The Big Picture - Is ‘Digger’ the Tom Cruise Movie We’ve Been Waiting For? Plus: Our Top 10 Tom Cruise Performances.

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

BANG! BANG! BANG! On today’s show, Sean and Amanda discuss one of their most anticipated movies of the year in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s ‘Digger,’ starring Tom Cruise. They unpack their very complicated feelings and make the case for why you need to see this incredibly divisive movie on the big screen. Later, they look at Iñárritu’s career at large and wonder: Why did Tom Cruise make this movie? Finally, they take an extensive look at where Cruise fits into the Best Actor race at this year’s Academy Awards, and share their 10 favorite performances from his fascinating career. (0:00) Intro (1:07) ‘Digger’ (13:05) SPOILER WARNING (54:18) Iñárritu’s career at large (59:21) Why did Tom Cruise make this movie? (1:08:07) The Best Actor race (1:23:05) The top 10 Tom Cruise performances Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Sean Fennessee. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is the Big Picture A Conversation Show about Digger. Today on the show, we are digging into Digger, the new apocalyptic comedy from Alejandro Gonzalez in Oritou, starring Tom Cruise. Longtime listeners of this show know that we have been fascinated by Cruz and have longed for him to return to dramatic parts in original stories. We finally got our wish with this movie, which is likely to be among the most divisive of the year. Amanda and I will talk about the film's grasp at relevance and satire. It's decorated cast and the unique storytelling approach it takes.

Then we will get into our cruise bag by sharing each of our 10 favorites of his performances. Digger is as big a cruise acting showcase as we're likely going to get for the foreseeable future. And so we'll also take a look at yet another very crowded and star-laden best actor race. We'll get into it all right after this. Hello, mid-sized business. We see your big ambitions. But how do you achieve the wins you want when your technology is holding you back? SAP Grow is built to grow with your business, no matter its size.

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Our new double espresso with ginseng extract. Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover coffee plus on espresso.com. Okay. This is probably the least amount of information that we've ever shared with one another. Yes. About a movie in the history of this show.

I did not even open. the outline. You kind of gave me the bullet points of the rubrics. Yes. You know the run of show today. I know the run of show. And you gave me the option. And we were talking about it outside with friends. We've talked about it like around each other with other people, but have not shared anything. And I think part of that, for me at least, I mean, we're saving it for the show. But part of this show is going to be me trying to figure out how I feel. I said last week or earlier this week that I've just been all over the place day to day in how I think about this film and what I think works and what I think don't works.

Let me just say right now, not a masterpiece. Yeah, it's not a five star, not my favorite film of the year. And what? So Digger, not a masterpiece. Digger, not a masterpiece. You guys want to like do a Chiron in the booth shirt? Digger. M-Dash, Amanda Dobbins, not a masterpiece. I do feel confident in saying, no matter where I net out on good or bad or worthwhile or the biggest embarrassment to hit Warner Brothers since the last embarrassment, that this is one of the most annoying movies I've ever seen. I found the experience so irritating. And the movie knows that I will find it irritating and anticipates that. and sometimes I think it anticipates in a clever way and I want to give it credit

but then I think about it and I don't want to give it credit. I'm not really sure. I can't tell whether I liked the fact that it was annoying, we're not. But that is, the two things you can say is not a masterpiece and the most annoying movie. I haven't even, no details about the movie here.

Sorry. Sorry. Who else is in the film? You just, you wanted to launch in. We've been waiting. We haven't talked about it. That's a, that's a. That is a testimony, I think, to some of the urgency of the, maybe not the material, but the circumstances of the movie.

Yeah. And the fact that it is the kind of thing that we've been waiting a very long time for. And so it kind of demands a feeling. I'll give just a few bullet points before I share some of my thoughts. It is directed producing co-written by Inor Reto, co-written with Alexander Dinalaris, Nicholas Chacobone, and Sabina Berman. These are all people he's worked with before on screenplays. It's shot by Emmanuel Labeschi, Chivo. This is a return for Chivo to a, you know, Ritu film.

They took some time off on Bardo. The music is by Cosmo, Sheldrake, in addition to Cruz, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sondra Hewler, Michael Stoolbar, Robert John Burke, Emma Darcy, Sophie Wild, and Jesse Plemons appear in the film. It is about the most powerful man in the world, an oil tycoon named Digger Rockwell, racing to prove he can be humanity's savior before the disaster that he has unleashed destroys everything.

I liked this movie. I have significant reservations about it. And I do identify somewhat with the... I'm not sure that I found this movie irritating, but I certainly saw it attempting to provoke me and to kind of nudge me in the ribs pretty frequently. And whether or not it's unpleasantness is a feature or a bug

is, I think part of a wider conversation about Inorritu in general. Yeah. That there is something very knowing about his bombacity and his willingness to say, I'm rubbing your face in it, deal with it. I frequently dislike that in the films.

This film has an antidote to that. It anticipates it. It does have Tom Cruise doing something we've not seen him do in a very long time, if ever. And so, I think I ultimately come out on the movie as mixed positive. I've only seen it once and it was a week ago. And I've been reading some of the reviews this morning

and people have got their knives out for this movie which I find really interesting and that is not typically been the case for Inorritu in the first wave of reaction for most of his films all the way up to Bardo. And I don't see this as like a hateable, disastrous nightmare of a movie at all. I think there are some things about it that are fascinating, some things about it that are really well drawn and executed. there are also some things about it that are so solipsistic and obvious and frustrating that it's very hard to just throw my heart into it because it's not that kind of a movie.

But I'm happy it exists. I'm happy that I saw it. I want to see it again. It is interesting. And I have been thinking about it and been going up and down in how I feel about it. I think my initial reaction was it's really, really annoying and I think I like it because it does. anticipate, it is intentionally provoking and, you know, the showmanship of any and Ritu film, like, is very purposeful and very directed in this film in a way that

is cheeky, but also does know what you're going to respond to and is trying to bring the audience along about it. It's like very, very, very self-involved film, which all films are in their own way. It's just that this is self-involved in a Nita-Ritu style, which means that it is incredibly fussy. And it is often almost, it's often like very remedial, you know?

And the writing and the, hey, this is the point. And this is what we're trying to do here is very, very on the nose and in your face, as you said. But it does have a couple tricks up its sleeve. It has Tom Cruise. And even the Tom Cruise performance is very interesting,

and he gets some opportunities to do what our friends, our friend who we were just talking with, thinks he's doing. You know, he is in full old makeup prosthetics, doing like the Texas voice with an animatronic cat. And then there are a couple times in the movie where I was like, oh. And sometimes because he was unlocking some larger version of the bombastic performance and sometimes because he was the Tom Cruise that I remember from 1993.

And we're marks for that. I think there's one more phase in his performance that we really haven't seen before either, which we can talk about when we get deeper into the story too, that is fascinating. Now look, we're just big fans of Cruz. I think we acknowledge that he's a very strange guy, you know, and that time seems maniacal and his extracurricular activities are often frequently upsetting. But as a screen presence, I think he's one of the,

most fascinating people that's ever appeared in movies. I love watching him in movies. I have really enjoyed the Mission Impossible era while acknowledging it's been fairly one note in terms of what it's asking of him. And we fell in love with him in the 90s watching him go to extremes

in a lot of different kinds of movies with a lot of different kinds of filmmakers. This movie actually asks him to do many things that he really hasn't done before. He has done prosthetics before. He has done accent work, but he has not done them in quite this way. Maybe we should talk about what the movie is first, at least on the surface. And then we can talk about what it is when we get into spoiler territory.

Yeah, which we're going to do. We have to do it to have a proper conversation about the film. And I know there are going to be a lot of looky-loose who just want to know what we think about this and start the episode. Yeah. And I'm begging you to, if you're that curious, stop now. Go see the movie. Maybe you'll be mad at us, but at least you can then listen to the rest of the conversation.

I would encourage people to watch the film because this is. is a risk-taking mainstream studio movie with a big movie star. And I'm, I ask for this on every episode. Like, if I'm not actually saying there's some value to this, then I would be a hypocrite. It doesn't make the movie perfect. It doesn't even make it great. But it does make it... Once again, not a masterpiece. Not a masterpiece. No, I think it's worthy of people's time. And they can come to their own conclusions. But the movie does begin as what it looks like in the trailers, which is a very outsized Dr. Strangelove-esque madcap satire about a wealthy oil. Barron who's got a drilling project in Greenland and his project we learn via a video call leads to

glacier displacement and ice shelves that we soon learn will threaten areas of northern Europe. And this is, you know, potentially putting millions of lives in danger. And so it sends this man who is essentially living alone with his servants and his animatronic cat into a kind of a tizzy. And we learned that this man who is this very powerful. Baron is actually more powerful even than the U.S. government, you know, that he's able to call meetings in his private home, that everyone kind of bends the need of him, that the president asks him, well, what would you do, Digger? And he uses this power as an opportunity to, I think, like, maybe live his truth in a very strange way. That's shaded by something underneath the surface of the movie that we won't get to yet. But The movie doesn't really turn specifically to like what the U.S. government is going to do about it. It turns to what Digger and the U.S. government is going to do about this crisis.

And it really stays in his perspective the entire time. And it shows us that I think you use the word remedial and I think that's right. There's something very simplistic about this component of the movie. Yeah. The satire of the movie. It's just like, well, billionaires run the world. Yeah. And they're vinglorious assholes.

And every decision they make is about their own ego and their own desire to win and conquer, which is the kind of sentiment that I think we've shared on this show before, but I'm not sure needs to have an entire two-hour fantasia devoted to it. And so, and it is played. As you said, it starts with him alone with this animatronic cat, and he is doing, you know, the Tropic Thunder style performance at the beginning. And in classic in Ritu fashion, it's a very, like, designed, stylized apartment with, once again, an animatronic cat and the cameras are moving just so everything is very controlled,

specific. And as the characters start coming in, it is incredibly heightened. And it's satire that it is beyond satire. Like they are trying to be funny and it's very, like they're high on their own supply, essentially is the way that they're doing the performance and it's broad and you can understand what they're doing but it's not it's not sophisticated in any way you're like oh this is you guys are all really really at 15 and this is um uh everyone's trying too hard yeah i think i think about 20 minutes into the movie you start asking yourself like well is this just kind of a swing

and a miss at a kubrickian or terrygilliam style movie where you've got a huge idea and an order to execute that idea, you need these really outsized performances and you need this lavish production design and this sense of like, it's almost like a hyper world because you're living inside of a billionaire's castle. And then the movie does shift. Yeah. And I think, I mean, do you want to speak about the shift now? Uh, I mean, I, it's about 20 to 30 minutes into the movie. And most of what I've described is what happens in the film all the way up until that point. So if you don't want to know anything else about this movie. As Amanda said, you should go out and check it out. The tricky thing about this is that not a lot of people are going to see this movie. It's not really

tracking to do well. And it's not at all commercial. Yeah, it's just not. And yet there's something kind of fascinating about it. So, you know, apologies to Jack Sanders, who hasn't seen this film and now is putting Earmuff's son. Yeah. He's trying to leave the room. We see you. Okay, Jack. Go. Go. Go go. In the aftermath of this big meeting of the president and generals and the vice president and Digger and Riz Ahmed, who plays the sort of head of his environmental group that oversees whether or not catastrophes will be happening on Rockwell Enterprise's Watch. And Sondruculer, his sister is there yelling loudly about how he's ruining her, you know, environmental startup. Yes, her alternative energy company. We watch a sequence in which the president, played by Goodman and Cruz's Digger, are looking out onto a completely constructed facade that looks like a view out his back window.

