Nathan and Clint return after another short hiatus to break down another two-fer of VOD dreck -- first with Travolta's slow-moving racing drama Trading Paint, then with Cage's gonzo Tarantino/Guy Ritchie drug-biz knockoff Running with the Devil!

Pledge to our Patreon at patreon.com/travoltacage [https://patreon.com/travoltacage] Follow us on Twitter @travoltacage [https://twitter.com/travoltacage] Email us questions at travoltacagepod@gmail.com Podcast theme by Jon Biegen Podcast logo by Felipe Sobreiro

#75: Trading Paint/Running with the Devil

When last we spoke to composer Jay Wadley, he'd just finished scoring the mercurial Charlie Kaufman film I'm Thinking of Ending Things. Four years and a million projects later, the Charles Ives Award-winning composer (and co-founder of music production house Found Objects, with previous guest Trevor Gureckis) has been keeping busy, from films like Fire Island, Swan Song and the upcoming We Grown Now to shows like Apple TV+'s Franklin.   Set in the eight years Benjamin Franklin spent in France drumming up monetary and logistical support for the Revolutionary War, Franklin stars Michael Douglas as the Founding Father himself, who must navigate dueling alliances and a host of stakeholders on both sides of the pond. What's more, he and his grandson Temple (played by Noah Jupe) find themselves at the head of a cultural clash between the French aristocracy and their budding republic that will change both their lives forever.   Wadley built the lush sound of Franklin with the help of an enormous orchestra and his background in classical composition, melding traditional instrumentation with modern orchestration and a decidedly Americana flair to Franklin's upsetting of the French social order. Now, he joins me on the podcast to discuss the musical journey of Franklin.   Franklin streams weekly on Apple TV+, and you can listen to Wadley's score on your preferred streamer courtesy of Apple. 

Jay Wadley (Franklin)

This week, I talk to legendary TV composer Mike Post about everything from the Law and Order dun-dun to his original album of musical suites.   If you've had a TV turned to a network station anytime in the last forty years, you've heard Mike Post's music. A stalwart in the TV scoring game, he is the voice of so many police and law procedurals, from The Rockford Files to LA Law to his Emmy-winning theme for Murder One. But most know him best as the voice of the long-running Law & Order franchise, having scored almost all of its varying spinoffs since the Dick Wolf flagship series premiered in the late 1980s.   But outside of his stuff TV schedule, Post is also incredibly busy as a solo composer, having just released his first standalone album in thirty years. Message from the Mountains & Echoes of the Delta is a two-part series of suites inspired by the blues and bluegrass music of his youth, lending an orchestral heft to the American musical traditions that have inspired his iconic career. It's a stellar series of tracks, ones that feel like an already-accomplished musical artist spreading his wings and revisiting the music that made him who he is today.   Message from the Mountains and Echoes of the Delta is currently available on your preferred music streamer, courtesy of Sony Music Masterworks.

Mike Post (Law & Order, Message from the Mountains & Echoes of the Delta)

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!

Pledge to our Patreon at patreon.com/travoltacage [https://patreon.com/travoltacage] Follow us on Twitter @travoltacage [https://twitter.com/travoltacage] Email us questions at travoltacagepod@gmail.com Podcast theme by Jon Biegen Podcast logo by Felipe Sobreiro

#74: Speed Kills/A Score to Settle

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. 

Pledge to our Patreon at patreon.com/travoltacage [https://patreon.com/travoltacage] Follow us on Twitter @travoltacage [https://twitter.com/travoltacage] Email us questions at travoltacagepod@gmail.com Podcast theme by Jon Biegen Podcast logo by Felipe Sobreiro

 

#73: Color Out of Space

This week's guest is RTS winning and BAFTA-nominated composer Vince Pope, a London-based composer who cut his teeth on scores ranging from Misfits to episodes of Black Mirror. But his most exciting collaborations of late have been those with filmmaker Issa Lopez, starting with her 2017 magical-realist horror film Tigers Are Not Afraid. Now, the pair reteam to put a supernatural spin on HBO's seminal crime thriller series True Detective.   Inherited from Nic Pizzolatto's three-season anthology series, Lopez's new season, subtitled Night Country, follows a precarious period of darkness in a small Alaskan town as the town sheriff (Jodie Foster) and her ex-partner (Kali Reis) investigate the mysterious deaths of the members of a corporate research station on the outskirts of town. The case may well be tied to the unsolved murder of a Native woman that tore their partnership asunder years prior, and sends the pair down an ominous road filled with tough moral choices and events that lie beyond their understanding.   Pope's score blends elements of horror and murder-mystery atmosphere with a deep swell of psychospiritual torment, to say nothing of the addition of Native American elements like throat singers and collaborator Tanya Tagaq to incorporate the show's exploration of those cultures. Now, Pope joins me on the podcast to talk about True Detective: Night Country.   You can find  Vince Pope at his official website here [https://vincepope.london/].   You can stream the entire season of True Detective: Night Country on Max, and listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of WaterTower Music.

