This week, Travolta and Cage’s timelines finally merge with two certified stinkers from 1991! Podcaster extraordinaire and recurring guest Alonso Duralde (Linoleum Knife, Who Shot Ya?, a million others) takes the ferry to N’Awlins with us to steep in the sweaty, clumsy erotic thrills of Zandalee, in which Nic Cage plays a tortured artist who livens up the sex life of repressed trophy wife Zandalee (Erika Anderson), much to the consternation of frustrated poet Thierry (Judge Reinhold). The sex sc...
Jun 24, 2020•1 hr 11 min
Travolta and Cage fly high this week, as their filmic timelines finally align with two 1989-’90 films in which they play pilots! After a few dour years, Travolta struck gold with Look Who’s Talking, the Amy Heckerling-directed tale of a young single mom in New York (a pre-insanity Kirstie Alley) looking for a good dad for her baby son Mikey (voiced by an all-too-lewd Bruce Willis), and possibly finding it in Travolta’s happy-go-lucky cab driver/aspiring flight instructor. Then, of course, there’...
Jun 03, 2020•1 hr 7 min
This week on the pod, we fill out another notch on our We Hate Movies guest bingo card with the lovely Stephen Sajdak, as we break down two decidedly gonzo love stories in our heroes’ filmography! First, there’s Nic Cage’s one and only collaboration with David Lynch on 1989’s nightmarish road movie Wild at Heart, the tale of a snakeskin jacket-wearing criminal (Cage) and his lusty moll of a girlfriend (Laura Dern) boning their way through the American countryside with Dern’s vengeful mother (an ...
May 20, 2020•1 hr 20 min
Greetings Cagers and Travoltettes! This week on the podcast, Nathan’s Postal co-author Brock Wilbur (get your copy today) joins us to begin our inevitable descent into the mid to late ‘80s, where both Travolta and Cage started making curious career choices that would bury them in obscurity until they could claw themselves out. Here, we see both our heroes tackling those rarest of Travolta and Cage roles — the non-American. In Robert Altman’s stuffy, inscrutable TV special Basements, Travolta pla...
Apr 29, 2020•1 hr 7 min
In 1988, Nicolas Cage reached arguably his final form as the caterwauling, manic New York business bro Peter Loew in the horror-comedy Vampire’s Kiss. Meanwhile, John Travolta was still floundering in dated, mismatched romances like 1985’s fitness expose/rom com/Rolling Stone advert Perfect, co-starring a be-leg-warmered Jamie Lee Curtis. This week on the pod, We Hate Movies’ Eric Szyszka squeezes into some spandex and works up a sweat with us as we break down these two decidedly disparate entri...
Apr 15, 2020•1 hr 8 min
In a strange twist of fate, this week’s Travolta/Cage sees our heroes embarking on two decidedly different romances with musical megastars — but the difference is, one won two Oscars and the other was nominated for five Razzies! With the help of special guest Karina Longworth (You Must Remember This), Nathan and Clint explore the strange double feature of Two of a Kind, John Travolta’s flop-tastic reunion with Grease co-star Olivia Newton-John, and Moonstruck, John Patrick Shanley’s charming ode...
Apr 01, 2020•59 min
Greetings, fellow quarantiners! Hope you’re all staying safe and isolated as COVID-19 ravages the United States. Over here at Travolta/Cage, we’ve got another terrible affliction to deal with — disco fever! For this week’s episode, podcaster Sean Conroy (Sean Conroy Gets Happier) joins us to talk about Staying Alive and Raising Arizona. Staying Alive, of course, is the seven-years-too-late sequel to Saturday Night Fever, in which Travolta’s Tony Manero swaps out disco as an escape for a career i...
Mar 18, 2020•59 min
We finally start to play the real hits over on Travolta/Cage this week, as The Flop House’s Dan McCoy joins us to talk about two great films in our respective subjects’ careers: the Brian De Palma thriller Blow Out and Francis Ford Coppola’s romantic fantasy Peggy Sue Got Married! In Blow Out, we get to see Travolta shuck his overwrought pretty-boy character studies to play the dogged lead of a tight-knit Hitchcockian thriller. It’s a great showcase for what Travolta can do when he’s not tasked ...
Feb 19, 2020•1 hr 15 min
Greetings lovely listeners! This one’s a bit late on account of Clint’s whirlwind sojourn to Sundance, but now he’s back and we can subject you to another shockingly one-sided cinematic duel between John Travolta and Nicolas Cage! This time around, we decided to go without a guest, since a) we got busy and b) we didn’t want to subject the hard-to-find Nic Cage sporting drama The Boy in Blue on a third person. That’s right, in 1986, Nic Cage starred in a Canadian historical rowing flick as the Ca...
Feb 02, 2020•51 min
This week on the podcast, the tables turn for our intrepid young hunks, as John Travolta’s hot streak comes to a close with 1978’s Moment by Moment and Nicolas Cage gets a big, juicy, Cage-tastic role in 1984’s war drama Birdy. And we’ve got film critic Alonso Duralde (The Wrap, Linoleum Knife, Who Shot Ya?) in the passenger seat for this sizzling mix of May-December romance and homoerotic Vietnam melodrama! Moment by Moment is the third and final film of Travolta’s contract with Robert Stigwood...
