Posts Tagged → tom cruise
Go see latest Mission Impossible movie
You should go see the latest Mission Impossible movie. You will not regret it.
About once per year I get to see a Hollywood movie. Not because of limitations on time, or money, but because 99% of what Hollywood produces is dreck, garbage, stupid, juvenile, destructive amoral nonsense. So sifting through the many no-go movies usually results in one that I will see, per year, and this year I went and saw the latest, and supposedly the last, Mission Impossible movie, starring Tom Cruise.
About Tom Cruise: I like him, because I like the values he showcases and promotes in his movies. His movies have plenty of action, and also pit good vs. evil, honesty vs. dishonesty, tradition vs. popular modernization, etc. Very few of Hollywood’s actors or movies are about good values. Most Hollywood movies are about silly, superficial entertainment, performed by actors who in their private lives lead silly, vacuous, superficial lives full of ridiculous childish drama and bad decisions. They make their money doing dress-up and make-believe. Then these same people are quick to tell working Americans how to live, what to value, and so on. They are disbelievable.
Tom Cruise is the complete opposite of 99% of the Hollywood goofs. He communicates his values and beliefs through his movies, and rare interviews, and leaves us peons (who are also his paying audience) alone the rest of the month.
For example, his movie The Last Samurai is the improbable but beautifully done story of a white dude roundeye who is captured by racist Samurai during the quite real Satsuma Rebellion. It all comes down to Captain Algren (Cruise) talking with Lord Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe) around a campfire after escaping a false arrest (please accept my dialogue paraphrase that is close to the actual script):
Algren: “So That’s it. You will now just end it all, by your own hand, because of some supposed failure?”
Katsumoto: “Yes. It is our way of keeping our honor.”
Algren: “Honor? What better way to show honor than to live a life of service and sacrifice, as you have done your whole life?”
Instead of beating us over the head with political speeches on X Twitter, in just a little bit of movie dialogue, Tom Cruise shows us he values tradition, service, sacrifice, and personal honor. For all the people who dislike Cruise’s association with Scientology, why can’t you just accept him for who he actually is, and not what you merely suspect him of thinking? Based on what we see, the guy is A+ material.
His Mission Impossible series never failed to entertain, not the least reason being that Cruise does most of his own incredible stunts. Reportedly, he routinely breaks ribs, fingers, and damages all kinds of other parts of his body doing these stunts. How many other Hollywood actors do any stunts, much less real stunts that are really dangerous?
Ummmmmm… probably none.
And, how many other Hollywood actors bother to stay in great enough physical shape that they could do their own stunts, if they wanted to?
Ummmmmm.. probably a small handful. So I give Tom Cruise all of the credit he deserves for all of the rare stuff he does. He gives his all to his movie audience, which is much more than can be said for most actors who just stand in front of a green screen and pretend to fight an imaginary foe.
This last Mission Impossible ties together all the past ones. Kind of a high-tech version of the Sherlock Holmes movies mixed with James Bond. But also give Tom Cruise real credit for taking a huge risk with his pro-America, physical adventure-loving audience: His movie cast is a racial- and gender-diverse mix of people, who do not simply appear on screen because they have a certain skin color or boobs. Rather, Cruise has selected exemplars of each: The reliable old black guy sidekick is a tech genius, who goes down fighting, and whose genius level tech work saves the world. The lady SEAL looks like the unique lady SEAL would have to look, very muscular and tough. And so on.
Cruise’s movie-wide racial & gender diversity is not painfully unrealistic and crammed down our throats. Rather, it is realistic enough for us not to have to suspend belief. This is exactly the kind of diversity that Cruise’s audience can accept, because we see it to some degree in our every day lives (not that any of us see world-saving superhero acrobatics play out, ever, but rather we see people like us doing exceptional things sometimes).
For example, I found myself alternately painfully gripping the poor Princess of Patience’s thigh, arm, and hand at different points in the underwater scene. Because in my youth I was a Water Safety Instructor, waterfront lifeguard, and very active SCUBA diver, I had experienced quite a few saves as well as close encounters. On one night dive in the Florida Keys in the mid 1980s, I had to tow my exhausted dive partner to the surface and back to the boat, which was marked only by a single underwater strobe light in the pitch blackness. Leaving my spear back on the bottom, and using an adapted rescue maneuver, I fought the same strong current that had caused him to run out of air in his dive tank, and run out of energy to do anything but slowly drown as a limp rag. Eventually I reached the boat just as I too was running out of energy, weighed down as I was by a tank, regulator, wetsuit, buoyancy compensator, and various kit.
