Travolta/Cage

This week, our boys lean into some hard times on opposite ends of the family-friendly spectrum; in  Killing Season , Travolta slaps on a dyed-black chinbeard and a thick moose-and-skvirrel accent as a Bosnian War vet set to take revenge on the American soldier (a weary Robert De Niro) who nearly killed him years ago. It's a one-on-one survival thriller in the wilderness among two old men, which is...

You know, every day it seems like we're hurdling ever closer to the end of the world — so it's fitting that we've got a double feature to match! This week, Dan and Jordan from Knowledge Fight take a little breakie from sifting through the purestrain nonsense of Infowars and Alex Jones to talk with us about Savages and Knowing ! In Savages , Oliver Stone adapts a tawdry crime thriller about what ha...

This week on the podcast, YouTuber video essayist extraordinaire Patrick H. Willems hops back on the mic with us for another pair of misguided, xenophobic action pictures! First, there's Bangkok Dangerous , a messy mix of John Woo and Wong Kar-Wai involving an American assassin (Cage) traipsing around Thailand for his next kill, only to find strange purpose among the people (and spicy food!) of th...

Film critic Caroline Siede (The AV Club, FOX Digital) joins us on a globe-trotting double feature with two distinctly inconsequential sets of stakes!  In  Old Dogs , Travolta teams up with the late, great Robin Williams (and the team behind the execrable but profitable  Wild Hogs ) for a maddening, dizzyingly-edited nightmare about two fiftysomething men tasked with taking care of two young kids....

This week, we're taking a break from the double-feature format for a special, singular look at one of the most important films in Nic Cage's filmography: Neil LaBute's baffling remake of  The Wicker Man . And we're pleased to be joined by special guest Bill Corbett, of  Mystery Science Theater 3000  and  RiffTrax  fame! Together, we break down the ways this one strays from the eerie folk horror or...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 i...

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 weapon...

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...

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 ha...

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 S...

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. H...

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...

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 fev...

This week, Nathan and Clint go it alone to compare two strange curios in Travolta and Cage's respective careers — Nora Ephron's post-Battlefield Earth comedy flop Lucky Numbers and the painfully-earnest romantic war drama Captain Corelli's Mandolin! While it got a critical drubbing upon release (no small thanks to the lingering stink of Travolta's Terl), Lucky Numbers surprisingly holds up as a pi...

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, Dut...

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 you...

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, sur...

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 — wit...

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 a...

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 e...

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 an...