And all of a sudden, a tree falls over, and a large man appears in the background. And it becomes clear that this is a set. It's a constructed set. This is a constructed world. This constructed world is actually a very expensively mounted play. And that the play is a play about a real-life man named Digger Rockwell and that Tom Cruise is playing Digger Rockwell and also an actor playing Digger Rockwell. And we get a handful of flashes throughout the film where the production,

which is essentially a rehearsal, it's the sort of day of rehearsal. Yeah, it's the tech rehearsal, I think. is a kind of dual crisis. It's a crisis that shows us something in the world, really what's happened to the world, through the means of storytelling, and also a kind of personal crisis for this actor, which unfurls throughout the movie.

Yeah. And so Cruz gets to play two different parts. And I got to say, when they revealed initially that it was a play, I was a little bit skeptical. And then as soon as we see Cruz behind the scenes, I was very engaged. It completely caught me by surprise,

and having a conversation like this on a podcast kind of ruins that for so many people, and I apologize if that's something they didn't want to know. We did our best. It hugely elevates the movie for me. A thousand percent. And it was fascinating to learn that this was not the plan,

that this was an idea that they came to much later, that originally it sounds like the film was mostly just Digger. Okay. And that this artifice, this story underneath, was developed over time. And I think it's the... It really deflates the movie

in a very special way. Because if this was... If all they were trying to accomplish was billionaires will destroy the world and were fucked... Yeah. That's just not a very interesting idea for a movie.

That's something we already know about. And this second layer, I think has me... kind of had my head spinning a bit about what it is that the movie is trying to say. And maybe it doesn't really have anything to say. But I at least spent more time

trying to unpack what it was trying to accomplish than I ever would have if it was just, you know, this kind of Terry Gilliam in in sheep's clothing kind of movie, you know? Absolutely. No, I think the twist is the only thing, the twist and what it allows in Cruz's performance. And the way that it allows you to think more about the way that it justifies all of the effort that you can see in the film because they are putting on a show.

So you're fine if it's suddenly, if everyone's suddenly like three sizes too big and everything looks a little too hyper-styelized because it is examining the process of making that in the context of the movie. So we like meta-things.

There are going to be a lot of people who just tune out as soon as this reveal happens. And I think in my screening, which was mostly an influencer screening, there was a lot of what? As soon as it happened, But to me, it's genius because the reveal comes at the exact moment where I was ready to write it off.

Exactly same. I was just like, well, this is like this is done, you know? And I was like, can I leave? You know, like what can I accomplish in this time? And I think the movie knows that. Yes. I think it is artfully times. Totally.

Yeah. So in that sense, I want to give it credit for it. Yeah. Even though on the flips, if I think too much about that, I'm like, well, it is kind of annoying that you're trying to set me up this way just to poke me and make me want to not. not be here anymore. And what is even that, what is provoking me with this like, you know, farcical idea of billionaires are bad? Like, I know. I know. And like the earth is screwed. Also, I know. Like, what is that accomplishing? Well, it's particularly jarring because the movie is full of jokes, but not funny. And that's, well, sure. That's a problem. You know, like, if the movie

was just attempting to be that very broad satire, but you're not laughing, it's kind of valueless. Now, after we get this reveal, and we see, you know, Cruz's character as sort of an actor in crisis trying to make this right and kind of a subterranean component of the movie that is very important, I think, is his kind of complex relationship with the director, who's played by Sophie Wilde, and they're pushing against each other a lot. And there's this kind of friction about what's the right way to play this. And it reflects our struggles with as we're watching it where it feels very broad, and it feels not right. It feels like it's almost not. And I don't know if Eniritu gets this. I think this is the intention. It almost doesn't matter ultimately.

It's how you receive it. But that character saying, this feels off to me. This isn't how this would happen. Yeah. It reflects our own sense of a theatrical reality. When you're in the theater, you want something to feel real enough that you're swept away and then you can accept the absurdity of it while you're inside of the story, as opposed to it feeling like a series of paper dolls being moved around the church.

chessboard. And the movie does feel like that on the flip side when you go to see live theater, the performances are bigger because they have to be louder because they're playing for the cheap seats. It's a different performance style. It's not the subtlety of screen acting where a look conveys everything. Everybody kind of

is yelling at each other in a stage play in some respects. And so I thought this totally complicated the movie in a way that I really enjoyed. But then the movie does an interesting thing where it then goes back to just being Digger for a long stretch of time. Again, Correct.

And I think it gets more interesting, but also a lot of the jokes don't hit. And there are times where you're enervated watching it and you're almost waiting to know why they pulled us out of the movie. And I was surprised by the paucity of real scenes with the cruise actor. And I'm curious, like, what you think about that. Right. I think we get to, is it four times when we see him out of it? Maybe five. I couldn't count.

at this point. But yeah, there's, he's in the dressing room a couple times. He has a couple standoffs with the director. And then sort of the final after the, after the show wraps scene. I, the other thing that it, that it does, and I couldn't tell whether this was sloppy or really interesting, you know, here we're the experience of watching this film. It is. is that the way that it segues between the real life and the onstage, the production, is through like the backstage screens and the kind of like the live cameras of what's on. So sometimes you are watching the stage production on a TV screen next to, you know, Jesse Plemons, who is one of the producers and we'll come back to him.

and then you kind of go into the camera. So the boundaries between what you're seeing and what's real and what's on a screen and what's on a stage are blurred. And I guess that is purposeful. I think it's pretty artfully done. Yeah. Yeah.

I think what it does is it rips open the can and says, like, well, what's really inside this story? And I'm not sure that it ever totally gets us to a satisfying meal inside of the can. Yeah. But getting my brain going and being relieved that it wasn't just the movie that was marketed to me had a real power. And I think for some people they may not like that reveal or it may not really have any impact on them. And I think that that accounts for some of the negativity that you're seeing about the movie.

I'm trying to figure out if this is a movie that feels that its message is important, that its cynicism is important, that its message. about cynicism is important. I don't quite know because the movie goes more or less where you might imagine it's going to go. And there's a segment in the middle of the movie that I think ultimately makes the movie worth seeing. Yeah. But at the

conclusion of everything, you're left with something that is common in Interruth's films, which is the sort of like, you're fucked. What are you going to do about it? You are? There is also an element to me, and I don't know whether, again, whether the film is

aware of it or whether I just reflected it on it. In this movie there is a little bit and also like, and we're all dancing while Rome burns. And there is something about this thing that we are doing, both the production that's within this film, but then also this film that we're making does not matter. Has not changed the way that people think about the world. Has not changed the world that we live in. I think the closing shots of the film and the credit sequence are some of the more I was again I was surprised by them

and sort of affected and they and they seemed to me a signal of the film's understanding outside of its tiny little jewel box in a way that I kind of want to give it credit for yeah I wonder if the

the idea that this kind of storytelling has emotional value you know the idea of pointing at something that has happened historically that set us off course as a civilization

and then having some comfort in that by experiencing, you know, the grandeur and the sadness and the absurdity of all of those things. Right. Does that make us feel better? Is it a temporary salve from the chaos outside? Yeah. It is a pretty—these are grand ideas that he's going for. I mean, you know, he's always going for grand ideas, and a lot of times they're a little bit too obvious to be entertaining or to be feel valuable to me. I think the movie that it's most similar to—I know you just rewatched last night is Birdman.

both tonally and in terms of its strident efforts to wow you with its very physical kind of handmade production. Sure, and also production within a production. Yeah, that's right. And self-doubt of the main character in terms of whether what this person is doing is valuable. Yes. And whether salvation can be possible for this character or for the, you know, the world at large through art. And two movies sharply trained on a male actor star figure. And a male actor dealing in one way or another with his past movie star successes.

And there is a lot of real-life meta-text brought to both of these. Yes, what this movie means to Cruz and what Cruz means to this movie. Likewise, for Michael Keaton playing a superhero some years after playing Batman. The thing with Birdman, which, as I've said before, I really enjoyed the first time I watched it. And then the second time I watched it and thought about what its targets were and what its intentions were. It just felt way less impactful to me was those targets. are just really small. You know, they're Hollywood, their male fragility, they're the place of critics in our culture. These, like, very kind of modest, kind of like grudge-bearing targets.

This movie's targets are way bigger than that. It's true. I was really taken aback back on my rewatch of how much time Emma Stone's character spends talking about what goes viral on the internet. Yeah. And the... Mock Twitter. I mean, but it's like an Aaron Sorkin level of obsession with very specific blog posts that are just, it makes it feel so dated, so small, so petty. Yeah. And, but it was funny that watching Birdman made, tipped me back on the negative side of, of, uh, Digger for a little while because I was like, oh, this does have all the DNA of the

things that I don't like about, um, about Inoritu films, uh, replicated in some of the same ways. And again, I just find the experience and the. the particularness. I did wonder if this is how other people feel about Wes Anderson movies. I just think there's a huge difference. To me, Inor Reto is constantly settling scores.

He's using his work as a way to kind of thunder back and what he feels is unjust. I don't see Wes Anderson doing that at all. Russ Anderson is just very closed off in his own world. In the design, they're very similar. Yeah. But it just kind of, you know, I respond to the emotionality

and the ideas in Wes Anderson movies so differently than I do to Ina Ritu's movies, which I agree are petty and reductive and just, I mean, they just feel like the op-ed page of any major newspaper yelling at me all of the time, and I don't read op-eds for that reason. So just really, really kept an obvious. But some people do seem to respond to both op-ed pages and Nina Ritu. So I just, there is something, there is something polarizing about him in a different way.

You're right that Digger just takes on things larger. on the internet. And whether or not it's worthy of those big swings is debatable. Again, I'd like to see the movie again to get a better sense of how I feel about it. That sense of surprise, though, that played out through the movie was worthy to me. And again, the reason to see the movie

is that Tom Cruise is making a lot of choices in this movie, and there are times when he does become full. There's a big centerpiece in the film. Yeah. When we go back to Digger's story, where he's asked to testify, essentially, in front of a large tribunal of some kind.

