Nathan Rabin's Happy Cast

This week on the podcast, we trawl through the rare pro-Travolta pairing with film critic Lisa Rosman (RogerEbert.com, Vulture), as Barry Sonnenfeld’s charming Elmore Leonard adaptation Get Shorty goes up against the execrable, ear-splitting Christmas comedy Trapped in Paradise! In the mid-’90s, John Travolta was flying high off the success of Pulp Fiction, which set up up nicely for his cool-as-ice take on “Chili” Palmer, a suave, personable loan shark who flies out to LA and gets the chance to dip his toe in the movie business. The movie around him’s great, too, a slick little hangout movie with wit to spare and some great supporting turns in Gene Hackman’s bumbling movie exec, Rene Russo as the ambitous B-movie starlet, and Danny DeVito as the world’s smallest biggest movie star. Too bad, then, that we also have to watch Trapped in Paradise, which is like if a Frank Capra film got mixed up with a rejected Saturday Night Live sketch. Cage plays one third of the crime-happy Firpo brothers (alongside a lost J