From Paris With Love (2009), starring John Travolta as a cowboy of an American agent and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as an ambitious but untrained low-level agent assigned to assist, is another of Luc Besson’s English language Euro-action films, the contemporary equivalent to the drive-in action movie of decades past. Besson has perfected the formula in […]
Is it too sweeping to call Jack Terry, the movie soundman of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981), John Travolta’s best performance ever? So be it. Who knew that De Palma—a director still more often than not dismissed as a technician with a Hitchcock obsession, a facility for bravura camerawork, and a penchant for split […]
John Travolta, one of Hollywood’s most visible Scientology cheerleaders, dreamed of bringing Scientologist founder L. Ron Hubbards’ Star Wars-inspired sci-fi epic to the big screen for years. Be careful when dreams come true. Battlefield Earth (2000) is hilariously, flamboyantly, aggressively bad, a pulp fantasy built on same hokey tropes and clichés that were tired before […]
