#12: The Experts/Wild at Heart (with Stephen Sajdak)

This week on the pod, we fill out another notch on our We Hate Movies guest bingo card with the lovely Stephen Sajdak, as we break down two decidedly gonzo love stories in our heroes’ filmography! First, there’s Nic Cage’s one and only collaboration with David Lynch on 1989’s nightmarish road movie Wild at Heart, the tale of a snakeskin jacket-wearing criminal (Cage) and his lusty moll of a girlfriend (Laura Dern) boning their way through the American countryside with Dern’s vengeful mother (an ecstatically bizarre Diane Ladd) on their tail. It’s a kaleidoscopic mishmash of Wizard of Oz, Elvis Presley movies, and the kind of seedy violence and surrealism only cinema’s greatest weirdo can supply. Contrast that, of course, with Dave “SCTV” Thomas’ screwball Cold War comedy The Experts, where a pair of hip New York losers (John Travolta and Arye Gross) are unwittingly recruited to modernize a creaky old Midwestern town that --gasp- turns out to be a spy school in the middle of Soviet Russia! Put on the shelf for two years and not released until after the Cold War came to a close, The Experts was dated before it even came out. It’s a garish mess of ‘80s mullets, cowboy boots, and clunky dance scenes, but hey, at least it got Travolta and Kelly Preston together at last. Now that’s true love! Listen to our thoughts on these two films, plus the recent news of Cage’s casting as Joe Exotic in a prospective Tiger King TV series!