Tom Cruise

same religion (at the time at least)?

their facial features (the eyes especially) are actually very similar if you look closely. the nose is different, true.

thomas cruise mapother IV.

even when he is shit he is watchable and I can't really tell when he is shit, any longer.

maybe I am just good at avoiding films I would like him less in--vanilla sky and stuff.

I pretty much hate him, but I wouldn't call it kneejerk. It's not a reflex, it's an opinion that took years of gathering evidence to build. I've seen almost all of his movies, and I just... don't... LIKE the guy. Not as an actor, not as a person. And yet I still go to see his movies. If anything's kneejerk, it's the impulse toward self-abuse.

crosspost

what is it about him?

I've not seen so many of his interviews and if I try to think of what he looks like being interviewed I get 'the stock smile' or his 'uncomfortable consternation' looking back at me. those are just images not memories. in fact, I'm not sure, have I any memories of tom cruise? probably definitely so it would be silly for me to argue fr his images over my memories. well, not entirely but I won't. I always think of him as insecure but always remember him as outgoing, confident, good look-ing.

Jaymc's story about Leno kinda sums up the confusion i feel about him.

xpost

i mean yeah, i was being a little hyberbolic. i can see him as good looking and sexy and all that.

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well Madchen put it more succinctly upthread:

He doesn't look like a zombie so much as he looks like he's always concealing the desire to launch across a room and beat someone to death with their own shoes.

more xposts

Also, I saw him on a different talk show recently where he started laughing uncrollably for a good minute, if not more, and when he tried to speak he couldn't. I wasn't paying enough attention beforehand to know the context or to understand what was going on when he finally was able to talk, but that was a definite chink in the armor moment.

(it's midnight for now tho, but later)

cruise's magnolia = von trier's five obstructions?

I don't see how keeping her eyes open during a kiss helps tbh

Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle has a trenchant joke that encapsulates the fundamental arrogance of so much American war cinema: “American foreign policy is horrendous 'cause not only will America come to your country and kill all your people, but what's worse, I think, is that they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.” Doug Liman's American Made, a rollicking comedy based on the drug-smuggling, gun-running, contra-funding exploits of C.I.A.-backed pilot Barry Seal (Tom Cruise), represents a discomfiting corollary: Not only will America attempt to destabilize your country with insidious covert ops, they'll come back decades later and make a movie about how much fucking fun it was.

https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/american-made

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jul/05/the-top-20-tom-cruise-movies-ranked

'War of the Worlds' below 'Cocktail' and 'Days of Thunder' is certainly an interesting take.

8. Minority Report (2002)
Cruise and Spielberg should, by rights, be as natural a combination as bread and butter, and yet Minority Report is the only truly satisfying movie they have made together.

The only one out of...two

this is genuinely the greatest scene ever committed to film

pic.twitter.com/VZXRJctPcc

— velma 🐀 (@maggotmagick) June 23, 2022