THOMAS CRUISE MAPOTHER IV: HIS ŒUVRE

Well described, cryptosicko.

My memory of Cocktail is exactly opposite JIV's: I remember Cruise as good, Bryan Brown as giving a cliched cynical-older-guy performance (or at least the script boxing him into that corner).

"knew how to employ his persona"

Not to get off topic, but related: Someone dismissed Travolta's performance in Pulp Fiction on the Travolta thread the other day. Majorly disagree. He's not only great, that character can't be played by anybody else--Tarantino made the role about him. The Jack Rabbit Slim scene wouldn't be one-tenth as good with someone else.

I don't any director ever played around with Cruise's persona quite so creatively--Magnolia comes close--but the same thing is at play in lots of his films (maybe even, past a certain point, every film he does by default).

"I don't think any director..."

Kubrick totally does it in Eyes Wide Shut, obviously playing off of Kidman and Cruise's real life marriage and pitting them against each other on set, and continually, for nearly three hours, makes Cruise wander around Manhattan and a secret sex mansion and NEVER get laid, despite coming very close many times. Cruise is castrated in EWS, and his masculinity is implicitly mocked throughout and explicitly at least once (when the teenagers or whatever accost him on the street).

I was gonna say

best persona riff: EWS
worst persona riff: Tropic Thunder

hard agree on TT

Agree with everything you say about Eyes Wide Shut. But because the character's such a cipher, I personally don't find him as interesting as T.J. Mackey (or Vincent Vega).

I actually think TT holds up pretty well as a satire of Hollywood self-importance, which makes his self-flattery-via-self-mockery shtick in it even more glaring

that casting/role might have been one of the slickest bits of PR in Hollywood history

I will take the populist route and just say my actual favorite movie from this list starring Mr. Thomas Cruise, OT VII, is War of the Worlds.

Saw it twice

would throw his turn in Minority Report in directors utilizing his talents to best use.

i am saying this without evidence, but did his career take a notable dive after minority report? i guess i haven't seen a lot of his recent movies. but that's because i'm not really a big fan of the genre of whatever jack reacher is

and it seems like a lot of his recent movies are in that genre, global superstar tom cruise mode. i like when he pretends to be a more normal person

did his career take a notable dive after minority report?

no, before Minority Report, $200 million gross was the marker of a big hit for him. since Minority Report neeearly all his films since have grossed $200 million or above, with Fallout pulling $800 million to be his biggest hit since Top Gun or Rain Man.

Collateral, two years after Minority Report and just before the couch-jump, was the last time he ticked off a square on his "major white male American director" bingo card, though.

(In 2006 he and his producing partner were given part-ownership of United Artists after their deal with Paramount was terminated due to his anti-psychiatry, anti-Brooke Shields, and anti-anti-depressant public statements. She was ankled two years later, but since then he seems to have tried to create his own personal 1920s-style UA* by building a stable of house directors that he rotates between, and having McQuarrie involved in as many productions as Cruise can drag him into.)

*((founded by actress-producer Mary Pickford, writer-actor-director-composer-producer Charlie Chaplin, actor-producer-writer Douglas Fairbanks and director-producer DW Griffith to circumvent the influence of existing Hollywood studios. It is currently United Artists Digital Studios, a division of Comcast making webisode revivals of War Games and Stargate. Up the workers!))

Realise I haven't seen A Few Good Men!

...should I?

Can you handle the truth?

AFGM is pretty dumb

Voted Cocktail, since it was kind of exemplar of a certain kind of movie of its time, especially one with TC in it.

All I can remember from Cocktail is TC sexing Elizabeth Shue under a waterfall, which may reflect my age when I first watched it

An exemplar

kind of exemplar of a certain kind of movie of its time, especially one with TC in it.

When you got movies like TC in it, you can't lose

I've never seen the first two Mission: Impossible movies and likely never will. I hate DePalma, and hate what Hollywood did to John Woo. But I like a surprising number of Cruise movies, the last three M:I installments and the second Jack Reacher (haven't seen the first) among them.

I thought his self-mutilation movies (Vanilla Sky, having his eyes torn out in Minority Report) were interesting, and Edge Of Tomorrow, despite being saddled with one of the worst titles in cinema history, was really good.

