Travolta/Cage

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 dis...

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 vide...

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 Actio...

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 franchi...

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 s...

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 wi...

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 Moon...

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 a...

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 b...

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 fas...

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 th...

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...

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...

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 be...

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...

Everything is awesome this week, as Nathan and Clint go it alone to delight in the toyetic goodness of The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part! Of course, every rose has its thorns, so we have to balance out the pure-strain awesomeness of that film with the horrifying grocery-store hijinks of the cinematic war crime that is 2012's Foodfight! - a kid's movie that features black dick jokes and callbacks t...

Grab some tiramisu and your favorite comic books, because for this Happy Cast we're going spelunking down the deep, twisty well that is M. Night Shyamalan's mind! Eric Szyszka of We Hate Movies returns once again to talk about the ego, ambition and incredible weirdness of Night's work - whether he's poorly deconstructing superhero movies or grossly mishandling the ecological disaster movie. Also,...

Now that the joy of the new year has passed, and we've all forgotten our resolutions, it's time for a Happy Cast that is decidedly less happy! This week, Nathan and Clint go for a double-dose of arthouse didacticism with indie provocateur Lars Von Trier. First, we break down the upsetting misanthropy of his latest, The House That Jack Built; then we take a trip back to 2006 to watch his computer-s...

Happy Life Day, listeners! It's 2019, so we thought we'd look back at that most hallowed of holidays, when the coke piled up like snow and Bruce Vilanch was allowed to touch the Star Wars universe! The Star Wars Holiday Special is an infamous piece of Star Wars ephemera, and we (along with returning guest Brock Wilbur of the X-Wingin' It podcast) dig into its curious origins, the deeply perverse n...

🎵Happy Cast, Happy CastHas no deal with Conde NastStill we try, as we mightTo fill your earbuds with delightLook out! Here comes the Happy Cast!🎵 Howdy, true believers! For this friendly neighborhood episode of Happy Cast, we were thrilled to pull in Dan McCoy from the Flop House universe to talk about the surprisingly excellent Sony-produced(!) Spidey flick Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Wh...

Howdy, listeners! This week, we're thrilled to bring on writer-director Adam Rifkin to talk about his latest film, The Last Movie Star, which features the wonderful final performance of Burt Reynolds. Among other things, we talk to him about what it was like to craft a script for a movie icon and deal with the man's legacy. Before that, though, Nathan and Clint pull double duty by looking at the b...

Ho-ho-ho, listeners! We're celebrating Christmas in mid-November over on Nathan Rabin's Happy Cast, as we get a sneak peek at the Netflix's The Christmas Chronicles, starring Kurt Russell as a Santa Who Fucks. Friend of the show and Christmas film extraordinaire Alonso Duralde (The Wrap, Linoleum Knife) climbs down our chimney to talk about Minion-y murder elves, pernicious Chicago racism, and all...

(Note: we didn't even realize when recording that this is the one-year anniversary of Nathan Rabin's Happy Cast! Thanks so much to everybody who listens, comments, likes, pledges, and subscribes. Here's to another year o' laffs!) This week, Nathan and Clint continue their tradition of talking about weird month-old releases by diving into the superhero madness of Tom Hardy's Venom! We also look at...

Happy Halloween, ghouls and goblins! For our spook-tacular horror-themed episode of Happy Cast, we bring on 80s horror movie maverick Scott Weinberg (80s All Over) to take some evil, dark acid and wield overly-long chainsaws as we discuss the psychedelic Nic Cage slaughterfest Mandy! Also, we bow to the whims of our Patrons and talk about the one-off anthology horror film Halloween III - Season of...