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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:15Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Fennessy.

• 0:16Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm Amanda Dobbins.

• 0:17Sean Fennessey?

  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 Gonzales Inarritu, starring Tom Cruise. Longtime listeners of this show know that we have been fascinated by Cruise 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, its 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.

• 1:02Sean Fennessey?

  We'll get into it all right after this. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions, reach, and reacts. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not-so-great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that: bullspend. Instead, why not invest in what looks good to your CFO? LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Reach the right buyers with LinkedIn Ads. You can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So cut the bullspend, advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a $250 credit for the next one.

• 1:45Sean Fennessey?

  Just go to LinkedIn.com/thebigpicture. That's LinkedIn.com/thebigpicture. Terms and conditions apply.

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• 3:24Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. This is probably the least amount of information that we've ever shared with one another about a movie in the history of this show.

• 3:34Amanda Dobbins?

  I did not even open the outline. You kind of gave me the bullet points of the rubrics.

• 3:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, you know the run of show today.

• 3:43Amanda Dobbins?

  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 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 work. 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...

• 4:24Sean Fennessey?

  So Digger, not a masterpiece?

• 4:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Digger, not a masterpiece. You guys want to do a Chyron in the booth, sure?

• 4:29Sean Fennessey?

  M- Amanda Dobbins, comma, The Big Picture.

• 4:33Amanda Dobbins?

  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 or not.

• 5:16Amanda Dobbins?

  But that is, the two things you can say is not a masterpiece and the most annoying movie I've ever made.

• 5:21Sean Fennessey?

  You just jumped right into it. I haven't even, no details about the movie here. We have no summary.

• 5:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Sorry.

• 5:25Sean Fennessey?

  Who else is in the film? You wanted to launch in.

• 5:27Amanda Dobbins?

  We've been waiting. We haven't talked about it.

• 5:30Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 5:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 5:40Sean Fennessey?

  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, produced, and co-written by Inarritu, co-written with Alexander Dinalaris, Nicholas Giaccone, and Sabina Berman. These are all people he's worked with before on screenplays. It's shot by Emmanuel Levesque, Chivo. This is a return for Chivo to an Inarritu film. They took some time off on Bardo. The music is by Cosmo Shell Drake. In addition to Cruise, Riza Med, John Goodman, Sandra Heuler, Michael Stuhlbarg, Robert John Burke, Emma Darcy, Sophie Wild, and Jesse Plemons appear in the film.

• 6:21Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 6:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 6:40Sean Fennessey?

  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 its unpleasantness is a feature or a bug is, I think, part of a wider conversation about Inarritu in general.

• 7:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 7:01Sean Fennessey?

  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, which is Tom Cruise. Like, 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 has not typically been the case for Inarritu in the first wave of reaction for most of his films, all the way up till Bardo.

• 7:43Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 8:11Amanda Dobbins?

  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...

• 8:32Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, the showmanship of any Inaritu film like is is very purposeful and very directed in 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 in that 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 Inaritu style, which means that it is incredibly fussy and it is often almost, it's often like very remedial, you know, and the, the writing and the, the, 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

• 9:16Amanda Dobbins?

  face, as you said, but it does have a couple of 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, he is in full old makeup prosthetics, doing like the Texas voice with a animatronic cat. And then there are a couple of 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. So that makes it-

• 9:59Sean Fennessey?

  I think there's, 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, we're big, just big fans of Cruise. 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

• 10:42Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 10:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 10:54Sean Fennessey?

  At least on the surface. And then we can talk about what it is when we get into spoiler territory.

• 10:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, which we're, which we're gonna do.

• 11:02Sean Fennessey?

  We have to do it to have a proper conversation about the film.

• 11:04Amanda Dobbins?

  And I know there are going to be a lot of looky-loos who just want to know what we think about this and start the episode.

• 11:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 11:09Amanda Dobbins?

  And I'm, I'm begging you to, if you're, 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.

• 11:19Sean Fennessey?

  I would encourage people to watch the film because this 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, if I'm not actually saying there's some value to this, then I would be a hypocrite. It doesn't make, make the movie perfect. It doesn't even make it great, but it does make it-

• 11:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Once again, not a masterpiece.

• 11:38Sean Fennessey?

  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 baron who's got a drilling project in Greenland and his, 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, his animatronic cat, into a kind of a tizzy. And we learn that this man, who is this very

• 12:21Sean Fennessey?

  powerful baron, is actually more powerful even than the US government, you know, that he's able to call meetings in his private home, that everyone kind of bends the knee to 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, 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 US government is going to do about it. It turns to what Digger and the US 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

• 13:06Sean Fennessey?

  very simplistic about this component of the movie.