Collateral was pretty good for a while, though the scene where the bar owner talks about Miles Davis makes me cringe all my skin off and it should have ended with Jamie Foxx flipping the cab - boom; cut to credits on a black screen.

People talked shit about Oblivion and it was probably too long but if was a cool vibe to dig around in. I'd love to play a game set in that world. And if it came on TV I'd watch the shit out of it.

I've never heard of Oblivion, and "Jack Harper" is such an incredibly generic name my eye just slid right past that entry in the poll. "Jack Harper" is a name Arnold Schwarzennegger would have had in one of his late 80s/early 90s movies that no one remembers now.

Edge Of Tomorrow, despite being saddled with one of the worst titles in cinema

Warners formally changed the title (back) to Live. Die. Repeat., the director's intended title, for home video, and Liman & McQuarrie have both referred to the sequel as Live Die Repeat And Repeat.

Lots of great performances

oh COME NOW

If people enjoy a film, they tend to believe the acting was great, even when it was just passable enough for them to suspend disbelief. It isn't as if Cruise can't act. He's not an amateur. But he has a limited range.

Concentrating on 'action' movies has been a smart career move for him. His recent characters only need to move the plot ahead and he's surrounded by high-budget effects that carry the audience along on a river of spectacle, so his acting isn't all that central to the overall experience.

Imagine how much worse every single one of these movies would be with Joaquin Phoenix.

Leo and Cruise have often struck me as similar actors...because both are fairly ~external~ actors...if that makes sense. Though Cruise less likely to ham it up. But, like Leo, I can't see Cruise convincingly playing a reserved or intelligent character with a rich interior life, for instance. Everything is on the surface. I don't mean this as a criticism. EWS is a great example...at the end with Pollack you just see Cruise furiously *thinking* and then that incredible moment that I have to assume Kubrick insisted on where he keeps his hand to the side of his face for an unnaturally long time.

He's not someone who has ever seemed at ease on camera.

I think that's a really good comparison. They are both method intense, but only to the extent that you can really see them acting intensely.

Agree that Tom Cruise taking the piss out of himself in stuff like Edge of Tomorrow and Tropic Thunder and (to an extent) Minority Report is a pretty good look. You can see him sort of loosen up and have fun a little when he's, I dunno, chasing his own eyes down a hallway. Like Schwarzenegger, he plays an oddly convincing everyman (imo) for a guy who is clearly not an everyman.

Eyes Wide Shut is the best movie he's been in, but absolutely not his best performance.

Still voting for it.

I've never heard of Oblivion, and "Jack Harper" is such an incredibly generic name my eye just slid right past that entry in the poll. "Jack Harper" is a name Arnold Schwarzennegger would have had in one of his late 80s/early 90s movies that no one remembers now.

Voted EWS her for John Wayne-related reasons

I really don't understand the love for Eyes Wide Shut. Is it just residual Kubrick worship - like, you liked 2001 and The Shining and A Clockwork Orange so much you can't admit that the dude ever put a foot wrong? Because I've seen the movie, and it's...not...good. The script is boneheaded, the compositions are static and about a half-step less stagy than fucking Dogville, and there's not a single good performance in it, in either the "that is a realistic human being acting in a recognizably human manner" way or a "that is a larger-than-life but dramatically compelling figure doing interesting things that propel the story in an unpredictable direction" way.

I mean, just about all of that is wrong but it's definitely not "static," the camera movement and editing is hardly Dreyer. Maybe "stagey" but that's an observation not a flaw.

u know Stan said "Real is good, interesting is better."

I find EWS's unreality preferable to The Shining's.

unperson mostly otm, EWS is un-rewatchable

as for Tom, I get the fascination with Magnolia bcz haha he says "respect the cock" ohmysides, but much prefer "big fat fucking penis" in Bot4oJ.

Tom's wheelhouse was probably Risky Business-style light comedy, but then Top Gun struck. I've always found his INTENSE persona laughable.

but tom several of us HAVE rewatched it :)

I've rewatched EWS twice; it's like staring into a toilet bowl hoping the waters turn into tidal waves.

you can't admit that the dude ever put a foot wrong

Hardly. His filmography is about half and half to my eyes.

It’s true though, that movie about dreaming and the unconscious based on a 1920s surrealist Freudian novella isn’t strictly realistic in its tone or performances.