And when we saw the movie clips back in April, I compared it to a Roy Anderson movie, and it looks that way with like these dusty, gray white men, these kind of monochromatic, washed out backdrops and costume decisions. And after Riz Ahmed's character does what he is asked to do, which is to in public excoriate his boss's behavior and the work that he's done in oil drilling and explains that he is responsible for the thing.

this massive ecological crisis. Digger then enters the arena and Cruz, like, on corks one. It's just, he's a great yelling actor. He's not a subtle actor. He never has been. He's a showman. He is, he's Vince from

the color of money. He is Daniel Caffey, you know, barking back at Jack Nicholson. He is maniacal Ethan Hunt. And he's doing it with Jerry Jones's accent, wearing a, I guess, a red velvet cowboy suit and a hat.

And he delivers this speech about why he does what he does and why the world needs him and why the world needs oil. It is essentially a 10-minute version of you need me on that wall. You want me on that wall, which I was just... I thought of the same thing. It's his Jack Nicholson moment. Of course we did.

And I was grinning up at the screen. And listen, again, it's like it's a room full of real people, not CGI people. Thank you so much. There are dummies very specifically placed throughout. Almost was like mocking the idea of this tribunal. Totally. And so, you know, it's big in design.

And the camera is kind of following him around. And if it's not one take, then it's designed to be very much. Well, there are times where he grabs someone's phone and he starts yelling into the phone. And then we cut to the camera as though he's talking into it. Right. But there's just a lot of camera work and a lot of noise going on around him. Highly choreographed. And athletically to say, like, this is a big thing.

And because it's Tom Cruise, he just like wipes all of that out of the way. And all you can do is look at him in this ridiculous accent, in full prosthetics, just absolutely tearing it up. I was grinning at the screen. It's just a great sequence. I was just like, I can't believe this is happening. And I also can't believe I'm grinning at if it were anybody else.

And if he weren't bringing that, you know, I thought of West Anderson again because of like the, the Hackman versus Wes Anderson Royal Tenenbaum's, like 10. and bombs, like, tension. Friction. Yeah, there is something that he is dressed up in all of the, like, Inoritu stuff and is just pure rage and Tom Cruise's humanness for the first time on screen in 15 years. Yeah.

There's also something about the way that they've built us, Bill Digger up to this point. As somebody, we don't quite know whether or not he's going to fall on his sword. We don't know if he has any contrition. We've not really seen him as that kind of a character until this point. And this is actually happening inside of this play that is called Fossil Fools. And so, which is stupid but also kind of funny. And he obviously does the thing that we expect most stride and billionaires to do,

which is that he, in this sense of deluded grandeur, not only defends himself, but implicates everyone. And says, you want your, the things you don't need deliver to your house within two days. You want to be able to use yourself. You want to be able to drive wherever you want to go. That oil is mother's milk. That this is the gift that God has given us on this planet.

And it's not persuasive because we know it's ridiculous and self-serving. But he's so committed in the part that you do get caught up in everything that he's communicating. And he's obviously being shouted down by the members of this committee that are in the room. And you're kind of on Cruz's side. And this is like a common thing that happens where Cruz, you know, think of Cruz. in Magnolia playing T.J. Mackey where you're like, this guy's a piece of shit. He's also really charismatic and interesting. And I kind of

I hope the movie goes back to him soon. And so, again, to me, it's a real price of admission moment in a movie. Totally. And I'm not sure that the movie ever totally like recovers from that height. No, but on the flip

side, it gives you normal crews and crews and repose and crews out of the prosthetics, which is, what you are both literally longing for if you're a cruise head and you're watching this movie because aside from that one

10 minute sequence it can be a lot but is also metaphorically what we have been yearning for for going on 20 years now of just like I would like to see Tom Cruise be Tom Cruise again and there's this magical wordless moment

during the reveal where after that giant head pops out the shot goes just like a little bit wider like so you see the margins and you see the lights. And then in silence you watch Goodman and particularly Cruz's bodies change and relax. And it's basically like there at ease. They're off, they're off duty.

And it was kind of like watching old Tom Cruise take over his body again. And I viscerally reacted to it. I was just like, oh, there he is. There is that moment. And the character gets saddled through this subplot, the thing that is going on below. the movie is that behind the scenes in between the rehearsals or like, you know, during this tech rehearsal, Tom Cruise's daughter is traveling home from somewhere and then her plane for a while goes missing.

And, you know, and it's weather conditions and it is indicated that the weather conditions are because of climate change and because of the just unreliable nature of. That's the real world impact of the story that they're telling on stage. And so he's mostly acting opposite video calls and or opposite Jesse Plemons, who is the producer, who offers to try to help him find his daughter. Yes. And so his real life character is dealing with the consequences of what his onstage character is, you know, gladiating for all the time. And he is betwixt and between and also still really committed to the show, which is what's the amazing part of it. A true actor in crisis movie.

It's like opening night or something. Yeah. And but so he's quiet. He's not, he's not freaking out. He's not screaming. He is just nervous and almost internal. And again, you haven't seen any internality in a cruise performance. in 15 years.

At the same thought. And he can still do it. I know. And what's so amazing about it is also that he's still in the prosthetics. And they seem to do something where, I mean, I guess he's still fully in them, but he does look a little bit different when he's offstage. I don't know what that. I think you described the posture well, which is he's relaxed.

And I wonder if even his face is more relaxed. Yes. He's not performing the digger hypertension. Right. Whereas you have him. And he's also using a voice that, honestly, we've not heard in a long time. He's using a normal speaking voice

that you might have heard and gosh, what's the last movie he made where you felt like he wasn't just maybe oblivion, maybe in some of the more quiet moments of oblivion where he's having conversations. I think you were erasing some emotional moments in Top Gun Maverick and so am I, but yes. Yeah, but you know, there's just something

about the iconography. Totally. Yeah, he's reusing things rather than finding it. But just like just like, just the single one-on-one conversation with a person where there's like a little bit of anguish, a little bit of unsureness. It is just nice to see from him. It's a little bit like, you know, applauding a dog for taking a shit outside. It's like he's an actor.

Like it is what he should be able to do. We know he can do it. Well, sure. But like, again, we haven't seen evidence of it. And like, even like recent video evidence of the man being asked direct questions, he can't use a, he can't use a proper noun. Yeah. He's like, it's really, it's, there's just.

not always something there. I know. That's the thing is, in the press, he's not showing us any of this in movies. Even the original-ish movies that he's made, American Made or the Mummy, like, even in those movies, there's no... The Mummy being, like, one of the original movies that he's made, is just a real sign of the times. Yeah, it's unfortunate. I think there's also something about the fact that the movie was shot at Pinewood, which is the legendary London studio where many Bond movies were shot, where many Star Wars movies were shot, where Superman films were shot,

but also where Black Narcissus was shot. You know, there's this great storied history of complex, colorful productions being mounted in this place. And you feel it. Like, we're backstage. It is a little bit of a backstage drama when the movie is interested in portraying those moments.

And, again, I'm really grateful that they did. I'm not totally sure. it feels like two-thirds of one movie and one-third of another movie and I'm not sure if they're really in agreement with each other and not just because they're different kinds of films but because of what one is saying to the other but I'm still sorting through that feeling I don't know if there's anything else specifically about Cruz

that you want to highlight we should also talk about the rest of the cast yeah it's funny how I I think so highly of the rest of the cast that I'm like well surely they wouldn't have signed on to something that was actually just stupid in the end. So there's got to be more.

Specifically, Jesse Plemons. And the Jesse Plemons, can we talk about that? Yeah. The Jesse Plemons scene where it is revealed that he is the real-life nephew of the Digger character. And he is producing this play sort of as an exorcism, but really is like image rehabilitation. Yes. And we should say this is an older play. It's kind of a cult classic that was made in the aftermath of the ecological

disaster that actually happened on Earth in this story and that it's being revived here on some sort of anniversary almost. Yes. And so the cruise, the real life cruise character and Sophie Wilde, the director are like really coming at heads and there's like the, you know, the climactic bomb-dropping scene that everyone is playing with their version of Dr. Strange Love on like so much cocaine and, or even more cocaine, I don't know. And then there's a friction about like, this is, this is too much. This isn't real. This isn't how it would happen.

There's no humanity in this. And the Plymins character, because you've kind of wondered why Jesse Plemons, one of our great actors, is there. Just kind of skulking around the movie occasionally getting into the actors. And you're, and looking like eager and being funny and definitely like, you know, sending up every single producer he's ever seen just lurking around on set. But then he comes like almost like a deity to like explain to everybody. Here is what is happening and here's why we're actually doing this.

And you can't trust that character's motivations either. And you can't trust his explanation, but it is sort of the Rosetta Stone of the movie. And I do find myself thinking, well, Jesse Plymins, of why I respect so much, wouldn't do anything that's like ultimately really stupid. So. So. A lot of actors we love some stupid things all the time. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know what you mean, though. I mean, it extends to many other actors in this cast.

But I'm just sort of like, so this explanation and this kind of, you know, because what it's saying is that that this is supposed to be some sort of, we're supposed to like learn from art, but also. that it's impossible to separate the art from the, you know, the real world and the motivations of the people who are making it. And that nothing can be this, like, perfect ideological expiration or, you know, nothing can actually save. We can't save the world through art. I'm sorry. Do you think that's what his character wants? Because I'm, that's also a little bit foggy to me. Yeah.

It feels personally very valuable and important to him. And in fact, the younger version of him figures significantly into the conclusion. of the movie who's portrayed in the play. And this does seem to be sort of like a reckoning for his family name and this, but sort of like let's let us not forget that the Rockwells did destroy the world, but also there's something sadly tragic about that that we should acknowledge. But isn't the character also slightly motivated by other aspects of it, like, of the family wealth or the other business?

Like, does Cassandra Hewler is his character's mother and her company does. hang on and then is manufacturing the gas mess or something. So there is something, you know, politically and financially motivated within that character, which is communicated. So, you know, I think it's ultimately like a fairly nihilistic whole take on it. I'm not totally, I don't totally remember the particulars of that character other than it seems like he's, like everybody else, he's compromised. Yeah.

And it's a funny movie because it's about the struggles of the art and the artist and what the value is of, conveying these stories to us and whether they assuage us during difficult times or whether they just make us better understand ourselves in the human condition. But the movie has that sequence that you're describing is a director and an actor not being on the same page. A situation that I'm sure, you know, Ritu's been in many times and I'm sure Cruz has been in many times. And the person who solves the issue is the producer. Now, that might actually be accurate. Yeah. But to dramatize that is very funny. And it also kind of tells you a little something, which is like the man with the money is the decider. And so it does have this really kind of

clever conclusionary idea. Yeah. It's just like, unfortunately, this is how the world works and there's kind of no way around it even when it comes to staging the art.

Nevertheless, they continue to put on the show and people are moved in the, at the performance. Right. And they're applauding and they're these very earnest, tight close-ups on all their faces. And then a warning bell goes off. And we learn that we are truly living

in a post-apocalyptic environment. And everyone starts putting their gas masks on, which leads to the conclusion of the film. And I don't, I don't, you said nihilistic. I don't, is it? Well, the other thing, just speaking of it is the man with the money who saves it is the, the resolution of the real life cruise character. Plotline and what happens to his daughter, which is, I thought, I thought this was interesting.

