Travolta/Cage #41: The Weather Man/Lonely Hearts (with Jon Gabrus)

This week 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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