Also the missions Ethan Hunt undertakes do not strictly speaking appear to be “impossible”, a major plot hole

Tom Cruise, along with Matt Damon, are two actors that I find enormously compelling onscreen and will watch anything either of them is in.

"Minority Report" is my favourite later-Spielberg movie and Cruise is fantastic in it and I'm voting for it. "Magnolia" is gutter trash.

xp its a publicly funded org, you have to oversell the difficulty of everything just to get photocopier money

fgti otm

he hits some of his lines well in Jerry Maguire ("I am Mr Black People") but the script is overwhelmed by bullshit

While white leading men over 40 are on my mind: Colin Farrell would be "The Lobster", Matt Damon would be "The Talented Mr. Ripley", Clive Owen would be "Croupier", Leo DiCaprio would be "Catch Me If You Can", Clooney would be "Michael Clayton".

not about to watch Ballers to compare, but The Rock flirting and fighting with Vanessa Kirby* in F&FP:H&S managed to be weirder and creepier than Cruise flirting and fighting with Vanessa Kirby** in M:I-FO

*(14 years younger)
**(24 years younger)

flirtin and fightin it's all the same Livin' with Louie dog's the only way to stay sane

Yeah Risky Business has a bizarre, singular mood, circa otm

DeMornay might be more crucial to the mood of Risky Business than Cruise. The viewer can believe they have more of a grasp on her personality than Cruise's character does, but only by a couple of degrees.

You're right, and iirc Cruise's friends are total losers/cowards like him(at first)... I only saw this a few years ago as well and while I knew it was more than the living room scene (which was its reputation according to VH1's I Love the 80s), I was frankly astonished when I saw "MUSIC BY TANGERINE DREAM" in the opening credits. In my mind, Risky Business and Thief are films happening simultaneously in the same city.

Think this is the most popular thread I ever started lol

his œuvre

"Risky Business" is where he "becomes" Tom Cruise in lots of different ways, but especially how the naive character starts out at the mercy of De Mornay but seemingly ends up ruthlessly cold-blooded (lesson learned, capitalism!). But yeah, because DeMornay is so crucial she lends her character a real ambiguity, especially in the alternate (director's preferred) ending:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KnW9_viA7Q

Gah, that movie is so good.

Was flipping around on hotel tv and saw Cruise with Cameron Diaz. I thought, wait, what movie is this? Turns out to be something called Knight and Day. What the hell is that?

I thought he was really good in the new "Top Gun," charming, dramatic, funny, vulnerable, pretty versatile in the role of "Tom Cruise, movie star."

On the way to the theatre my wife told me one of her co-workers is his ... first cousin, once-removed? Cruise's first cousin is the co-worker's mother, whatever that makes her. So everyone was, of course, curious. Have you met him? What's he like? She said the only time she met him was at his mother's funeral, but that for years, every year they would get a pile of Scientology books and pamphlets from him, which they promptly threw out. This went on for several years, but at some point the Scientology stuff stopped coming and he started sending a coconut cake instead.

Apparently this is a Cruise trademark:

It is a White Chocolate Coconut Bundt Cake from Doan's Bakery that Tom Cruise sends as a gift to all his famous friends at Christmas. The cake is a moist coconut bundt cake with chunks of sweet white chocolate topped with a rich cream cheese frosting and toasted coconut flakes.

Incidentally, at the box office my wife asked the ticket seller for two to "Mission Impossible." The ticket seller just looked back blankly, and my wife doubled down. "Two for 'Mission Impossible,' please." And the ticket seller kept staring, frozen. "Um, 'Top Gun,'" I told my wife, and she turned red, and the seller and everyone just cracked up. Tomato/potato.

Mentioned in the other thread, but the last half hour of this was Mission Impossible

For those of you worrying that your dreams have passed you by, Tom Cruise just had his biggest hit at age 60. He did it via a specific set of values and habits that I think can work for anyone, so I wanted to start a thread. The first thing you need to know: What is a Thetan? 1/ pic.twitter.com/NvrymZElrJ

— Jason Pargin, author of John Dies at the End, etc (@JohnDiesattheEn) July 16, 2022

lol

One day it’s gonna seem mad to everyone that it came out this dude uses actual slaves and nobody gave a shit