Travolta/Cage Ep. 29 - The Thin Red Line/8mm

(NOTE: Apologies in advance for some audio issues after the seven-minute mark; we’ll work to address them for the next episode.)

This week, Nathan and Clint go it alone for one of the podcast’s most curious double features — an art-film masterwork with barely any Travolta in it, and a fully-loaded grotesquery with more Cage than we can shake a snuff film at!

First, there’s Terrence Malick’s 1998 war film The Thin Red Line, an elegaic meditation on man’s inhumanity to man, and the way war corrupts the majesty of nature — with an ensemble cast so sprawling even folks like George Clooney can just pop up for 37 seconds! It’s one of cinema’s most beguiling and entrancing works of moralism, and Travolta crops up for about five minutes in a silly mustache to talk tactics with Nick Nolte. Cinema!

On the other side of the coin, we get a sneaky glimpse into the kind of direct-to-video thriller sleaze Cage would make his living in for the next several decades with Joel Schumacher’s 8mm, a lurid, obvious tale of a snuff film and the doe-eyed PI who chases it. See Cage mug while he watches a filmed murder that looks not unlike a Marilyn Manson video! Thrill as Joaquin Phoenix delights in milking the phrase ‘battery-operated vagina’ for all it’s worth! Gasp as you behold the desperation by which 8mm tries to recapture the brutal nihilism of Se7en!

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