Jan 15, 2020•1 hr 5 min
This week on the pod, we continue our trek through John Travolta and Nic Cage’s early careers, when Travolta was hitting it big as a singing, dancing A-list movie star and Cage was still slumming it in weird supporting roles in his uncle’s ambitious films. To that end, we brought on Emmy-nominated writer, comedian and satirist Jake Fogelnest (Corporate, The Fogelnest Files) to talk about these distinctly disparate entries in our subjects’ oeuvre. For Grease, it was John Travolta’s big moment — a...
Jan 03, 2020•1 hr 18 min
This week on Travolta/Cage, We Hate Movies’ Andrew Jupin clears the dance floor to help Nathan and Clint through a groovy double feature of Saturday Night Fever and Racing with the Moon! In Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta grooves and twists his hips through his first big superstar role as Tony Manero, a blustering Noo Yawker who dreams of stardom and only gets a taste of it when he dances at the local nightclub. Everyone knows this one for its banging Bee Gees soundtrack and its groovin’ rei...
Dec 23, 2019•1 hr 23 min
Welcome to episode two of Travolta/Cage! This week, film and TV critic extraordinaire Noel Murray (AV Club, The Dissolve) joins us to discuss the next two films in Travolta and Cage’s oeuvre. First up is 1976’s The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, a surprisingly effective TV weepie-of-the-week starring Travolta as Tod Lubitch, a boy with no immune system who has to live his life in — you guessed it — a plastic bubble. Will he find love with the relatable girl-next-door (Glynnis O’Connor)? Will he esca...
Dec 04, 2019•1 hr 7 min
Hail, friends, and welcome to the first episode of Travolta/Cage! Think of it as Happy Cast, renewed and refreshed, with a groovy new purpose! It’s the same old Nathan and Clint, but this time, we’re going through the filmographies of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage — two of the strangest, most fascinating pop culture figures, warts and all — in chronological order. For our premier episode, we bring on ‘80s pop culture expert Scott Weinberg (‘80s All Over, now Science vs. Fiction) to help us talk...
Nov 20, 2019•1 hr 41 min
Nov 04, 2019•18 min
Amid a slow week at the cinema, amongst stuffy English TV lords and sad Brad dads in space, Nathan and Clint decided to stay on the couch this week and check out some of the streaming-only offerings on the old Net of Flix? Did you know you can watch movies on your computer now? Instantly? For a subscription? Wild! This episode, we’re offering up an anti-comedy double feature with two stars who disappear into unlikable personas of themselves. First, there’s Between Two Ferns: The Movie, in which ...
Sep 25, 2019•1 hr 5 min
We here at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Cast love to keep our finger on the pulse of pop culture, so naturally this week’s episode is about the hit #1 movie everyone’s talking about, the smash hit that’s blowing up the box office… the John Travolta-Fred Durst project The Fanatic! This week on the pod, we partake in a double-dose of Travolta VOD madness with two of the three projects he’s dropped into video hell this year. First up is his woefully misguided, yet fascinatingly terrible character study The...
Sep 11, 2019•1 hr 8 min
What do Lance Reddick, disgruntled military contractors and black presidents under deadly threat have in common? They’re all contained in both films we’re talking about in this week’s podcast — Angel Has Fallen (the latest in the “Gerard Butler kicks ass FOR AMERICA” series) and 2013’s White House Down, aka the silly Die Hard in the White House film that should have gotten a trilogy. Give us Action Fantasy Obama, goddamnit! To join us on this patriotic journey through films that exist in that st...
Aug 28, 2019•1 hr 4 min
Salut, mi familia - Nathan and Clint peel on their tank tops, slam a couple Coronas, and hop in their muscle cars for a double-dose of Fast & Furious mayhem? With Hobbs & Shaw now in theaters, we take a look at what happens when two buff, muscley dudes smash and shit-talk their way through a buddy cop movie despite being the exact same person. But before that, we skydive deep into the Fast franchise proper with the movie that kicked off their WrestleMania-adjacent partnership, The Fate o...
Aug 14, 2019•1 hr 3 min
All right ramblers, let’s get rambling - Nathan and Clint are riding into town on their ‘69 Road Runner, listening to old-school surf rock and dropping ‘60s TV references like nobody’s business in our Tarantino-stuffed Happy Cast! Critic Alonso Duralde (The Wrap, Linoleum Knife, Who Shot Ya?, Breakfast All Day) joins us to talk about QT’s latest, a sun-soaked elegy for Old Hollywood as riotously stylish as it is frustratingly old-fashioned in its ideas. Did we love it? Did we hate it? Did we lov...
