Film Canon, respectively. What’s more, we’ve got a very special guest to guide us through: Actor and Blank Check podcaster extraordinaire Griffin Newman! First is She’s So Lovely, a lost John Cassavetes script turned into a schmaltzy, all-too-conventional romantic ...
Dec 24, 2020•1 hr 24 min
Welcome to The Rock! (And a Nora Ephron film too, but we know what you’re really here for.) This week on Travolta/Cage, we finally enter that much-vaunted era of Cage, the Schlocky Action Picture, with one of his greats — Michael Bay’s slick slice of ‘90s milporn cheese The Rock. One of the rare films to crystallize Bay’s particular brand of macho maximalism into something approaching a watchable action film, The Rock lets Cage out of his cage as the twitchy “chemical superfreak” Stanley Goodspe...
Dec 09, 2020•1 hr 11 min
This week on the pod, we start to crystallize the essence of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage’s mid-90s careers with two decidedly different films about characters engaged in holy martyrdom! Jason Webber, author of Purple Bananas: How Prince Saved Me and Other Selections from the Soundtrack 2 My Life and Juggalo publicist extraordinaire, hops on board for a two-part bender of Phenomenon and Leaving Las Vegas. In Leaving Las Vegas, Cage pours himself into the role of a low-functioning alcoholic pub...
Nov 18, 2020•1 hr 5 min
This week, Travolta/Cage hurtles inevitably into the over-amped action movie phase of our subjects’ careers, as John Travolta shacks up with Hong Kong action wunderkind Broken Arrow! Smirking and smarming his way into his first all-out villain role, Travolta plays an Air Force bomber pilot who decides to steal some nukes for some easy money, with only the wiry Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis to stop them. There are no doves, but there’s plenty of ‘90s cheese. Ain’t it cool? On the other sid...
Oct 28, 2020•1 hr 6 min
This week on the podcast, we trawl through the rare pro-Travolta pairing with film critic Lisa Rosman (RogerEbert.com, Vulture), as Barry Sonnenfeld’s charming Elmore Leonard adaptation Get Shorty goes up against the execrable, ear-splitting Christmas comedy Trapped in Paradise! In the mid-’90s, John Travolta was flying high off the success of Pulp Fiction, which set up up nicely for his cool-as-ice take on “Chili” Palmer, a suave, personable loan shark who flies out to LA and gets the chance to...
Oct 14, 2020•1 hr 4 min
This week, Nathan and Clint go it alone with our latest pairing of Travolta/Cage goodness — mostly so we didn’t have to make a third person suffer the indignity of White Man’s Burden, a post-Pulp Fiction “racial commentary” in which the race/class divide is reversed and white people are on the lower rung of the totem pole. Here, John Travolta, as a poor construction worker living in the ghetto (sporting a… curious blaccent), decides to kidnap his wealthy employer (Harry Belafonte) to get money a...
Sep 30, 2020•54 min
This week, poor Travolta finally catches a break, as we finally reach the point in the podcast where we get to discuss the movie that brought him back from direct-to-video flop hell — Quentin Tarantino’s new-cool opus Pulp Fiction! We’ve got the perfect guest for it, too: film critic at large Jason Bailey, author of Pulp Fiction: The Complete Story of Quentin Tarantino's Masterpiece. Together, we chat about the film’s impact on popular culture, its influence on the indie film renaissance of the ...
Sep 09, 2020•1 hr 17 min
What happens when Nic Cage does a favor for his first-time filmmaker brother Chris Coppola, but derails it with a performance so bizarre it makes Vampire’s Kiss look like Leaving Las Vegas? Well, this week on the podcast, Nathan and Clint find out with the help of guest and friend of the show Scout Tafoya (RogerEbert.com), as we talk about Deadfall and Look Who’s Talking Now! Two films at widely disparate ends of the Travolta/Cage spectrum, Deadfall and Look Who’s Talking Now feel like adventure...
Aug 26, 2020•1 hr 8 min
This week, The Pitch's Abby Olcese throws on a vest and electric guitar to join us for a couple Travolta/Cage obscurities filled with both ironic and unironic pleasures! First, there's Shout, the rockin-est, rollin-est, bone-deep silliest (not to mention white savioury) '50s drama, in which a cool-as-ice music teacher played by Travolta, who brings a little slice of funk to a small-town boys academy. A James Dean lookalike pines after a young Heather Graham! Kids dance erotically at the first ba...
Aug 05, 2020•56 min
It’s buddy week this week, as the stars of our podcast pair up with unlikely partners in some early ‘90s curios of varying levels of quality! First up is Amos & Andrew, E. Max Frye’s well-intentioned but dubiously-funny racial satire about a well-to-do Black intellectual (Samuel L. Jackson) who finds himself the victim of racial violence in his own home, and the down-on-his-luck criminal (Nicolas Cage) who ends up teaming up with him to pull one over on the cops. It certainly hits differentl...
Jul 22, 2020•1 hr 14 min
One of the things we’ve learned about Travolta and Cage during this project is that they’re both, in their own way, Elvis figures: they’re handsome, song-and-dance men who occupy a kind of irresistible masculinity and cultural supremacy in their prime. Never is that clearer than this week’s doozy of a double-feature, as film and TV critic Odie Henderson (RogerEbert.com, Vulture) helps us break down Look Who’s Talking Too and Honeymoon in Vegas! The podcast’s very first sequel, Look Who’s Talking...
Jul 08, 2020•1 hr 3 min