Like the way that they handle, which is it's entwined into the actual story. And so the Digger character loses the nephew character over the side of the boat. And but in the middle, he gets a phone call and he takes it because I guess it's a rehearsal and whatever. And also, you listen, life happens. And also these people are supposed to be ridiculous, right? They're not as, they're not supposed to be aspirational people. So he takes the call. He just says, okay.

Cruz does, like, it's amazing, very controlled emotional acting and then goes right back in the scene where the character is letting go of his nephew. And they finish the play. You don't know the resolution of the phone call, though. It's everything around you is being indicated one way. And then it turns. out that she's totally fine because the billionaire producer has used all of his money and resources to save her. And so... What's our takeaway from that? Well, real life stakes and art. Well, it's like,

to me, that just undermines the art, right? That it's like the artistic stakes are, you know, art doesn't actually, art can't save real life or even like really portray the stakes in the way. What's really happening here is that just like if you have money, you're going to be okay. And the despair that is portrayed near the end of the play in the story maybe can't match the despair of the actual actor whose family is in peril. Right. But again, the only solution is to like buy your way out of it with elevated technologies. Sure.

And so the movie is like kind of at cross purposes. And I think it's unclear to me if it even knows what it is trying to convey to us. It's also okay if it does not have a conclusion that we have to absolutely understand and stand by. And it's kind of a relief to me that it wasn't as simplistic. That there wasn't someone just wasn't Tom Cruise standing on the stage, delivering a very obvious monologue about what it means. I agree. Yeah, where Digger falls to one knee and expresses his regret for everything that he's done

and then the curtain's closed and it's over. I think the rest of the cast is poorly served by the movie. Agree. For a very specific reason, which is that they don't really get to operate outside of the play. And so you only get to see these extremely obnoxious performance styles. I think Rizumet comes out the best because we get to spend the most time with him. But when he's in a group, anytime there's a group activity, the movie is like kind of awful. Yes.

Kind of obnoxious. Thank you. Yeah. Just really annoying. Yeah. Okay. That isn't the whole movie. And they're supposed to be, and that's the point.

But you're just also like this is bad hang. Yeah, and it's sort of like, how do you want to spend your time? Is this valuable? And, you know, I make the case that in a horror film when something is really awful, I'm having a good time. This wasn't the same for me. When there's the big meeting immediately after the president is informed of what's happening, that scene is very obnoxious and not very funny. You know, there's a joke about how there are no women present. You know, there's a woman because the C word is used.

And then there are no women present. Everybody laughs heartily. And it's like, this is the worst Cohen Brothers move. of all time. Sure. And it goes on, the laugh goes on for like a long time. And that is really when you start to turn against the movie, which the movie does know. It is intentional. And yet there's a scene later in the film where all of the president's cabinet and Digger and are all watching on a television, the events transpiring when the ice shelf officially hits Northern Europe.

And there's mayhem. We don't actually see on the screen what they're watching, but their reactions are so ridiculous and overwritten. and unfunny. And again, like, does a movie deserve credit for knowing that this is unpleasant to watch? And making something unpleasant to watch? But is that a comment on, like, the failure of the art and the way that the play is being staged or not? It's unclear. Yeah.

I think in the moment I didn't think it was. And then when we sit here talking about it, I want to give it credit. And I do think that there is intention in it. And I will say, in other situations, horror movies being a great example where I really don't enjoy watching something, you are often like, but that is the point. So, and that you, we do, you and I both try to give films credit for creating situations that get reactions out of us because that is, I mean, that's definitely Enereatou's.

No doubt. Objective. Yeah, it's in the Revenant. It's in Morris Peros. It's in all his movies. So I do think that it's intentional. And there's a difference though Because in horror films

It's often about invention It's often about seeing something you've not seen before And being agonized in a way that feels creative This is durational This is like we're sitting you inside of something That's just annoying to be around And that in and of itself is not a value to me And it's hard to not hold past prejudices against him

I mean and that's why when I watched Birdman And I was like oh you really think all of this is important I do find that with Digger, I want to give it a little credit for being, I almost want to credit the self-loathing or the fact that to me at least the movie indicates that all of this is useless. And there is something punishing about that that is acknowledging the punishment of the movie itself. So I guess I give it a little credit. But then, like I said, sometimes I'm like, wow, that. That was really annoying. Yeah.

And I know most of the stuff that you said. I wrote this down. I've seen this written about in a few places, the sort of like, what does this all add up to? Yeah. Question of the movie. And I don't know if it's anything. And I don't know if that's a problem or not.

I don't know if, because movies that have more modest means, more modest ambitions, it's easy to say, it's okay, it's just a movie. Yeah. You know, the love hypothesis is just the movie. Resident Evil is just a movie. Maybe it has some cool thematic intent, but it's not about anything.

But this is a how we live now movie. That's the whole point of the movie. Yeah. It's like, let us confront you. And it... With the agonizing potential of our future. Mm-hmm. But also, maybe it's okay if you're rich.

And also, maybe it's okay to still be living in a hellscape as long as we're communing in the shadow of art. Or maybe... Yeah. Because people are very happy at the end of the play. They're very happy. They're moved.

Right. But to me, that's, and then they put on their gas masks. It is right there in the same scene. To me, I don't think that, I don't even, I don't think the, the play is presented as any sort of long-term achievement beyond making these people happy for a moment in the total nightmare that they're, but it's like they, we made a play about this and then nothing happened. Yeah. The movie, if you look at it from one direction, does have the same effect of a person during an acceptance speech in an award show, lecturing the world about what's wrong with the world. And it's sort of like, you're Tom Cruise. Yeah.

If you're concerned about this, and perhaps you should be about the potential ecological nightmare forthcoming, address that in the press. Yeah. Oh, I definitely don't think that the movie oriented to or Chris. or anyone involved is actually interested in any lessons about like the actual earth or the oil or billionaires. Yeah, I do. I think don't look up as a really interesting comp for the movie because, you know, that movie is flawed. I think I was a little bit higher on it than the majority of people, give or take the academy. But I think of it is very similar to this movie where it's attempting a very difficult tone.

It's using stardom as a refracting tool. Sure. But I know that Adam McKay comes to that movie honestly. That he really believes that that movie is trying to be a bellwether for a proper crisis in our world. And whether or not you feel that it works and conveys the message or isn't obnoxious because it's very, you know, moneyed people telling you what's wrong with everything. It's at least like an alarm sounder. And this movie, it feels kind of trapped. Like it feels like it's skipped a step and it's just like, You're doomed.

Yeah. Which, okay. Thanks. Tom Cruise? Could you help us, perhaps? What could you do with your massive influence and power? I guess you can make art, right? That's your job, is to make art.

Yeah. And that is what the movie is about, which is when you can't do anything else but make art. I did not think about, you know, the fact that our world is ending and the earth that we're inheriting, we're giving to our children is, you know, rapidly dying. Like, for a second. while watching this movie. I don't think this movie is like materially interested in it and or an argument against...

Until the end. Because it's just the window dressing for the crisis of the filmmakers and the actor character in the film. But then at the end, those final shots, as you say, where we see the devastation and the way that the people are living now in this future world.

I thought that that was sincere. You know... For sure. But I mean, that's like, That's a grace note. You know, I don't, for example, I don't think that Tom Cruise signed on to this movie because he's, you know, unveiling an initiative to save the earth, you know, through renewable energy. Although that would be okay. I welcome it, you know.

Yeah. You could use of status and wealth. The other movie I thought about is the megalopolis. Same. The difference between the two movies is that Megalopolis is so romantic. It's so passionate. thinks it's compassionate. I'm not sure that it actually is,

and that was one of my gripes with it, was that it ultimately felt similarly celibistic to this movie. But this idea of, like, only I can process the great trauma of our times through my singular vision. Yeah. It's something I kind of enjoy when directors do,

even if the movies don't work. Like, it is kind of, it is what I want these artists to do. But then it really is, like, in the eye of the beholder or the, you know, the person, eye of the director, who do you want? reimagining the world. The movie I thought about was Mickey 17. It has a lot in common with,

I think, actually, in terms of text, in terms of, you know, highly stylized production, weird performance at the center from a movie star we love, a director with a lot of success and recent success at the academy, taking a swing with Warner Brothers money. And not all of the performances and certainly not all of the political commentary landing. Very mad cap satirical. The performance style is very similar. So if you found that movie to be a turnoff, digger is not for you. New from Nespresso.

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Scotia Bank You're richer than you think Ina Ritu Obviously we've been unkind to him on the show This is his eighth feature film He has a case for Second, Third, Fourth Most Significant filmmaker of this century

You know, we talked all about Nolan As this, you know, Titan of the 2000s And you can point to a handful of other People who we really enjoy, you know Yeah This has been certainly a PTA century It's been, I don't know, who else would you put in that class of somebody who's really been going since 2000. It has been making great works over that time.

People love Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron, his Inoritu's friends and compatriots from Mexico. Trying to think. So on the 25 for 25 list, we had a Quaron. No del Toro, no Inoritu. No, no Spielberg. We had a Nolan. We had... No Villeneuve, but Villeneuve is obviously been active throughout this entire century.

But, I mean, he's only made eight movies, but two of them. those movies have won him best director. He's one of the most decorated filmmakers alive. I mean, yeah. This is among my favorite of his movies. As I look at the list, I really despised Bardo. And I've had people push back on me and be like, you don't understand the Mexican heritage and the point of view of that film

and why that's so important to our history. I acknowledge I don't come to the film with that experience. But that's true of many people that are going to watch the film. It didn't convince me the sort of value of the way that story was told. And this movie feels like a smash-up of the, the meta quality of Birdman, the grueling aspects of the Revenant, and the kind of self-satisfied, like, smugness of Bardo.

And you put them all together, and, like, you do get a ton of virtuosity. His movies always look amazing. And the camera work and the production design and the costuming of these movies is very special. He does have, he has taste. Whether it is good taste is debatable, but he has a point of view.

Sure. He makes a lot of choices. He has style. He has style. He, yes. And whether it is, and I guess even taste. I mean, I do remember the kitchen in Bardo. It was one of the most glorious things I've ever seen.

It does things look good and look purposeful. And that is not true often of many filmmakers. So, yeah, it's all surface. And the writing and the ideas are always the problem for me. Yeah, the first three movies of his career, or four movies of his career, Memorialis Peros, 21 grams, Babel and Beautiful, are very different. They're grounded, extremely intense human dramas that have no outsized or fantastical components to them. Yeah, but they still are all the storytelling interconnected.

You know, there is something extra. Yeah, a lot of lattice work in all the movies. Yeah, you can't just like tell a story. about a person. You know, it's all got to connect in this one magical, whatever way. We can't just be straightforward. It's interesting, though,

that it is now evenly distributed where you've got the first four films that are these much more tightly focused character dramas, even if they're glow-trotting. And then these four other movies that are much more reliant on scope and style.