It was a very close call that was suddenly brought back to life by watching Tom Cruise’s realistic near-drowning scene in the sunken nuclear submarine. With the jumbled torpedos laying and falling all about. As he is running out of air and time and body heat. Swim, Tom, swim up!
Anyhow, a bunch of Cruise’s acrobatic stunts in this unbelievably entertaining movie have gotten him Guiness Book of World record recognition, as well as Most Dangerous Stunt Ever, Most Ridiculous Stunt Ever, Stupidest But Coolest Stunt Ever, Most Incredible Stunt Ever…especially for a sixty year old white guy.
You gotta go see this movie, even if the rogue computer / rogue Artificial Intelligence plot has played out at least since War Games (1983), Dune (1984, based on the 1960s book), Terminator movies from 1984 to 2019, and many others, where humankind is almost the fatal victim of our own ridiculous curiosity. Mission Impossible is so good that we forget all that and buy deeply into the premise that our AI foe “The Entity” is about to destroy humanity, and so we must engage in or at least tag along on an impossible mission to destroy it and save humanity.
And one more thing about Tom Cruise: If he is actually deeply into Scientology, then it is treating him really well. Everything about the guy looks like success and contented happiness. We hear no stories about poor choices or destructve behavior. Most of Hollywood is a-religious or non-religious, and most of Hollywood’s people are morally relativistic and quite lost on this planet. Their private lives are a complete mess, and very few of them have any sort of moral compass or true north. Scientology may sound weird, but I think all religions and belief systems sound weird to some degree. Even if it is weird, wow, is it ever working for this super successful, happy guy, Tom Cruise….one of the few real working actors left on our entire planet.
Movie review: Top Gun: Maverick
Sounding like a nattering nabob of negativism is not my thing, so suffice it to simply say Hollywood is an overflowing sewer of anti-Americanism, anti freedomism, anti rule-of-lawism, anti-religionism (except radical Islam, which the areligious ethnic Jews of Hollywood looooove), anti Constitutionalism etc. Meaning that Hollywood rarely produces anything of value or anything worth seeing any longer, unless you are so desperate to see anything at all on the big screen that you also like clawing out your own eyes afterward so you can un-see the garbage Hollywood poured into them.
Suddenly, enter Top Gun: Maverick, a new re-make update from the fun, cool, and patriotic 1986 military movie Top Gun. People (Hollywood movie “critics”) complain that actor Tom Cruise (center stage in both Top Gun movies) plays pretty much the same masculine stud role in almost all of his movies (Mission Impossible, Jack Reacher, Top Gun, The Last Samurai etc), but who else in Hollywood is going to or even can actually act like a real man these days? Radical feminism axe murdered masculinity, and so Hollywood is now filled with lisping, mincing, Valley Girl talking actors born with boy parts down there, but who can not possibly be mistaken for a man’s human shell with a hint of testosterone. And Brad Pitt traded in his masculine stud acting persona for something a lot more drunk, high, and pathetic in real life.
So, fact is, Tom Cruise has the masculine stud role market cornered. He is the only Hollywood male who could play the role of fighter jock Maverick. I think he does it well, and he plays a compelling guy with feewings, too. Actor Tom Cruise has depth and breadth, in addition to acting skill. Thank you, Mister Cruise.
At a time when America is being purposefully failed and destroyed from within in every way, it is refreshing to watch a movie about American freedom’s greatness and motivational patriotic grit. Unique aspects of our nation that we took for granted. Top Gun: Maverick does this very well, as well as delivering on all of the military technological finery one had come to expect from America just 18 months ago. Before the Biden Administration began shoveling our most valuable technology out the door to our enemy China on purpose.
America needs heroes now, and especially military heroes, and no, a guy pretending to be a woman in a military uniform is not a hero. From the time of Ulysses, Samson, and Achilles until just 18 months ago, a military hero has always been a strong man (and occasionally a really impressive and brave woman chopper pilot) who is brave enough to risk his life in combat for the safety of America (or any other nation under risk of failure). Treading on dull military procedural failure at every step, Tom Cruise’s ultimately successful character Maverick gives us that heroic figure here, exceptionally well.
It feels good to believe in a free and robust America again, even if just for two hours and ten minutes. Go see this fantastic movie, which also has a classic early Kawasaki Z-1000 superbike (Mad Max), an original Mustang P51 fighter plane, and some other classic gas guzzlers whose presence once highlighted and then underpinned American greatness. It is worth the price of admission, and your buck sends a message to Hollywood that they will ignore, but which the normal people in America will understand.
10/10 rating here (I liked it even more the second time).