Vince Pope (True Detective: Night Country)

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!

Pledge to our Patreon at patreon.com/travoltacage [https://patreon.com/travoltacage] Follow us on Twitter @travoltacage [https://twitter.com/travoltacage] Email us questions at travoltacagepod@gmail.com Podcast theme by Jon Biegen Podcast logo by Felipe Sobreiro

 

#72: Inconceivable/Looking Glass

Grammy- and two-time Emmy-winning composer Carlos Rafael Rivera has spent the last decade building moody, complex musical worlds around complicated characters. His earliest prominent work was with regular collaborator Scott Frank on films like A Walk Among the Tombstones, and the Netflix miniseries Godless. But it was his mercurial work on Frank's miniseries The Queen's Gambit that earned Rivera breakout status.   Since then, he's worked on a host of films and series both with Frank and elsewhere: Apple's Lessons in Chemistry, HBO's Hacks. But his two most recent scores, and some of his best, have him dealing with different ends of the prestige-crime-drama ecosystem. Take Netflix's Griselda, in which an unrecognizable Sofia Vergara climbs her way to the top of Miami's drug trade as the real-life Cocaine Godmother; scored like an opera, Rivera's sound is full of harpsichord, lone voices, big breathy melodramatic moments.   On the other side of the Atlantic lies AMC's stellar miniseries Monsieur Spade, in which Clive Owen plays an older Sam Spade solving a mystery while spending his retirement in rural France after World War II. There, the usual noir trappings are leavened by a distinct sense of melancholy, lonely guitar strains underlining the postwar fragility of its French setting.   This week, I'm thrilled to have Rivera on to talk about these shows and so much more, from his musical journey with the guitar to his philosophies on which perspective to score from. It's a brilliant chat (maybe one of the best this podcast has ever enjoyed), and I hope you enjoy.   You can find Carlos Rafael Rivera at his official website here [https://carlosrafaelrivera.com/].   Griselda is currently streaming on Netflix, and Monsieur Spade runs weekly on AMC and AMC+. You can also stream each soundtrack at your music service of choice.

Carlos Rafael Rivera (Griselda, Monsieur Spade)

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.

Pledge to our Patreon at patreon.com/travoltacage [https://patreon.com/travoltacage] Follow us on Twitter @travoltacage [https://twitter.com/travoltacage] Email us questions at travoltacagepod@gmail.com Podcast theme by Jon Biegen Podcast logo by Felipe Sobreiro

#71: 211/Between Worlds

This week, we're catching up with one of the Oscar-shortlisted Best Score nominees -- Anthony Willis' score to Emerald Fennell's lavish, mysterious thriller Saltburn. Fennell's second directorial feature, after Promising Young Woman, is a kind of Brideshead Revisited by way of Tom Ripley and mid-2000s party culture: A mysterious young bloke named Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) follows his irrepressible attraction to fellow Oxford pretty-boy Felix (Jacob Elordi) all the way to Felix's palatial mansion, Saltburn. There, he immerses himself in the hedonistic lifestyles of the ultra-rich, all the while hoping to catch a glimmer of Felix's attention -- or does he?   Reuniting with Fennell for his second score with her, composer Anthony Willis crafts a suitably Gothic sound for her idiosyncratic class thriller. Opening with romantic strings, transitioning into classical choir, then electric pianos and additional layers and textures, Willis draws the listener in like one of Oliver's obsessions, before disrupting the film's jagged classicism with rough modern electronic textures and a sense of sweeping orchestral doom.   Today, we talk to Willis about all of that and more, including his longtime collaboration with Fennell and his early life as a chorister at Windsor Castle.   You can find Anthony Willis at his official website [https://kraft-engel.com/clients/anthony-willis/].   Saltburn is currently available for rental or streaming on Prime Video. You can also listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of Milan Records.

Anthony Willis (Saltburn)

Film and TV critic Clint Worthington (Consequence, RogerEbert.com, The Spool) talks to a new composer every week about the origins, challenges, and joys of their latest musical scores.

Right on Cue

A deep dive into the strange, fascinating careers of two of cinema's most prolific weirdos -- John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. With Nathan Rabin (Nathan Rabin's Happy Place) and Clint Worthington (Consequence, The Spool).

Travolta/Cage

Clint Worthington's Show

A podcast where I interview film, TV, and video game composers about their latest scores. We talk about everything from influences to instrumentation, the process of composing, and the specific thought behind individual tracks from the soundtrack. 

Clint Worthington

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