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#40: Lord of War/Be Cool (with Lon Harris)
Travolta/Cage
English - November 24, 2021 14:33 - 54 minutes - 124 MB - ★★★★★ - 47 ratingsSociety & Culture nathan rabin john travolta nicolas cage movie film action bad Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
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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