#63: Criminal Activities / Snowden (with Matt Goldberg)

Travolta/Cage

This week, Matt Goldberg (formerly of Turner Classic Movies, currently of the Substack Commentary Track) joins us for the mighty return of... gasp.... John Travolta in a good role?

First, we cover Jackie Earle Haley's directorial debut, Criminal Activities, a messy but ultimately interesting Tarantino riff in which a group of down-and-out high school buddies (Michael Pitt, Christopher Abbott, Rob Brown, Dan Stevens) ends up inadvertently in debt to a cheeky, Macbeth-quoting mob boss (Travolta, having a grand old time). They can get out from under his thumb, if they do one big job for him -- kidnap the failson (Edi Gathegi) of his mob rival. Twists, turns, and darkly comic antics ensue, as a deeply-overqualified cast leans into the film's innate goofiness.

On the other side of the coin comes Oliver Stone's poorly-aged, deadly serious, self-righteous political biopic Snowden, charting the life of Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, doing his best Elizabeth Holmes impression) as he goes from dull intelligence agent to dull whistleblower. Cage shows up for a few minutes as Snowden's jaded mentor, but otherwise it's two-plus hours of Stone's overwrought self-insistence that what you're watching is The Most Groundbreaking, Earth-Shattering Discovery About Government Surveillance Ever. (The government's spying on us all the time? The hell you say?!)

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