And it almost feels like digger is him, like there is, it feels like a little bit of self-chiseling going on here in a way that I admired that I didn't see in Bardo. Like, Bardo feels like fake self-lacerating. Whereas this, there are times where I'm like, you feel like you're kind of powerless,

like you've been a little bit denuded or, like, destroyed by your inability to, like, get anybody to pay attention to what it has you've been trying to say with your films over the past seven years. Maybe I'm being a little too generous to him, but there does feel to be like some component of that in this movie, while also it being this big, massive movie star showcase and extravagant production. Yeah, I do think that it is self-aware. I don't know it's the good type of self-aware.

You know, I think that I think there's a very fine line between self-aware and self-indulgent. There's a part of his films that makes me hate a part of myself, which is that being cynical is not a personality. And his movies are just so relentlessly cynical about how, like, we are all doomed. And they're all kind of like this interwoven conceit between your own mortality and your strily. to be to transcend it like it's always going back and forth on that like that is what birdman is it's about a guy who's like thinks he's a hot shit actor and then realizes like his life is meaningless unless he can be a real hero unless he can really get above the sort of surface level experience of just being a successful man and I like that idea but like where the movie nets out and how

it chooses to like throw its punches I find it be really shallow so I feel this way through all of his movies I think they're kind of interesting to think through I think they're kind of annoying. I think they look really great. And then I watched them a second time and I'm like, I wish I wasn't watching this. Exactly. And so I wonder where I'll net on this one. I do think that the Cruz component of it just makes it more special. Why did Tom Cruise sign on to this movie? A great question. I don't know the answer. It's almost like he spun a wheel. There were 20 a tors on it. And he was like, well, there's 20 people who are great. Right. And I got to do one with one of them. And that's what I did in the past.

I mean, there still are layers of artifice to this role that I wonder whether, you know, he didn't jump right back in to Magnolia. No. There is, he spends a lot of time in, you know, high accent work, big prosthetics. You don't get to actual Tom Cruise. He doesn't have to bear himself very much or until very. A couple of moments. Yeah.

But so you can kind of see it as a, like a bridge back from Ethan Hunt. And, you know, he's just doing stunt work of a different kind. It's a lot of less Grossman from Tropic Thunder. It's a lot of like hiding, doing a voice, you know, doing a lot of physical contortionism that it shows how he's transformed in some way. Yeah. But again, him showing us the actor in crisis stuff is a way more interesting choice and a place. and a place that I liked seeing him move, and it actually made the over-the-top stuff work better.

It made it feel like, oh, there is a contrast in what he's accomplishing here. He didn't just turn his life over to being an annoying agent, screaming at people on a phone during Tropic Thunder. Like, it's not just layered, it's textured. Like, you can feel him going to different places. So I really appreciate that. And it's weird when you, I mean, the 10 years is pretty grim, even though some of these movies I love.

But since 16, it's Jack Reacher Never Go back. Then the failed mummy film, which is not original, I agree. Then 2017's American Made, which I think is underrated. And it's kind of an interesting movie. Not a huge success, but an interesting movie. And then Mission Impossible Fallout, Top Gun Maverick, Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning, Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning. And now this.

Yeah. This isn't a better movie than Mission Impossible Fallout, which is just the fucking delight, you know, which is the joyful action movie. This is not a better movie than Top Gun Maverick. I agree. Okay. I agree. But what do those two movies have on their mind, I guess is the question.

Yeah. Like, not really anything. They have the idea of Tom Cruise on their mind. They are Tom Cruise mythology vehicles. Mm-hmm. And this does as well in a different way, but it's about more. He's less at the center of it. When you ask, like, why did he do this?

Yeah. Why do you think he did it? I can't figure out how self-aware Tom Cruise. cruises either to put the, you know, and maybe in that way he and Ianaritu are an interesting match and maybe they see something in each other. But I don't know if he understands that he's just been shut off in action star mode for 10 years and now that he he wants to, whether he wants to take a different direction be himself again, whether he feels he needs to career wise, because the last couple Mission Impossibles didn't really deliver in the way that we, you know, that they expected,

both commercially and artistically in one podcast's opinion. And so does he understand that he's got to make the pivot, but he also doesn't, you know, he needs a gradient. You know, he needs a bridge back to himself. So this works out. And or is he just, you know, someone who saw, Mores Peros before everyone else in town, which was one of the lines from his interview in GQ. One of the only things he's been saying. He said that he admires Brad Pitt and he said that he worked with Ridley Scott in London. That's it.

Those are the only three specifics that he offers in that entire interview. And you watch something like that, which I think is an incredibly revealing text and that it says nothing. He has no, he seems so divorced from any reality. it seems like the characters that we've been seeing running around or, you know, just what he does. Emotion is motion. Another quote from him. What does that mean? I don't know.

It doesn't mean anything. But I think it's just because he, so I don't know. I don't know. I don't understand how he's thinking about these things. I don't know whether he's thinking literally. I'll psychoanalyze because what else am I going to do here. Obviously he's made some what you could describe his mistakes in the press in the past. The jumping on the couch.

Sure. the heck during Matt Lauer, the memorable moments where he came off as aggressive or odd, and there was a sense that he was diminishing the magic of the work that he was doing on screen by not only showing us too much of his true self or a performed self that was maybe closer to a true self, but that he was debunking the wonderful mystery of the movie star. And he's retrenched completely and has returned to reveal nothing. but when you have chosen to reveal nothing, exposing yourself at length,

reveals a kind of falsity, a kind of protective outer shell. And that's fine if you only want to make Ethan Hunt movies. I love Ethan Hunt movies. I got no problem with that. When you're making a movie that is as loud and dramatic and consequential in theory as Digger, I think you're expected to have something to say.

Yeah. To have some point of view. That doesn't mean you need to talk about your relationship with your family or with your faith or whatever it is that people are always wondering about with Tom Cruise, you know,

would it be useful to hear him talk about Scientology for an hour in depth with blistering honesty? Yes, is that ever going to happen? It's never going to happen. I do think that it would be helpful. I do also, I mean, again, he did not use proper nouns, but I feel like I learned a lot about

mentalities and the way people think and communicate and put words together in that world. There's a whole sense of the secret, you know, kind of like the manifestations of things. And this movie, maybe you could make the cases reflective of that, of the way that he sees the world in that specific respect. It's really interesting that he made his bones mostly playing ordinary guys doing extraordinary things. That was kind of his superpower.

We were talking to our colleague Tyler outside about the movie and he was like, I'm interested in the movie because Tom Cruise has never really played a Texan or, you know, a Western figure. He's never made a, he's never done a cowboy movie. And then we were thinking, like, well, he's never really played a Southerner either in a movie. And he's done accents, right? He does an accent interview with the vampire.

He does an accent in Far and Away. He's done some accent work, but mostly he plays Daniel Caffey and Mitch McDeer and the cornerback in all the right moves and, you know, the kid in risky business. And he plays the American every boy who just happens to be beautiful and stunningly charismatic. And so doing a transformational part at the stage of his career, the ultimate psychoanalysis is in the arc of the great movie stars, much like his forebearer, Paul Newman, presumably wants to win an Academy Award. Oh, so you think that's why. And he got one for Leo and it got a bunch of, and Birdman got a bunch of them. Yeah, I mean, I Noritu is one of the most Oscars-friendly filmmakers in the world.

This is a hugely audacious performance in which he's very good in the movie. He is. There is the most obvious it's time narrative that we've ever had. He was just given an honorary Oscar last year for his contributions to the film industry. So if you're being cynical, you think, yeah. He wants to win an Oscar. But I still, I would have liked to be in the war room for a number of reasons, but also to be like, is this the way that we're going to win an Oscar?

Because I don't know. Yeah. It's interesting because, like, he could have also done a very intense human drama. I've always wanted him and Cameron Crow to reunite on a movie because I just think that that Cameron Crow understands something about Tom Cruise that no other filmmaker understands. And the two movies that they made together, I have always been fascinated by. And they're, like, you know, they're like two mirrors staring at each other, you know,

and sending like a million. cascading images Yes. Yeah. You know, reflecting one another. But I think I understand where he's going here. Let's talk about Best Actor before we get into like the other Cruz movies that we really like.

Because I think that's why this movie exists. I think this movie exists as a $100 million production. Sure. Because Tom Cruise was like, yeah, I'll make an interview two movie. And let's make it fucking big. Yeah. Well, yeah, we know that. But I just, I have some questions in the decision making on his part that led to.

Because I don't know. We're going to talk about best actor and I don't know whether I have him in my five. I don't think I do either. Yeah. The interesting thing about this is I have seen

all but two of the movies here. So I feel like I'm coming from a place of being informed about this race. And this is an interesting race. And it's a race that seen from one direction includes Brad Pitt, Matt Damon,

and Tom Cruise. Seen from another direction includes a lot of older actors and a complete unknown. I'll read from the bottom up the list I made. Oh, this is an order?

More or less, but it doesn't include Tom Cruise. Well, yeah. And, okay. Go ahead. Jack O'Connell and Inc. Don't think it's happening. Brad Pitt and the further misadventures of

Cliff Booth. We haven't seen it yet. We haven't seen it. He's already won for this part, which means they'll be, and it's a Netflix film, there will be maybe a little bit less positivity in that direction. Robert Pattinson in prime time. Now, this movie's doing really well. It's successful. And young people really like it. It was number one yesterday at the box office. It beat Avengers, which is interesting. Also just say anecdotally, you know, they, press box did a whole episode about it and Brian and Brian and David both loved it kind of unreservedly. When we talked about it, we were like, I saw it with Brian, actually. This is, we loved it, but we were like, this is for the hardcore.

This is, you know, for the movie people. And it seems like everyone I know is just kind of like, wow, that's pretty good. And your point is right. And I think a huge part of it is Patenson, who I think now has, like, has been rubber-stamped in a way that he was not when he made Mickey 17. That's true. But I've got him low. Maybe that's wrong. You can tell me if that's wrong.

Okay. You're Borisov and Artificial. We haven't seen that movie yet. Yeah. Sebastian Stan and Fjord, which six months ago, three months ago, I would have said. is probably in a good spot, and now I don't think is in such a good spot because of the divisive nature of that movie, even though I still think that movie has a strong Oscar potential.

Yes. Seth Rogen and the invite, this is a bit of a sleeper to me. There's definitely a world where all four of them go in because that movie is so liked. Yes. Like, liked enough that everybody wants them in. But I think Seth is weirdly in the weakest position of the four of them

because he's the most familiar in terms of the performance he's giving. I guess that's true. And I bet he's... so liked. Yeah. I mean, he's great.

But it is also not classically what we think of as a best actor performance. It's more comic. Yeah. And sly and sarcastic. And sad. And sad.

