Studio idea Travolta for Prince rejected. Vanity departure explanations uncertain; Gershon declined sex scene, Beals declined for Yale, Apollonia look favored. — Bill Simmons
Golfing in suits and Russell Crow’s swing are comic details. — Bill Simmons
Gina Gershon lacks expected corporate-lawyer gravitas for one response, while another enjoys the counterintuitive casting; Curb is praised separately. — Chris Ryan
The wall dissolving into an image of the children is both appreciated and found corny.
The struggle involves wealthy people and expensive vacation property, making the emotional stakes harder to accept for one participant; the exact vacation location remains uncertain. — Sean Fennessey
Coughlin giving Flanagan tips; Addicted to Love bottle flipping; late-night Coughlin's laws stair fall; Cell Block barman poet; Jamaica bar reunion with Coughlin; first Bonnie scene; last Flanagan-Coughlin scene; showdown with Jordan's dad
The first entry lumps together Coughlin giving Flanagan tips, and possibly Uncle Pat giving Flanagan advice before he starts bartending.
Uncle Pat is a very familiar figure; Monty's father in 25th Hour is compared as another Uncle Pat who runs a New York bar and is cheap. — Sean Fennessey
Uncle Pat being cheap is the opposite of how to run a bar, answered by the point that he only has six people in his bar.
Coughlin's law "Anything else is always something better" is followed by Flanagan's first good night clicking with the waitresses, which is when the movie starts cooking. — Bill Simmons
A movie set entirely at TGI Fridays is floated; that stretch is called the best part, but a whole movie of it would be a good YouTube video rather than a movie. — Chris Ryan
TGI Fridays is praised as a realistic New York bar compared with movie bars like Cell Block; bartending there suggests Coughlin is not a life winner. — Bill Simmons
Coughlin may have just served time or been in a money-laundering scheme and is trying to regroup; "Coughlin's Law" is joked about as a prison movie. — Bill Simmons
Cruise bartending to Addicted to Love is called one of the five most 80s moments captured on film. — Bill Simmons
Cruise looks like he is hearing Addicted to Love, or music, for the first time, cheering it like a game; Robert Palmer's reaction is imagined. — Bill Simmons
The late night where Coughlin falls down the steps while streaming Coughlin laws and they do the Hippy Hippy Shake is really funny; Coughlin writes the laws around his own behavior. — Bill Simmons
Cell Block is called the greatest bar set ever built, a three-story prison cell like the set of Oz; Rembrandt reacted to it in real time on a Grantland video. — Bill Simmons
Cell Block is compared to the multi-level Terminal 5 concert venue in New York. — Bill Simmons
Nobody at Cell Block drinks; they wait for poems, and Flanagan delivers the world's last barman poet speech ending with the bar being open. — Bill Simmons
Gina Gershon ordering an orgasm and the Coughlin-Flanagan routine to All Shook Up complete an unassailable five minutes; the Cell Block scene is called hysterical. — Bill Simmons
The barman poet may have invented Steve Austin's "that's the bottom line" gimmick. — Chris Ryan
In Jamaica, Cruise keeps giving Shue the Rock Bottom by throwing her into the ocean. — Sean Fennessey
Cruise's two romantic interactions, the ocean throws and tickle-attacking Gina Gershon among feathers, suggest he had never done these things before. — Sean Fennessey
The Jamaica bar scene with Shue, Eckhouse hovering and Coughlin showing up is magic, ending with the success-manual bet and the revelation that he married a rich girl. — Bill Simmons
Whether Coughlin sought out where Flanagan was is questioned; maybe he guessed from Flanagan talking about Jamaica and the poster. — Bill Simmons
Coughlin convincing Flanagan to open a bar should have been in the list too. — Bill Simmons
The Jamaica bar is a bummer full of lonely regulars rather than sunburned tourists. — Bill Simmons
Coughlin's "there's my wife" cuts to Kelly Lynch clearly shot in another location, which is very funny. — Chris Ryan
The first Bonnie scene is great, and Flanagan then screws up things with Shue because he is a dirtbag. — Bill Simmons
The last Flanagan-Coughlin scene is the final pick, since the first half is much better than the second. — Bill Simmons
A self-described first-half guy calls Brian's showdown with Elizabeth's dad the funniest scene in the movie by far; another voice adds that the showdowns with the dad and with the sculptor are both excellent. — Chris Ryan
Another personal pick is the entire Cell Block scene, plus the electrifying Addicted to Love sequence.
The accountant-looking guy at the bar who owns the hottest spot in New York raises the question of why he is at a TGI Fridays. — Chris Ryan
Joan Allen: no, though a contender, and one host would feel so bad if this were her Apex Mountain.
Gina Gershon: no; Bound is suggested instead, and Cocktail (as transcribed) comes up with a don't-get-me-started.
Travolta: no way; he was the biggest star in the world, but this is a second, mini-pleasant apex era for him rather than the peak.
Nick Cage: a definite yes, this rather than the Oscar is his Apex, after the trilogy of those films in a row, followed by the movie where he plays an angel who comes back, after which it all fell apart.
