#40: Lord of War/Be Cool (with Lon Harris)

Travolta/Cage

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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