Travolta/Cage

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 Sh...

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...

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...

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...

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-i...

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 (sp...

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...

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 d...

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 acade...

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...

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 dow...

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...

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 fi...

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 girlfr...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ti...

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 t...

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...

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 dis...

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 t...

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...

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 brin...