i mean i think i’m cool with tom cruise inasmuch as he will eventually be bodily ejected from a great height from either a building, a plane, or a bridge when one of his stunts goes horribly wrong, and i’m happy to participate in his self destruction
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I have seen a lot of people asking this question very skeptically lately and I think it is actually a very interesting and representative one on a number of levels that describes the last decade pretty well. I don’t think he’s interested in appearing like a relatable human celebrity anymore, and I think the culture has shifted to a degree that it’s possible for him to regard ever having tried as a mistake. also, this movie is both extremely explosively great and very thinly elegaic in a way that was also not really possible until fairly recently, so as long as you are lamenting the lack of plausible generalizable standards being applied to anything, tom cruise has got your back. he might as well be a god at this point; who cares
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I’ve always felt pretty neutral about Tom Cruise, for like his whole career. Contrast with Nick Cage who I used to loathe but I’ve been coming around on him for the last decade or so.
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I’ve never given a shit about tom cruise being weird or a scientologist. he exists to strive for excellence in the name of entertaining people even at great risk of personal harm, which I find endearing. we are all clocking in to capitalism every day without doing too much to stymie it, a weird cult which I believe has done more harm overall than scientology (which I do have a vendetta against for suiciding theresa duncan and her boyfriend) but it always seemed weird to me how much enjoyment people get out of patting themselves on the back for pointing out how weird it is, it’s not like we ourselves are doing any better here, and at least this guy wants to entertain me through death defying feats and a sincere belief in the power of movies.
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also think about how shitty the last james bond’s attempt to do this was by comparison
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isnt he like #2 in the entire organization. maybe im misremembering stuff from like 12 years ago but i feel like he was a fairly direct actor in the cult, more so than me buying an iphone and living america. i find no enjoyment out of “cancelling” him or whatever (i genuinely am wondering if new information has come out in the past decade), i liked his movies prior to the scientology stuff came out back then, for what its worth.
all the the publicity about him climbing the burj khalifa or jumping from space may partially read as “im doing it all in the name of entertainment” but it also reads as a huge ego complex by someone desperate to engrave his name in stone
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I think it’s fine to criticize a man who has relied on slave labor in his personal life, and promotes a horrifying cult he personally profits from, yeah
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at this point i’ve completely divorced actors from their politics, i don’t care anymore. when i say i like an actor i mean it solely based on movies. i like tom cruise, and i’m pretty sure he’s a piece of shit. et cetera. actors are just tools for higher powers anyway (i love a lot of them)
the reasons i actually like tom cruise are, like, collateral and eyes wide shut or whatever though. he’s fun enough in these new mission impossibles but i do think the “he’s killing himself for our entertainment” view is pretty corny. i’m sure there have been hundreds of stuntpeople who have done more interesting work than he’s doing and i’m also sure there’s a whole hollywood career’s worth of people making sure he’s perfectly safe at all times
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The unscripted office chair stumble is a top ten Cruise stunt as far as I’m concerned.
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I agree with this but I think there’s an argument to be made that as he gets older he brings the collateral / eyes wide shut / magnolia energy to more of his mainstream roles (thinking mostly of this and fallout) which I think accounts for why they’re better than ever, and is also why people claim he’s killing himself for the role (obviously not really true even compared to like any big 80s Chinese movie star). the mere suggestion of nuance from him being visibly old and pushing himself adds a lot to the impeccable practical effects that no one else is carrying the torch for. I don’t think he did much interesting work between like 2004 and 2015, and I never gave a shit about minority report or anything like that, which makes his obviously execrable personal life less contentious if anything but still boring even to talk about. he is back in the fuckin saddle right now
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I like watching Tom Cruise on screen because there’s no disguising his profound sociopathy and in the right project, that is compelling to watch
I haven’t ever paid for one of his movies, so I get the benefits of watching an absolute psycho destroying his body for entertainment without the guilt of financially supporting an absolute psycho
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coincidentally another interesting question along the lines of “why are people letting Tom Cruise off the hook” is “why is this sequel to mediocre Reagan-era propaganda so extremely good?” and the answer is that, well, we lost a lot of meaningful ideological battles in the meantime, but we can still win the battle of “old man make plane go fast,” and if you think it’s depressing that we’ve narrowed our focus to that degree, you’re right, but you’re also boring, and look at old man make plane go fast
this one is pretty much a layup in critical terms
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Sorry to interrupt the Tom Cruise chat, just here to say:
I watched both Sonics. They’re fine. They’re goofy kids movies, but as those go, mostly inoffensive? You can tell they got some real Sonic diehards on board for the second one, considering how many references, big and small, are crammed in there.
I guess since the second one did as well as it did they’ll do a third, and yeah, sure, why not.
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i like how Tom Cruise looks on the Vanilla Sky poster, sort of a Gerard Way dykey vibe
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tig notaro should just do all of tom cruise’s roles, and he can be her stunt double
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i cant get past that they had to pay 11000 dollars an hour to the american military to use the planes
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omg thank you for putting the finger on it
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The Punisher '89 is a weird movie (maybe I should have watched the theatrical cut, but I watched the Unrated Cut so I could see the VHS quality cuts where they show knives going into people’s heads and such).
Apparently Dolph Lundgren was against wearing the shirt with the logo on it (wise decision in the long run), so instead he has some stiletto daggers with a little skull on the pommel. There’s also two scenes of him absolutely filthy, butt naked, kneeling before an altar in the sewers, where he lives like an extra violent one-man TMNT team.
He gets all his information from a drunk Englishman named “Shake” who pleads with him in prose, there’s a whole plotline involving a female detective who gets knocked out in one scene and is never seen again. He’s supposed to be dead and the entire police force of ??? is after him, but he keeps a low profile by riding the loudest, rickety motorcycle I’ve ever seen while looking like absolute shit. Frank Castle shoots up the worst looking casino I’ve ever seen in my life, leaving zero bullet holes in the wall, and is told by the villainous yakuza lady that he cost them $2 million that night.
Oh yeah the yakuza is one of the big bads, and naturally they are all samurai, karate masters, and ninja. The yakuza lady shows up in full geisha makeup during a showdown at the end because of course she would.
Dolph Lundgren spends the whole movie mumbling, and I’m pretty sure the main Italian mafioso character is played by (lemme look it up) a Dutchman, whose accent goes all over the place.
I dunno, it’s a mess, but there’s a scene where Castle very casually stabs a dagger through a shoji wall and a dude falls out from behind it, so it can’t be all bad.
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