Jafar Jackson for Michael? Well, I mean, yes. Ryan Gosling for Project Hail Mary. I don't know where I am on this. I don't know where I am. I know that that's Amazon's only movie and they're going to come back,

but they haven't gotten in the mix yet. I don't think Gosling is going to get nominated, but I do think the movie is going to get nominated for a bunch of awards. Yeah. I like Project Homeary. Okay, here's, I've got six people here plus crews. Okay. Right now this feels like the race to me.

Okay. Maybe Patenson has a surge. Maybe something else happens that I don't know about. Maybe you're a Borosov is extraordinary in the movie. Artificial. But I think it's Anthony Epilito for I Play Rocky. Yes. which critics are not going to like the movie.

Regular people are going to love the movie. The Academy is probably going to like it enough that's going to get attention, whether it gets in, is debatable. He's very, very good in the film. Pedro Pascal behemoth. Okay, if you say so. I don't think he's getting in.

Yeah. But I think he's on the periphery. Okay. John Turer for the only living pickpocket in New York. Yes. I think this is happening. Yeah. And I think these next three are definitively happening.

Andrews Scott and Nelson or Matt Damon in the Odyssey and John Malkovich and Wild Horse 9. I completely agree on the top three. I think Pattinson is a little closer than you think that we are, of course, in... You might be right. But that is recency bias. But that's also how these things happen. And the actor races start a lot earlier and solidify a lot earlier.

Like Malkovich, you know, was at the festivals and then it was done. And you can kind of just start, you know, cementing that now. Yeah. I mean, that one feels like it's happening officially. This could change. Andrew Scott is getting amazing reviews for a movie that. I think people really don't like very much. Damon's going to carry across the Odyssey Bridge.

To me, the question now is amongst those six, and let's say Pattinson is seven. Yeah. Where does Tom Cruise fit in? So the Academy loves Eniritu or did in Tilbardo and has historically not understood Cruz at all. And he got an honorary Oscar last year because, as, you know, in Steven Spielberg's words, he saved theaters. But they've nominated him three times. He has three competitive acting Academy Award nominations.

They just, they don't, they don't get it. They were snobs about it. And I think the Academy has changed in a lot of ways since then. But I think, and not really in the favor of, you know, the firm and its greatness. And it feels to me, you know, Tracy's kind of like you guys love all those 90s movies. and I love that for you. And it just feels how the Academy feels about Tom Cruise. Well, I've said this many times.

I feel that the Jerry McGuire year was his Oscar. He lost to Jeffrey Rush that year. The Jeffrey Rush win is something that happens, which is like a bit of an older actor who many people are not as familiar with, is overwhelmed that performance as David Health got was so big and so emotionally powerful. And Cruz, when he lost there,

that was his second nomination after born on the 4th of July, was 34 years old. And everybody was like, he'll be back. Not to worry. In 99, he's nominated for Magnolia, which is a very big and abrasive performance and a character that sometimes stars win for,

but not often. And then nothing since. He got a best picture nomination for Top Gun Maverick, but that's the only other time he's been nominated. And I'm not sure if Tom Cruise's reputation amongst cinephiles, Academy members, the world at large is as one of our great actors. It's as the movie star.

Right. That's how we understand him. Our contention has always been. He's a great actor. He's a really interesting actor. He's kind of an adventurous actor in a way that many movie stars are not. If you go and compare him to the matinee idols over time, you compare him to Clark Gable,

you compare him to Rock Hudson or Paul Newman or the beautiful men of movie history. Yeah. He's doing way crazier shit than them. He made eyes wide shut. He made Magnolia. Yeah. He did less Grossman. Like, he's a weird guy. He does weird, he's a rock of ages.

Like, he's a kook. Rock of ages. I know. And sometimes they don't work. That's the thing. You take risks. They don't work. And the last 10 years is saying, like, whoa, actually slow down.

Right. And with the exception of rock of ages, everything that you were listing is 2000. It's, you know, 25 years ago. Yeah. It's pre. But you had an interview with the vampire. Have you seen him in an interview with the vampire? Yes, I have.

Yeah. It's really weird. Kirsten forever, you know? Yeah. Does he still send her show? shoes? The coconut No, or maybe

someone else sends, no, I think he sent her shoes. Someone's sending someone's shoes. All of that is before 2005.

And then 2005, like, rock of ages, yes, is weird, but you're giving him credit for being weird good and sometimes more frequently,

weird goes bad. I'm just giving him credit for being, for taking risks, for doing things that many of his peers wouldn't do. and

Valkyry was a swing, man. He was like, I'm going to make a movie about Nazis who attempted to kill Hitler. And he was like, this is normal. This is a cool thing that cool actors do. And that's the sort of thing that you would see in a movie in the 70s, but not in 2008,

and certainly, I'm with Brian Singer. I just want to let you know that he sends Dakota Fanning shoes. Dakota Fanning. That makes sense. You seen collateral recently? Not in the past, like, three or four years,

but he's amazing in it. Post 2000. Well, sure. What year? 2004. Right. What I said, I said 2005 is the dividing line. Yeah.

Okay? And that was 21 years ago. Edge of Tomorrow. That's a slapstick comedy and a sci-fi action thriller. It is very good. And he is good running around in it. And Emily Blent's arms are amazing. Uh-huh.

Those are your takeaways. But it's different. That's not, that's not 90, that's not 86 through 96. Okay. It's not cutting time. Is Tom Cruise getting nominated for? for Best Actor. No.

Do you think this movie will be an epic financial fiasco? Yes. Or just a disappointment. Where did Mickey 17 net out? I think worldwide not terrible. Okay. But I think this movie is going to end up doing worse. Yeah.

But I'm just, I'm looking for it. As we learned from the summer box office game, comps don't help. We learn that in business, too. But I'm just curious. I mean, Mickey 17 made $134 million worldwide. Is Dagger going to make $134 million worldwide? I don't think so. No.

It might open sub 10 million this weekend. And come in like fourth place behind. This is why I was saying at the beginning, you know, I think there are a lot of people who want to know but don't want to sit through it. So that's not a good look. That's not auspicious. This is the challenge, too, with movies like this is in our society, a movie that doesn't work. is a wait for streaming. Yeah.

It's not actually, we haven't gotten to the place yet in the revival of moviegoing culture where interesting failures are worthy of your time and money. They're worthy of your second screen experience while sitting on your couch three months after everybody else. Yeah. But it's a movie that ought to be seen on a big screen. Like, why go to all this trouble of staging this elaborate machine? Well, I mean, I think that's just a larger question about the movie.

Why go to all this trouble? You're right. To make an interesting podcast. It's fun to just talk about stuff. Yeah. I've been looking forward to this and I still don't know. I don't feel resolved on it.

And I don't think, I mean, that was the interesting thing. It also would have been so easy for us to just be like, Interreat 2 sucks, fuck this movie. Yeah. I don't feel that way. No. I do feel that anything that gets the kind of reaction and engagement and me just thinking about it every day

and being like, hmm, well, what about this? And oh, remember this part. And, you know, has you asking questions of, like, what is satire and what is comedy? And what is the meaning or use of art? And what is the meaning or use of Tom Cruise? I mean, you don't have to provide those answers. So just to ask the question is interesting. But I don't know if I want to watch it again.

That's the thing. I will. But that was the other interesting thing. in doing the Inor Reto rewatch that I did, that I did because it is such an Enner Reto movie. So I went back, I did Amaro's Paro, which I just didn't enjoy as much as, you know, the first time around. And I was like, okay, this is a little cute.

I get it. And manipulative. And Birdman, just really, really tough hang the second time around. There is a, there's the freshness and the, you can only be provoked in the way these films provoke you. once and after that you get it. Well, you got to remember that with Birdman, that was a pretty dramatic recontextualization,

redefinition of an Ninaritu movie. You know, there was the novelty of the false single shot style, you know, where they're kind of hiding all the threading of those shots, but still seeing it on screen, you know, for the first time on opening weekend, I was like, wow, this is really cool. He really pulled something off here.

Plus, the sort of the bravora nature of the acting style and the cleverness, air quotes, of the script, was just different from his previous four movies. I mean, his previous four movies were these, like, dead serious treatises on the pain in the world and how, you know, demolished we are. Yeah. Yes.

Right. Yeah. How, like, you know, agony is an infectious disease. So it was different at the time. But, like, as I've said before, like, just looking at it with any critical lens, the movie just feels really shallow. Yeah. I'm going to see this again.

I'm probably going to see this again on a big screen. But do you think it's getting... Do you think Cruz is getting nominated, Sean? I don't think you gave your answer. I do. You do? I do. I also think...

I'll add this. This movie is ripe for a 10 years later reclamation. Oh, totally. There will be a cult to this movie. A thousand percent. Because it's going to seem right about a lot of things. It's also just very big and audacious in a way that people love, that I love. I love when

filmmakers are like, fuck it, we are going to as you said, 15. And I do because I think the bottom of this race is a little soft. And to me it's really a question if I play Rocky plays really, really well.

And they campaign epilito well. If he's a good talker, if he's charming, if he's good on the scene, they love an ingenue, right? And this is otherwise a lot of old hands. I love that fact about have the top three contenders and best actor this year have all played Ripley. Yeah.

Isn't that great now? Malcovich in Ripley's game. Andrew Scott in the Ripley series and of course the talented Mr. Ripley for Damon. And there's something Ripley-esque about Tom Cruise, knowing that he moves through the world, wouldn't you say? He would be good at it. Yeah, he would have been a hell of a Ripley. I would watch it now.

Does it have to be, yeah, listen. No, there's older Ripley stories, right? Aren't some of the later Highsmith novels about him being older guys? I think that's what the Malakovich film is. Is the later stage, Ripley? Okay, top 10 cruise performances. I forgot to rank them. I just wrote out 10, so I'll do it live now.

He'll do it live. Yeah. We don't have to talk through every single movie. Did you rank yours as well? I did. I have to make a decision right now because I'm stuck on something at the moment about what to do.

Okay. Would you like me to do mine and then you can do yours since you're not ranked? Sure. You don't want to go... You want to go back and forth? I thought that we could, but we don't have to.

Okay. Okay. Number 10, what do you got? Risky business. Not on my list. Wow. Okay. You don't know how to have fun

and you don't know the power of dancing in your socks. I've never done that. Okay. That's not surprising to me. I've danced. I dance every day with my daughter. Yeah.

In my underwear while wearing ray bands, it's never happened. Okay. It will never happen. That's my solemn promise to you on this show. My number 10 is Mission Impossible. which is just an acknowledgement of a broader canon of work

and also because I love him as Ethan Hunt and the sequence where he's sitting across from Henry Churny and he's like, Kittridge, you've never seen me very upset. I think it's fantastic. De Palma aids it. His performance in the other movies is like up and down, you know, a little non-entity at times. So I, at nine, just to build a beautiful list and podcast

together. Nine, I'll do fallout, which is my mission impossible choice. Because I do think that we need to honor just the Tom Cruise jumping out of planes and just absolutely like ripping on guys. And that is, that's the peak of it for sure. That is a form of acting. It completely is. And he's one of the best at it. He's a great physical performer. There's a ton of running in both of these Mission Impossible movies. That's one of his signatures. Okay, good. We're getting a little bit of differentiation already. Okay. Number nine, I've given myself a real challenge here. Okay.

