Nathan Rabin's Happy Cast

Greetings, rat-brains! This week, we welcome puny man-animal Alonso Duralde for a double dose of religious-themed mayhem: Travolta’s Scientology-adjacent epic Battlefield Earth and Nic Cage’s erstwhile Christmas dramedy The Family Man! Battlefield Earth has long carved out a place as one of the great so-bad-its-good classics, as L. Ron Hubbard’s gargantuan pulp sci-fi novel turns into a messy, Dutch-angled workplace comedy with a mincing Travolta performance that must be seen to be believed. It’s Star Wars, plus The Office, minus a tripod.Then there’s The Family Man, which is just as limp and boring as the phrase “Brett Ratner does Frank Capra” implies. Here, Cage traps himself in normie mode as a semi-sleazy inivestment broker whose run-in with a Clarence-like Don Cheadle throws him into an alternate-timeline suburbia where he’s married to the girl that got away (Tea Leoni, holding the entire film on her mighty shoulders). Will he crawl back to his upper-crust hedonism? Or realize that middle-class heteronor