Jul 31, 2019•1 hr 10 min
Howdy webheads! This week Nathan and Clint catch up on the latest cog in the Marvel machine, Spider-Man: Far From Home, a teen sex comedy wrapped up in Spandex and CGI. It’s cute, it’s fun, it’s a little subversive, but does it hold up to the great responsibility of the Marvel franchise? Let’s find out! In the meantime, we also take a look back at Sam Raimi’s batshit-crazy Spider-Man 3, a movie with a million subplots, Lowell from Wings in a striped T-shirt, and more jazz than any self-respectin...
Jul 17, 2019•1 hr 1 min
All right, all right, all right listeners, throw on some crusty jorts and dig your bongo out of storage - it’s a McConnaissance double feature over here on the Happy Cast! This week, Nathan and Clint take a look at the wild-eyed movie star’s most recent, most baffling role choices - brooding tuna fisherman/gigolo/Double Indemnity-style murderer in Serenity, and the hedonistic, blazed-out poet Moondog in Harmony Korine’s stoner comedy(?) The Beach Bum. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they’re certainly effe...
Jul 03, 2019•53 min
Suit up, mutants — we’re breaking the X-Jet out of mothballs for a postmortem on Fox’s X-Men franchise! This week, Nathan and Clint look back at the haphazard production cycles and messy storytelling of both retellings of the Dark Phoenix Saga: Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand and Simon Kinberg’s Dark Phoenix! One’s a big, campy mess that throws in a million other subplots about mutant cures and Frasier as a big blue ape; the other is a dour, funereal mess that’s cut to pieces and doesn’t ev...
Jun 20, 2019•1 hr 6 min
This week on the podcast, Nathan and Clint talk about two very different kinds of monsters — the fictional beasties of Godzilla, King of the Monsters and the very real monster behind the tone-deaf anti-comedies The Test and Loqueesha, Jeremy Saville. One levels buildings and pulls high-tension wires down, and the other makes deeply strange, misguidedly offensive screeds about how women shouldn’t be trusted and how hard it is for white men to get ahead in the entertainment business. Which of them...
Jun 07, 2019•1 hr 51 min
Pika-pika, listeners! This week, we Pokemon Go to the theater for the unabashedly adorable, incredibly opaque Pokemon Detective Pikachu, with acclaimed author and humorist Mike Sacks in tow. Together, we attempt to unpack a movie intended for a far younger age group than ours, while pairing it with another movie featuring Ryan Reynolds talking through the mouth of an animal — Marjane Satrapi’s fascinating black comedy The Voices. Along the way, we talk to Mike about his latest project, the Stitc...
May 22, 2019•1 hr 17 min
Assemble, lovely Happy Cast listeners! This week, we finally offer the world our long-awaited takes on the (now) second-highest grossing film of all time, Avengers: Endgame. Does it bring the MCU to a close in a satisfying fashion? How much screentime does Captain Marvel get? Are they even getting revenge on the right Thanos? Where does the MCU even go from here? Along the way, we also dig into the fascinating mess of 1999’s superhero comedy Mystery Men - a movie that dared to critique a culture...
May 08, 2019•1 hr 16 min
It’s silly cape movies for little babies this week, as pop culture musical parodist Insane Ian joins Nathan and Clint this week to talk about a couple kid-friendly superhero movies - DCEU’s recent (and surprisingly solid) Shazam!, and Disney’s mid-aughts superhero/high school comedy Sky High. Plus, we talk with Ian about “Weird” Al Yankovic’s influence on his music, and what makes him just so neat. (And why you should pledge to Nathan’s Kickstarter for The Weird Accordion to Al in the final days...
Apr 17, 2019•1 hr 26 min
What about love? What about trust? What about (Jordan Peele’s) US? This week on the podcast, Nathan and Clint pull the most dastardly double feature - Us, Jordan Peele’s blood-curdling followup to Get Out, and Rob Reiner’s equally bone-chilling disaster The Story of Us, starring Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer! Both films are about families besieged by surprisingly internal threats - Peele’s by sinister doppelgangers who compellingly stand in for a variety of societal and cultural tensions, R...
Mar 27, 2019•1 hr 6 min
This week on the pod, Nathan and Clint strap on their big Feminist Ally hats and dig into the latest Marvel movie Captain Marvel, political context and all! And, just for balance, we take a look back at the last time a women fell to Earth from space wearing a red, yellow and blue outfit - 1984’s camptastic slog Supergirl. Tracking the trends of female-led superhero movies from their ignominious beginning to finding their feet in the modern era, we get reflective on the cultural trends that led t...
Mar 14, 2019•1 hr 26 min
With February taking its final bow, it’s our last chance to celebrate the fun and foibles of the romantic comedy with Todd Strauss-Schulson’s delightful Isn’t It Romantic - and Strauss-Schulson comes along for the ride as a guest! Together, we chat about what makes romantic comedies work and not work, how his Rebel Wilson vehicle upends those tropes, and what sets it apart from other high-concept rom-coms like David Wain’s They Came Together and Amy Schumer’s I Feel Pretty. It’s a delightful con...
Feb 27, 2019•1 hr 16 min