Are you also ranking these lives? No, no, I've just, I have to pick one or the other of these two movies. Okay. So here's what I'll tell you what I'm choosing between for number nine. I'm choosing between the color of money and Rain Man. I feel that Rain Man is his most underrated performance. Sure, yes. Same era.

Yeah. And they come right around the same time and it's when he's hot shit young crews, but he's no longer like high school student crews. Mm-hmm. And we've talked about this. many times this came up on the rewatchable's conversation quite a bit, but the best performance in Rain Man is not Dustin Hoffman. It's Tom Cruise.

And Tom Cruise is the center of the movie. He's the fulcrum of the movie. And he exhibits, I think, a lot of pathos and a lot of complexity in a way that a lot of his performances don't. The color of money, he's playing kind of a dumb guy, but he did learn how to play pool and he is on fire. He's, you can't look away from him in every single scene. He's a light show, but it's Paul Newman's movie. I want to know where Paul Newman is going. Why don't you do Rain Man and I'll do Color of Money at number eight?

Because it is my, it's on my list in terms of like the young peacocking crews, which is a real element of what he did. He did play a lot of like American, you know, like the normal guys. But they always had a little edge. They were always a little too hot for their britches. They were always like, look over here. Look at me. And color of money. you know,

werewolves of London forever. I love how we're mixing it up right now. Okay. My number eight is Vanilla Sky. Okay. So you just want to be in the club with Lance Oppenheim? No.

I was in the club before Lance was born. Okay. I built the club. Okay. Lance is welcome. As I said, the Cruz Crow Project matters to me. I think it's nice that you guys have this club.

And once again, it's for you. Well, it's not, I mean, Lance said it's his favorite movie of all time. Yeah, yeah, no, I know. I wouldn't put it that high. I do think the movie has some flaws. What I love is the same thing that I love about Digger, which is like, what a weird swing for the most famous person in the world to do.

To make a movie about being the most famous person in the world. To make a movie about fearing, becoming hideous, and unloved, and lost. It's a very strange movie. It's always been interesting to me that Cruz and Crow together made these, like, this pair of Midlife Crisis movies. Yeah. But you could make the case that Cruz was not yet at his mid-level. life crisis when he made these movies, but he almost like foretells them.

Or he just has several, you know. Or yeah. You can do a lot when you're that rich and famous. Maybe he keeps going. Every quarter, he hits a new one. But yeah, I've always been a big fan. So your number eight will be the color of money. So what's your number seven?

Great question. Let's go with Top Gun Maverick. Okay. Which is, you know, Tim and old guy, nostalgia, Jesus mode. But I found it very moving. And he plays, listen. One of the signature notes of this podcast.

You being moved by Top Gun Maverick. I mean, you know, it does, it is also a spot for like the absurdity of late Tom Cruise and what Tom Cruise has kind of become as a character on this podcast. And the movie is like very aware of that. You see a picture of his bicep before you see him, you know? just multiple shots of him on all the motorcycle grinning with the theme song but I do think that he finds in the moments with Miles Teller and you know in this the scenes with John Hamm there is like the Val Kilmer scene when he just is talking to it's he can still act he finds humanity in those moments

and it's the best type of nostalgia yeah Maverick is a certain kind of a cruise part is like a little more wolfish, a little more devilish, you know? Yeah. He's like a, he's the risk taker character. He's the loose cannon who breaks the rules. Sure. You know, he lives his own way. Sure. That's why he's never elevated.

What's he supposed to, you should have been a colonel by now? Is that what Ham says to him? But he's also in Top Gun Maverick, like, you know, he's softened. He's still, he's still bopping around. He's still getting in trouble. He's still. Monically laughing in bed fully clothed with Jennifer Connolly. You know, that scene is interesting.

But he made up a whole new version of football. Yeah. To create teamwork. Yeah. What's that game called? Double offense to something. I don't know. No, it's like Thunderball or something.

It's something very stupid. Okay. My number six is collateral. Yeah. Oh, I'll do collateral at six, too. Oh, great. Okay. There we go.

Yo, homie, is that my briefcase? Yeah, sure. Again, another thing that I think interesting actors do, which is like, I'm going to play the villain. I'm going to play the scariest person in the movie. It was interesting. I was rewatching some sequences from this last night, the scene where he assassinates the jazz musician,

the scene where he gets his briefcase back after Jamie Fox is mugged in his car. And he looks in that movie with that hair the way that he should look now. He should have a head of white and gray hair. Yeah. And he should be a little older and a little more grizzled. And I watched him on GMA and I was like, Why is it important to you to look like this now? No, I know.

You know, I was thinking about this recently because, I mean, should's a powerful word, right? And should is a strong word. It's how he would look if it were the 80s. But I was thinking about it in terms of also Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, who obviously, you know, have a different interpretation of what it means to be late 50s and early 60s. But like, what are we supposed to do as we age? Like, is everyone just supposed to, like, go gray, cut their hair off and shop at Talbets? Like, can't we, as the world, you know, turns? I honor your fears about aging.

I'll just say for an actor. Yeah. Especially for male actors. I'll limit this to male actors so as not to indict Sandra Bullock or Nicole Kidman or any other actress who, whose bankability is somehow premised on their attractiveness. But for male actors, especially male movie. stars. Aging unlocks a level of gravitas and clarity to the work that is usually very powerful and letting yourself be exposed as an older person instead of doing what he doesn't digger, which is pretend to be an older person. Right. Which if he did not have the psychotic diet and

physical regimen and beliefs and dyeing his hair, he might actually just look like Digger. You know, like most normal men when they get into their 60s and 70s just start to look like Digger. And there's not really anything wrong with that. And it has served many, many great movie stars well to get a little bit older. William Holden got older. He looked good. He's handsome in Network. He's actually quite sexy in Network, even though he's a grizzled 60-something. He draws Diana Christensen in that movie. That's true. But what he's playing in Network is very different and the types of roles that Cruz wants to play. Sure.

You know, Russell Crow has aged naturally, and now he's just like in Nuremberg. So... I'm doing fine work. I kind of enjoyed Nuremberg. So I don't know if it's limited to bankability and what you want to do and what audiences or studios or the... Except in terms of the way you look and what roles you can play, I don't think is gender-specific. There's, I think, a much wider... offshoot of this conversation, I think would be interesting, but maybe not for a movie podcast, that is sort of about, like, the crisis of aging that is happening amongst Gen X and younger boomers and this desperate desire.

Like, the sort of, like, plastic surgery late in life thing used to be the terrain of, like, wealthy, kooky people. Right. And now has become far more common amongst people with means. Yes. And I mean, it's not limited to just Gen X and boomers. I mean, there are many 25-year-olds also. No, no, of course. I think that's a downstream effect of it being, like, more accessible, of the technology

improving, of the ability to kind of like manipulate your image via social media, even just like makeup and hair care and all those things are just so much more elevated than they were 20 or 50 years ago. But it means that we're like where our culture are no longer comfortable with aging. And you could say Tom Cruise is a signal figure in that. The fact that he is frequently looks like or is at least attempting to look the way that he did in 2005. Right.

And again, I do think there is a difference in the genders and sort of like what the expectations are of people there. There's some. But there's something a little sad about like an unwillingness to look the way that you naturally would look as an actor because it's like those are your tools. Your tools are not having a frozen face because you've manipulated your face because of surgeries. That actually limits your ability to go further into a character, to be even more human.

You're becoming more inhuman. Yeah, I think that's true. And then it becomes the differences between, like, surgical or, you know, physical interventions and then just styling and how you position yourself in the world and what, you know, what you wear. And do you hold your shirt up when you are on the cover of a national magazine and all, like, all of these sorts of things? And, like, they're related. But I think there's there's what someone does. and then also like our concept of how someone of a certain age should look is interesting.

Yeah. And why is it what it is? And why is it either 25 or, you know, 90? And that there's like there's just this area in between where everyone from the age of 35 to 68 now kind of looks the same. Yes. And that is weird. But also why do I need to, you know, why do you need to? You know, why do you need to look 90? Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. I mean, some of it is...

This is really down the rabbit hole. Yeah, whatever. I think milf culture has completely infected this. Okay. Now, I'm obviously 44. And the thing that happens when you get older as a man is... Sure. Women who are a little older are much more attractive to you than they ever would have been. And you get this kind of boomerang effect where when you're like 11 and you meet your friend's hot mom and you're like, oh, that mom is hot. Right. And I never thought about this this way. And then you get to 44 and you're like, all the moms are hot. But... because of the way that Milf post-Stiffler's mom is narrativized to us that that is more of a sweet spot there was a time 10 years ago

where I thought Kardashian was the thing that was influencing our perceptions of beauty and I feel like we have moved away from that as kind of like the the way that Marilyn Monroe was once a vision of sexual desire this is all interconnected to Cruz though because Cruz similarly is like

what is my most appealing masculine age? When was we? When was I at my absolutely most beautiful and appealing to the widest swath of people? I do know the answer to that. What is it? It's 1992, a few good men, which is not my number five. But that's when he's the handsomest. You can put us back on track.

Okay. These are some interesting thoughts of having in my 40s. Some of it is also just about like, part of the reason that Kardashians are so influential, aesthetically is just also because they coincided with the rise of, like, of Instagram and so there's just like a visual flattening effect in everything. thing has to look the same way. Obviously, Instagram face. And I think that's true to, like, aesthetic features and age and the way we dress and all of the above. Anyway, but not Tom Cruise, who's still just trying to look like, like Maverick. We both have collateral number six.

Yeah. What's your number five? It's a good movie. I don't know. This gets really hard. I guess Top Gun. You've got Top Gun and Top Gun Maverick. Yeah, they're different phases of life. I acknowledge Tom Cruise's aging process, even if you don't. Not aging. Emotionally. He's experiencing things. Old people have value. Of course I agree.

I'm advocating for him to get old. I love old people. He can get old and still color his hair. I was obsessed with my grandparents, my great uncles and aunts. I was so interested in them. Do you think that if you were like, so you have like a good silver gray going, right? Not according to my daughter who says my hair is gray. No, but it's like if it goes white.

If it changes color, it will. It's going to go totally white. Yeah, my dad is white right now. And then are you going to, intervention? You're just going to go. I've said I don't intend to diet. I don't, you know, I don't, will it be really weird if I'm talking about milfs on a pod when I'm 52 and shock white? It would probably be weird. I wouldn't be ideal. Yeah. But I am who I am. I mean, I really believe in this. Like, I actually think. Okay. Well, listen, you're an example to the kids. But it just, it is also like you haven't had to confront it yet. You know, if like I go, I could go my, my dad. the way of my dad or the way of my mom. Your mom is white silver?