Tangent: Travolta also played an angel, in 1996's Michael, whereas in Phenomenon he had an accident rather than being an angel and is remembered only for the poster pose.
After a joke asking whether this is the apex for smoking a cigarette without a face, the host wraps up by saying nobody had an apex, despite the definite yes for Cage moments earlier.
Nominees: Nick Cassavetes as Dietrich, Gina Gershon, Dominique Swain as the daughter, Alessandro Navola (as transcribed) as the brother Pollux, a choice the host does not condone, CCH Pounder, who gets burned to death along with Robert Wisdom's Bunny Colvin from The Wire, Thomas Jane, Todd Parker in Boogie Nights, as one of the prisoners, and the actor who played Machine in 8mm and Sabaka (as transcribed) in The Wire, who escapes with Cage and is one host's favorite.
Margaret Cho gets an honorable mention; the hosts cannot believe she is in it as comic relief with one joke, a terrible line about a transplant for the stick up someone's rear.
Picks the brother Pollux because of his weird voice, doing the ten million dollars line. — Jason Concepcion
Another host has the prisoner Sabaka (as transcribed), our dude whom the others like too.
Another goes with CCH Pounder because she smokes in every scene she is in, including inside the medical lab during the face transplant, then puts her cigarette out on the comatose patient, which is never okay.
The early CGI and obvious stunt doubles; the father-daughter sexual tension and everything with Dominique Swain; the deception of Travolta's wife, named plainly as rape; the caress-heavy lip touching; the Pollux performance; the improvised sibling kiss
The CGI is early and needed to be better, especially for a scene shown later, and there is obvious stunt-double work where Cage suddenly has way more hair than three seconds earlier, looking like Kiki Vandelway (as transcribed).
The brother-sister kiss between Dietrich and Gina Gershon's character was improvised on set by Gershon and Nick Cassavetes, improv incest to add a little salt to the relationship, and the director (transcribed as John Lewis) reportedly said go with it.
There is a lot of weird touching of the lips of people you do not know, three different times; it is a caress-heavy movie. Pollux Troy was a nice juicy role where the hosts wanted more, did not think the performance was good, and note there is a reason the actor was not seen again.
The sexual tension between Cage wearing Travolta's face and Travolta's daughter is flat-out disarming and uncomfortable, not super comfortable in 97 and more uncomfortable as the years pass, down to putting on a Tricky album for Dominique Swain.
Swain's character is a Hong-Kong director's idea of a goth teenager: a little more eyeliner, a fake nose ring, blonde and otherwise a regular person, supposedly on the edge.
Travolta agreeing to switch faces has not really changed the world, and the film glossed over Travolta's big chin cleft and Cage's rat-like teeth, although the characters joke about the chin and tease each other about the love handles.
Says the whole father-daughter thing is an L for everyone involved, everything with Dominique Swain, down to the end when her father brings home a strange boy to replace the child who died and she suddenly dresses like she just went to American Eagle because everything is fine now. — Chris Ryan
Picks something from the aged-best list, the plot point in which Cage's character, wearing Travolta's face, has sex with the wife under false pretenses, which he names plainly as secretly raping her and says is literally what happened. — Shea Serrano
Others agree that is literally what happened and you cannot do that; in the 90s it was supposed to be funny and now it is not, and one host who is still going with the CGI is made to feel bad about it.
The script was written in 1990 with Sly Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in mind as the leads; the hosts agree that would have been horrible given the bodies, faces and accents, wondering how the vocal box would handle Arnold's or Sly's accent.
Joel Silver then optioned it wanting Michael Douglas and Harrison Ford, which some think would have been incredible but more like a sexual thriller going to a weird place; this detours into Michael Douglas's publicly stated claim about the sexual cause of his throat cancer, which one host insists is a true story to Google and others call a suburban legend and a humble brag.
Johnny Depp was in until he found out it was not a hockey movie, treated as true because it is on the internet, with jokes about whether he thought Pirates of the Caribbean or Edward Scissorhands were hockey movies too; Bruce Willis and Alc Baldwin (as transcribed) were teamed up at one point, which might actually have worked since Baldwin would dial it up.
The funniest pairing, apparently a real thing, was Van Damme and Steven Seagal, two of the greatest Russian moles America has to offer.
Would most have wanted to see Stallone and Schwarzenegger, because it does not make any sense and he needs to see that. — Jason Concepcion
Would want Douglas and Ford, who would have had so much contempt for the material, unable to believe they needed another ranch in Montana this badly. — Chris Ryan
Goes with Van Damme and Seagal (as transcribed 'Van Dammen to go'). — Shea Serrano
The others knew that pick was coming and call it the worst one of all of them.
Mark Wahlberg turned down the role of Castor's brother Pollux; the movie is better with Wahlberg if he is dialing it up, and Pollux's weird hairdo already looks like Wahlberg's Gambler character; Julianna Margulis (as transcribed) turned down the Gina Gershon part because she was filming ER, probably a good choice at that moment, since Gershon does not go around asking whether people saw her in Face Off.
