Top 5 Tom Cruise films
I watched the rerun of Tom Cruise's appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart tonight, so I decided to do a Tom Cruise top five. I pretty much do a list a day, but might need to break out of the movie mold for awhile. We'll see. I managed to get a couple of responses to the Tom Hanks top five, but no one stepped up to the Speilberg challenge. Will I get any takers for Cruise? We'll see. I actually like Tom Cruise movies, for no other reason than the guy does everything on a big scale. He doesn't just lend his name to some crappy movie, if he's in it, you can usually be sure that you'll get your money's worth. Sure, grand scale, big budget movies might not be your thing, but it plays well on the big screen. I've seen 15 of his 27 films, so over half then, so this will be a bit of a challenge.
Notable Cruise films I haven't seen: Collateral (maybe next week), Magnolia, Born On the Fourth of July, and, amazingly, I've never seen all of Top Gun. On to the list...
5. Mission: Impossible (this one narrowly beat out The Last Samurai, maybe only because I've seen it more often. Samurai just dropped in price by about half, so I'll probably buy it soon and re-evaluate. Still, I really liked the first M:I, and kinda liked the second one too, allowing that there was a definite drop-off in quality)
4. Rain Man (I actually hadn't seen this in its entirety until fairly recently. It's pretty damn good. Dustin Hoffman deserved won an Oscar for it, as did the film and director Barry Levinson, but I feel Cruise's performance was overlooked because it wasn't as flashy. In many ways, he had the harder job, making the superficial Charlie Babbitt a sympathetic character in the end)
3. Vanilla Sky (this is a film that some people really hate, and I can see why. Not me. I thought it was spectacular. As evidenced by this, and the next two, I'm obviously more a fan of recent Cruise work, and not Top Gun/Days of Thunder, which I also have not seen, Cruise-era work)
2. Minority Report (a top-notch sci-fi/action/thriller. Speilberg and Cruise at the top of their respective games. This is what I mean by Cruise delivering on a big scale)
1. Jerry Maguire (this is the second time this movie has appeared number one on a Saint top five. Maybe I should do Cuba Gooding Jr. and Renée Zellwiger top fives and get it out of the way. Hmmmm... could I even do Cuba Gooding Jr. and Renée Zellwiger top fives? Checking imdb.... just barely with Cuba and nope for Zellwiger. Hmmm... I'll just give Jerry Maguire two more number ones and be done with it. Alright, I shop-lifted the pootie)