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 Denzel can put the brakes on this train!

Then, we pull some sleight-of-hand and move on over to Next, wherein Nic Cage plays a greasy, showboating magician with the magical power to see two minutes into the future. He could use it to help FBI agent Julianne Moore save the world from nuclear catastrophe, but instead he'd rather mack on Jessica Biel, who's young enough to be his daughter. It's a bonkers movie with an even more bizarre ending, and saunters far from the Philip K. Dick story it's based on. 

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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. Cage does a lot with a little, treating the film as an acting exercise, but it’s as po-faced as something made so soon after the tragedies probably would be. Still, it’s an interesting, if heavy, glimpse at how we were processing such an historical horror through cinema.

Don’t worry, we’ve got a nice pastel palate-cleanser to follow in the form of Adam Shankman’s breezy, bright adaptation of the Broadway musical Hairspray! A re-do of John Waters’ most accessible picture, now filtered through Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman’s catchy tunes, Hairspray sees ebullient, full-figured teen Tracy Turnblad (a revelatory Nikki Blonsky) finding her voice and standing up for integration in 1960s Baltimore. But most interesting for our project is Travolta, revisiting his song-and-dance bonafides in drag and a fat suit as Tracy’s agoraphobic mom Edna, shooting for Divine but ending up landing on Amateur Cher Impersonator. Still, A+ for effort, and his chemistry with Chris Walken is off the charts, baby!

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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 to the ropey CG to Eva Mendes getting nothing to do but stand around in tight clothing. Bleak!

Luckily, we get a zipper, more complex kid's tale with Disney Animation Studios' first big hit, the Pixar-inflected Bolt, about a white lab (voiced by Travolta) who thinks he's a superhero, only to have to confront the horrors of the outside world. It's a cute, clever premise (what if The Incredibles was also The Truman Show?) elevated by sincere performances and some stunning animation that still holds up.

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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 achingly bad you'll beg for this one to end just like Easy Rider. 

Then there's The Ant Bully, a Jimmy Neutron-inflected CG adaptation of a children's book that sees Cage in his most normal, regular-guy role yet: a wizard ant with magic powers who shrinks a ten-year-old boy to the size of an ant to teach him a lesson in humility. The effects are marginally charming, even if the human models look like porous hell-creatures intent on consuming our skin for sustenance.

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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 deadpan direction, it's a strangely sweet, darkly funny tale of a man struggling against his own mediocrity.

Contrast that with the flashy, sepia-toned melodrama Lonely Hearts, in which John Travolta plays a rugged gumshoe tracking down the infamous Lonely Hearts Killers, here played bafflingly by Jared Leto and Salma Hayek. When they're on screen, it's perverse fun, as miscast as the two are (Hayek's having a blast, despite playing someone who's decidedly NOT supposed to be one of the most beautiful women in the world). But then it cuts back to Travolta scowling with James Gandolfini, and the boredom starts all over again.

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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 between capitalism and war, with a great Cage performance and the one time Jared Leto's been tolerable on screen.

On the other hand, we've got Be Cool, the misguided, decade-on sequel to Get Shorty, with F. Gary Gray warping this PG-13 nudge at the music industry of the aughts into an unfunny monster of a picture. The good: The Rock steals every scene he's in as a gay bodyguard who wants to be an actor! The bad: Harvey Keitel raps. The ugly: Just about everything everyone's wearing on screen.

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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, dumb fun, and has Sean Bean betraying someone. What more do you want?

On the other side of the spectrum, we've got Travolta's weepy firefighter drama Ladder 49, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a whitebread firefighter navigating the risks and stressors of life in the service, with Travolta as his sage mentor. It's all very po-faced and sincere, the kind of movie you can definitely watch with your dad who flies a Thin Blue Line flag outside his house. 

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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 people) shows up to claim the house he’s squatting in as hers.

Contrast that with Ridley Scott’s masterful Matchstick Men, in which Cage fills the tic-filled shoes of a con man struggling with Tourette’s and OCD, and what happens when a young girl (Alison Lohman) who may be his daughter comes into his life.

One’s a sprightly, energetic dramedy with all the power of an actor and director at the top of his game (plus Sam Rockwell dancing!). The other? Well, it’s got Travolta saying “pussy” a lot. Take a listen!

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 adaptation and creative frustration, with Cage pulling in incredible work as a fictionalized version of Charlie (and Donald) Kaufman. Flowers and guns galore this week! Pledge to our Patreon at patreon.com/travoltacage Follow us on Twitter @travoltacage Email us questions at [email protected] Podcast theme by Jon Biegen Podcast logo by Felipe Sobreiro

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 his former hard-ass CO (Samuel L. Jackson, spitting ‘motherfucker’s from beyond the grave). It’s a wild, ropey ride with more twists than a loaf of challah. On the other side of the coin, we see what happens when Nicolas Cage ropes his actor friends into a warmed-over Tennessee Williams riff with his first (and only) director credit to date, the disastrous Sonny! James Franco pops up as a pouty gigolo-turned-army-vet returning home from the war to N’awlins and his brothel-madam mother (Brenda Blethyn), who just won’t stop trying to get him to turn tricks again. Also, Cage shows up in a lace cravat for five minutes and shouts at Franco while trying to both kill him and suck his dick. Le cinema! Pledge to our Patreon at patreon.com/travoltacage Follow us on Twitter @travoltacage Email us questions at [email protected] Podcast theme by Jon Biegen Podcast logo by Felipe Sobreiro