My mom is just, it's like pure white at this point. And my dad, you know, slowly went from salt and pepper to just, I mean, just great hair on my dad. And so if it's gradual, maybe I would lean into it. I'm not prescriptive about this. It's just for me. Okay. For me, I don't really like spending a lot of time on this stuff. Yeah. Okay. I know. You got to be in your spreadsheets. Congratulations.

There's other things I wish I was doing, you know? So whenever I'm doing something like that, whenever I'm like fussing over something like that, which is part of the reason again, I'm just to bring back to Cruz, I'm like, he's really worried about this. He's really interested in this. He's like at a whole machine that accounts for all of these things and maybe machines that he uses to account for them as well. Yeah, but it is a huge part of his job and has been his, it's not like he was always a huge matinee movie star idol. Totally. Like even, you know, and Top Gun is because just him in the jacket, it's him playing volleyball. Yeah. It's incredibly important. And this is like, you know, cocky, jingoistic. Like, I can, edgy Tom Cruise, who you're still rooting for.

I mean, you can't not have Maverick on the list. I don't have Maverick on the list. I forgot to mention my number seven, which is Minority Report. Oh, okay. He's good in it. He is really good in it. He is very good in it. Yeah.

Again, being asked to play. grief being asked to play Fear and You know very hitchcockian thriller Very carry grand kind of performance of like a man wrongfully accused Desperately trying to get away from something But my my top six I think is indicative of kind of what I like about Cruz Versus what the matinee

Audience likes about him and I think what some of his iconography is Like I like when he goes a little bit outside of his own beauty And tries to examine something a little bit deeper number five is born on the 4th of July Which I think is one of his very best performances. I think that's my number two, I think. It's like, he's incredible in it. The top five is very tightly compacted for me

because they're mostly about risks that are being taken with one exception. So your number five's top gun. So what is your number four? One of the Fourth of July, of course. He plays Ronkovic, Vietnam veteran who comes to speak out against the war, a Long Island classic

and transformational performance. And this should have been his Oscar. I think. I know you think it's Jerry McGuire. Who did he lose to? I'm going to look it up. But, I mean, he's sensational in it. And I think he lost to someone very worthy, as I recall.

Yes. I think it's one of those tough years. Yeah, he lost to Daniel DeLis and my left foot. Yeah, well, that's one where it's like, then D.DL's going to get a couple. He's, Daniel, Dano de Lewis is really good, but I would give it to Tom Cruise in that one. It's fine. They're not. Okay.

So I guess at four, I'll do a few good men. You Good Men is also my number four Okay, that's beautiful This is my favorite Performance This is, I mean, you know This is one of the most important movies On this podcast

Yep And rock star movie star shit Yeah I just Everything about He's funny He's angry He's principled

But he's also You know Outside the lines And he's not always on his best behavior He goes toe to toe with Nicholson He looks so handsome in the uniform I believe he wins Sure, yeah

I mean, well I think he does in the actual court of law Well, we know that But I think in the court of acting Many people would give Nicholson the W But I've always thought Cruz Gives the more

thrilling performance I want the truth Yeah But then But he is also just setting up Nicholson I don't know whether I agree with you But maybe he wins the movie

But not the scene I strenuously object Anyway You doctored the law books Yeah I mean if you can manage It's just a showcase for a very specific kind of Movie Star part Lawyer gets to give big speeches

It gets to be highly emotional Gets to be skeptical Gets to be downtrodden Gets to be drunk Yes Gets to be absurd Gets to place softball Number three what is it

So I guess I don't know So, I mean, the two movies I have left are Magnolia and Jerry McGuire, what's your, what is, what are your, I know both of those are in there for you. What's eyes wide shot is number three for me. Did I forget eyes wide shut? Oh, I did. Oops. Okay.

You've got two top gun movies on your list. You're not going to take the top gun movies away from me, but maybe I would take eyes wide shut instead of. Fuller of money? I don't know. Okay. You have eyeswit shut. It's fine. We have them all.

I didn't mean to forget eyes wide shut. I've always wondered. I've probably opined on this in the past. But I've always wondered with eyes wide shut and with vanilla sky. How much of those were self-reflexive acts to take those parts? Yeah. Because eyes wide shut, which is about a doctor who enters a world of mystery and sexual ridiculousness and power. and power

is very much a movie about being Tom Cruise. You know, that he's constantly being gawked at and he's being singled out and he kind of loses his self

throughout the process of that movie. Women are throwing themselves at him kind of strangely. He feels like he's in some sort of massive conspiracy

in which he is at the center. And the same is true of Vanil Sky. It's so crazy that that's the next movie he made after working with Cooper for two and a half years on Eyes Wide Shut.

But again, I think he just totally turns himself over to that movie. And he still talks about that movie. Working with Stanley and how special that was to him. And the way that he's like a, he's your classic like, I want to get beat up. I want to be the ball of clay. I want to be told by the great maestro's what I should do. Tom Cruise has never directed a movie.

And he's produced a lot of movies, but never directed a single movie. Unlike so many of the figures that we kind of venerate and talk through and their careers evolve and he still wants to be in someone else's hands. And when he does that, he usually, when it's somebody who's really talented, he gives his best performances, even with Inorritu, who we're so shaky on.

He's doing something cool in Digger, something big that you can't say of a lot of the kind of middle of the road stuff that he's been doing. So number three is Eyes Wide Show. What's Isle? What's number three for you? I'll do Magnolia at three.

Magnolia is my number two. Yeah. You know, obviously not as much of the movie is on his shoulders. Speaking of people I'd like to see him reunite with. It'd be nice to see Paul Thomas Anderson and Tom Cruise make a movie together again. I don't know if that will ever be possible. There's always been some speculation about what the master did into their relationship.

Yeah. He's extraordinary as Frank T.J. Mackie. Funny, weird. Tom Cruise is not frequently very funny. You mentioned he's very funny in a few good men, which is not a comedy, but he is funny in it. Right. And that's because the particular. ratatat of the Sorkin lines

fits with him fits with his delivery so he is funny but he is also kind of ultimately like the emotional crux of Magnolia and it's so out there and it's so weird it's like it's one branch of what Tom Cruise

can do which is why I put it at number three instead of our shared number one which is of course Jerry McGuire which is the whole range of what he can do yep total package yeah um Still think it's his best performance. I still think it's arguably his most fully realized movie.

Like a proper character study. And a great romance. And a great inside a world exploring how sports and sports agencies and that job works in a way that you've never really seen before. Right. Also, very idiosyncratic movie in terms of the way that it's structured with the cutbacks and forth to his agent mentor character and a real like lessons movie. I think it's brilliantly written. I think it's very funny. is aided by the fact that it's got supporting performances and a world around it.

It is so rich that lets it be this proper character study. But yeah, I mean, I've always felt like this is his, this is him at his best. Yeah. It's so specific and strange and also so popcorn at the same time. Yep. And has all of the, his character gets a lot of moments from, you know, show me the money. And, but also that everyone else remembers John. Jonathan Lipnicki or the, you know, you had me at hello, you had me at hello that it's really,

it's kind of incredible what he manages to do within such a broad and big movie. Yeah, I mean, he's also playing like a, not a very good guy. Sure. Well, he often doesn't play good guys. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. Until Ethan Hunt.

What's he trying to tell us? Yeah. Well, then he tried to tell us that he was asking us to trust him one last time. I'll take another Mission Impossible movie tomorrow. Sure. I mean, the last, the byplanes, listen. Wonderful stuff. Tom and Trammell Tillman together. Bring him back. You must be out of your mind.

We didn't talk about Tramilman and your mother and mother. I know, because I didn't really want to spoil it for people, but when that happened, I just sat right up. Like, hello! Nice to see him not doing a normal performance, too. Not that, like, really mannered severance, Mission Impossible kind of performance. All right. Well, that's it. Okay.

This was the Digger episode. Great. How do you feel? Unresolved, but okay. You know, I'm glad we had the discussion. I'm glad that you weren't like... I loved it, masterpiece. Yeah, and or this is a...

This is total drek. I'm glad that you at least thought it was interesting. It's interesting. I thought you were really going to hate it. And I did feel... I sensed that the turn, the twist, that you would get on board with it because it is pretty artfully done.

And I feel like it's weirdly not gotten... I don't usually read reviews of movies before we do the episodes. And I read maybe three or four this morning, partly out of kind of morbid curiosity, but partly just to jog my memory of some of the things that we've seen so I can really properly access the sequences.

But, you know, I just feel like it's a real knives out situation for this film in a way that I find fascinating. You mean the critics have their knives out. Correct. It's not Ryan Johnson's Knives out. I, that usually means that like it's accomplished something. Yeah. It's gotten a reaction.

Yes. So, and it got one out of us, even if we are still a little bit, trying to figure out where that is. Mm-hmm. All right. Good chat. Good job. I'm headed to New York. Congratulations.

Five movies and five days. That's my plan. Okay. I think I may be seeing several of those movies here while you're there. You're seeing Cameron Winter? You may be seeing artificial. Yeah, I need them to confirm that. I am seeing artificial.

Okay. I think I'm going to be able to see another. film. I'm going to see making Marie Antoinette. Saw that last night. I know. Lots to discuss. October. Can I tell you something? Yes. I was thinking about this on the way here. Okay.

I feel like a lot of October is going to be this same kind of conversation about Digger. Where it's like, this is interesting. Yeah. Did this work? So that's great news for us. I don't know whether that's great news for the filmmakers and or the box. office, but that's where we cook. That's the interesting thing about this podcast is that we kind of want things to be rocky because then we have a lot to discuss. More to talk through.

Yeah. I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel that way. And I always feel that way in October and I always hate August and September because the films are usually so rickety. Yes. And I love October. And this October. You also hate March and April for that reason because you're tired and you're hungover from the Oscars. Yeah. We got Project Tell Mary this year. That was great. I would love for there to be one big movie right after the. Academy Awards. That would be nice. We do get Thomas Crown Affair next March. Yeah. But I'm just

thinking through in my mind. I'm like, okay, so next weekend, we got Verity over the weekend. That's what we'll talk about on Monday's episode. And then other mommy, social reckoning, we've got Sense and Sensibility, we've got whale fall, we've got Clayface, we've got La Bola Negra opening. We've got a bunch

of things that are really rich to talk about, and really in the bones of the show. Plus we got Halloween coverage. Yeah. Plus we got a live show. It's going to be good. It's going to be fun. Okay. I'm glad to see your spirits are up. Okay. Thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders, for his work on this episode. Thanks to Lucas Kavanaugh for his production support.

They both came today wearing cowboy hats. Shout out to them. Yeah, Verity. Monday. Colleen Hoover adaptation. Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett. We'll see you then. For 50 years, Canadians have wondered what the names of IKEA furniture mean. Like Natopa, the guardrail for children's beds. Natopa means giving your favorite person room to grow. It means their safety and your piece of... No.

In Swedish, Natapa means night monkey. Mark! Ikea. 50 years of Swedishness at home. Look, he's wearing little pajamas. So cute.