Get Shorty (1995)

The boys are heading back to the decade of slick crime flicks, sharp dialogue and Hollywood cool for our Get Shorty 1995 Movie Review. This is peak John Travolta, riding the post-Pulp Fiction wave; Gene Hackman is doing comedy without really doing comedy, and Dennis Farina has arrived to swear at practically everyone in Los Angeles.

Welcome back to Born to Watch, the Movie Review Podcast where we don't take the movies or ourselves too seriously.

This week Whitey and Gow are joined by a returning Dan, who has finally wandered back into the studio after his extended sabbatical. It doesn't take long before old stories, old insults and the questionable exploits of 1990s G start flying around the room.

But eventually, somehow, we get to Get Shorty.

Adapted from the Elmore Leonard novel and directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, Get Shorty drops loan shark Chili Palmer into Hollywood and quickly discovers that the movie business might be even more crooked than organised crime. Chili comes to Los Angeles chasing money and ends up chasing something completely different, a shot at the movies.

And nobody could play Chili Palmer quite like John Travolta.

The boys dig into Travolta's incredible mid-'90s resurgence and why Chili might be one of his coolest performances. This isn't the dialled-up Travolta of Face/Off or the villainous version from Broken Arrow. Chili is controlled, confident, charismatic and almost impossible to rattle. As Whitey puts it, he's basically Vincent Vega without the heroin problem.

Then there's Gene Hackman as B-movie producer Harry Zimm. Hackman was apparently reluctant to play comedy, which makes his performance even better. He plays Harry almost completely straight while chaos unfolds around him, and the result is bloody funny.

Rene Russo brings Karen Flores to life, Danny DeVito sends up the Hollywood superstar as Martin Weir, Delroy Lindo is outstanding as Bo Catlett, and a pre-Sopranos James Gandolfini turns up as Bear.

But then there's Dennis Farina.

Farina's Ray "Bones" Barboni has no interest in becoming a producer, landing a movie deal or joining Hollywood's endless bullshit machine. He wants his money. That's it. His delivery, aggression, and complete inability to understand why everyone else is suddenly obsessed with making movies produce some of the episode's biggest laughs. By the time the boys get to Star of the Show, Farina is very much in the conversation.

The real star, however, might be the dialogue.