Travolta/Cage Nathan Rabin

This week, Nathan and Clint dig back into the classic mold of Travolta/Cage double features -- unfortunately, it's for more late-aughts VOD dreck.
First up is Speed Kills, a Dollar Tree Casino riff starring John Travolta as a fictionalized version of speedboat manufacturer and mobbed-up multimillionaire Donald Aronow (here "Ben Aronoff"). It looks and feels cheap, and thrums with all the speed of a rowboat down the ol' Mississipp' -- probably because it was initially conceived as a chintzy VR-cinema experiment. 
Then, we get a slight reprieve with A Score to Settle, which features Nic Cage as his millionth aging mob enforcer looking back on his post-prison life and broken relationships with an eye towards revenge. Cage is reliably solid here -- he can play these kinds of roles in his sleep, not that his terminally-insomniac character would allow it -- but the rest of it is a slog. Still, beats Travolta in a motorboat!
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This week, Nathan and Clint stare into some glowy rocks for a single serving of Cage in Richard Stanley's Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space!
Serving as a spiritual followup to Mandy (with its cosmic-horror stylings and full-on Rage Cage moments), Color Out of Space puts Cage in another tale of rural tranquility disrupted by neon-tinted ravings from the beyond. This time, he's the patriarch of a broken yet resilient family who retreats to the woods to repair long-festering emotional wounds, only to find themselves torn apart by a fuschia glow that emanates from a meteorite that lands in their backyard. Crops grow uncannily, people lose their minds, and alpacas take on new, horrific shapes -- all while Cage and co. flail against the unfathomable knowledge the "color" presents them.
It's a lean, effective, genuinely haunting bit of cosmic horror, and the boys dig into why it gets under their skin so. 
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This week, Cage plays two flavors of bad husband in a pair of VOD-ready erotic thrillers! 
First, we cover the Gina Gershon-starring Inconceivable, an overamped Lifetime movie about a crazy mommy (Nicky Whelan) who cozies up to a well-to-do couple (Gershon, Nicolas Cage) whose IVF-born child just so happens to be from her egg. Hitchcockian antics ensue, by which we mean Whelan's wacko MILF (falling far short of the post-breakdown Lindsay Lohan the original casting promised us) kills female wrestlers with dumbbells in shallow ponds, gaslights Gershon into restarting her pill addiction, and womb-jacks Gershon's latest attempt at a child. Still, it's got Gershon and a bored-looking Cage together for the first time since Face/Off!
Then, there's Looking Glass, a low-budget motel thriller so indebted to David Lynch they even got Angelo Badalamenti to provide some themes! Cage plays a dye-bearded wreck who, with his depressed wife (Robin Tunney), take over a motel in the middle of nowhere as a means to get over their recently-passed son. There, Cage stumbles upon a mysterious web of sex trafficking and voyeurism -- hello, one-way motel mirrors -- that at all times threatens to become interesting. More fool us!
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This week, we're back to the unfortunate Nic Cage double features -- this time with our boy Nicolas on either side of the law!
First, there's the staggeringly sloppy cop thriller 211, in which Cage plays an aging cop who teams up with his fresh-faced rookie son-in-law and a teenage ridealong to thwart a four-man bank robbery in Massachusetts. It's got the politics and aesthetics of a well-meaning anti-drug PSA, a bloated, poorly staged shootout even at a sparse 80-some minutes. 
Then, we get real weird with it with Between Worlds, a wild supernatural dirtbag romance with Cage as a scraggly, widowed truck driver, whose fling with another doomed soul (Run Lola Run's Franka Potente) leads them down a road where his dead wife's soul zaps into the body of Potente's hot young daughter (Penelope Mitchell). Marathon screwing and over-the-top garden hose fights ensue, as Cage goes as wild as he can with a film seemingly made for five dollars.
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This week, Jordan Morris (Jordan Jesse Go!) returns to the pod for a seminal moment for both our boys -- a 2018 that saw Nic Cage rise from the VOD ashes to enter a new era of cult acclaim, and John Travolta take his biggest swing-and-a-miss yet!
First, there's Panos Cosmatos' Mandy, a trippy bit of horror-fantasy psychedelia in which a logger (Cage) exacts revenge on the drug-fueled doomsday hippies who kill his love (Andrea Riseborough). Cue the neon lights, the screaming, and more Cheddar Goblin than you can swing an oversized chainsaw at!
From there, we earn the respect of all five boroughs of New York City -- count 'em on your fingers if you have to -- for Gotti, directed by one of the guys from Entourage and endlessly hagiographic of its subject, noted mob boss John Gotti (Travolta). It's a goofy, misguided waste of an okay Travolta performance, made even worse by the fact that it feels like someone watched GoodFellas high and decided the movie thought mobsters were really awesome (and great dads!). 
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Happy new year, boys and ghouls! Our first episode of 2024 (and the first after a bit of a hiatus) finally puts the spotlight back on Travolta after a string of Cage double-features and Johnny T failures. Blessedly, the television gods granted him the kind of role his 2010s VOD output could not: His mannered, theatrical turn as OJ Simpson lawyer Robert Shapiro in Ryan Murphy's anthology series American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson. Among a crowded field of stars (Cuba Gooding Jr. Nathan Lane, Courtney B. Vance, Sarah Paulson), Travolta stands out as OJ's calculating, reputation-focused lawyer, and we talk about how Travolta's idiosyncratic instincts finally worked in his favor. Plus, we talk about the cultural impact of the OJ trial, where we were, and how Murphy's melodrama was a perfect tone to strike for that crazy time in American pop culture. 
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