#49: Savages/Knowing (with Knowledge Fight)

Travolta/Cage

You know, every day it seems like we’re hurdling ever closer to the end of the world — so it’s fitting that we’ve got a double feature to match! This week, Dan and Jordan from Knowledge Fight take a little breakie from sifting through the purestrain nonsense of Infowars and Alex Jones to talk with us about Savages and Knowing!

In Savages, Oliver Stone adapts a tawdry crime thriller about what happens when a pair of hunky poly Laguna Beach weed entrepreneurs (Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Taylor-Johnson) have to rescue their third (Blake Lively) from a scary Mexican drug cartel led by Salma Hayek and Benicio Del Toro. The results are long, washed-out, and obnoxious, to the point where not even a go-for-broke Travolta can save it in a supporting role as a corrupt DEA agent.

Ironically, things start to look better as the Earth nears apocalypse, with Alex Proyas’ deceptively earnest sci-fi drama Knowing. Nic Cage plays an astrophysicist who suddenly has to face the possibility that the world’s going to end (slash discover a sense of faith?) when his son comes into possession of a series of numbers that predict the destruction of the planet. It’s a neat little throwback to the conceptual sci-fi pictures of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and Cage is remarkably restrained. Give it a look (and give us a listen!)