Cascading down.

Challenge #9

Rec Us Your Newest Thing. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Tom Cruise movies.

When you absolutely, positively have to distract yourself from everything else going on in your life.

It's not exactly "new" because I've been actively tracking down and watching them for the last six months or so, but in contrast to everything else going on right now, aside from original projects, it's still a fairly novel interest. After someone recommended the Mission Impossible movies as examples of well-choreographed action scenes where it's easy to keep track of all the participants, I decided to get them all from the library for a personal marathon. Then I figured I might as well put in hold requests for the Top Gun movies. Before any of those came through, I saw Edge of Tomorrow because I had access to the streaming service and it was the only canon from this vid I hadn't seen, and if it was as delightful as the other three, I might as well give that movie a shot. When I was finished watching it, I checked to see what else I had ready access to through the library and assorted streaming services and started working my way through everything available to me.

In looking over his movies, both the ones I'd seen at various points - Minority Report, Magnolia, Tropic Thunder, Risky Business, Collateral - and the ones I've recently watched, it's surprising how consistently good they are. Even the stuff that's not very good always has something going for it: enough jokes to be funny, enough solid material to imagine the much better movie hiding just out of frame, enough entertainment value to be worth the time it took to watch. Even when the movie isn't up to the standards of, for example, Born on the Fourth of July or Eyes Wide Shut, he's always giving a good performance. I'm not surprised the following he has, or the fact that there's still some old school fansites devoted to him with well-curated and well-organized photo galleries with scans of magazine articles going back decades. I'm genuinely enjoying this and I'm going to be a little disappointed when I run out of back catalogue.

In making an effort to watch pretty much everything he's done as a way to insulate myself from a lot of things that are far beyond my control and influence, from global wars to my brother's upcoming wedding, it's both inescapable and an escape to think about the nature of fame and celebrity, the concept of movie stars, the rise of clickbait media and the shift of how the public and private spheres are conceptualized. Much has been said about all those things, and more, by people who know what they're talking about, which is why I don't bother trying to articulate it myself. That said, I realized a little while ago that Cruise is both the world's highest profile cult victim and someone who possesses such a level of fame that it'd take a heavens parting and God speaking down to Earth level of miracle for him to get the kind of sustained removal and distance necessary for leaving any cult, much less that one.

I'm sure there's been plenty said about that, too, though it's not something I've deliberately gone looking for.

What I did go looking for were movies where Cruise is allowed to be short, because if nothing else, imagining Henry Cavill looming even more massively constantly amuses me.