• 13:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 13:09Sean Fennessey?

  The satire of the movie. It's just like, billionaires run the world.

• 13:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 13:13Sean Fennessey?

  And they're vainglorious 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.

• 13:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. 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 Inaritu 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, it's satire that is beyond satire. Like they're, they're trying to be funny

• 14:11Amanda Dobbins?

  and the, it's very, like, they're high on their own supply, essentially is the way that they're doing the, 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, everyone's trying too hard. That's-

• 14:38Sean Fennessey?

  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 Terry Gilliam style movie where you've got a huge idea and in order to execute that idea, you need these really outsized performances and you need this lavish production design and this sense of like, um, it's almost like a hyper world because you're living inside of a billionaire's castle. And then the movie does shift.

• 15:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 15:05Sean Fennessey?

  And I think, I mean, do you want to speak about the shift now?

• 15:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, I mean, I-

• 15:11Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 15:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 15:26Sean Fennessey?

  It's not really tracking to do well.

• 15:28Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's not at all commercial. Yeah, it's just not.

• 15:30Sean Fennessey?

  It's not. Um, 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 earmuffs on.

• 15:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. He's trying to leave the room. We see you. Okay, Jack, go, go, go.

• 15:44Sean Fennessey?

  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 Enterprises watch.

• 16:00Amanda Dobbins?

  And Sandra Tuler, his sister, is there yelling loudly about how she is, he is ruining her, you know, environmental startup.

• 16:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, her alternative energy company. We watch a sequence in which the president, played by Goodman and Cruise, is 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

• 16:52Sean Fennessey?

  playing Digger Rockwell. And we get a handful of flashes throughout the film where the production, which is essentially a rehearsal, it's a sort of day of rehearsal.

• 17:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it's the tech rehearsal, I think.

• 17:06Sean Fennessey?

  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, um, which unfurls throughout the movie.

• 17:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 17:23Sean Fennessey?

  And so Cruz gets to play two different parts. And I gotta 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. I was, 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. But it

• 17:47Amanda Dobbins?

  We did our best.

• 17:48Sean Fennessey?

  It hugely elevates the movie for me.

• 17:50Amanda Dobbins?

  A thousand percent.

• 17:51Sean Fennessey?

  And it's, it was fascinating to learn that this was not the plan, that this was an idea that they came to much later, that the originally, it sounds like the film was mostly just Digger.

• 18:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 18:01Sean Fennessey?

  And that this artifice, this, 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 we're fucked.

• 18:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 18:18Sean Fennessey?

  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, in sheep's clothing kind of movie, you know?

• 18:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, absolutely. No, I think that the twist is the only thing, the twist and what it allows in Cruz's performance. And the way that it allows you to, 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 like, you're fine if it's suddenly, if everyone's suddenly like three sizes too big and everything looks a little too hyper stylized 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.

• 19:26Amanda Dobbins?

  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, it, the reveal comes at the exact moment where I was ready to write it off.

• 19:39Sean Fennessey?

  Exactly.

• 19:39Amanda Dobbins?

  I was just like, well, this is like, this is done. You know? And I, I was like, can I leave? You know, like, what can I accomplish in this time?

• 19:46Sean Fennessey?

  The movie knows that.

• 19:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 19:46Sean Fennessey?

  I think it is artfully timed.

• 19:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Totally.

• 19:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 19:49Amanda Dobbins?

  So I, so in that sense, I want to give it credit for it.

• 19:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 19:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Even though on the flip side, 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, uh, 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, I know, I know. And that like, the earth is screwed also, I know. What, like, what is that accomplishing?

• 20:18Sean Fennessey?

  Particularly jarring because the movie is full of jokes, but not funny. And that's

• 20:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, sure.

• 20:22Sean Fennessey?

  That's a problem.

• 20:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 20:23Sean Fennessey?

  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 a kind of a, 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 Wild. 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, it, 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 Inaritu gets this. I think, I think this is the intention. It almost doesn't matter ultimately, it's how you receive it.

• 21:05Sean Fennessey?

  But that character saying, this feels off to me.

• 21:10Amanda Dobbins?

  This isn't how this would happen.

• 21:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Sean Fennessey?

  It reflects our own sense of a theatrical reality. That you, when you're, 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 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.

• 21:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 21:48Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 21:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Correct.

• 22:00Sean Fennessey?

  And it, it, 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 Cruz actor. And I'm curious like what you think about that.

• 22:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 22:22Sean Fennessey?

  I think we could do, is it four times when we see him out of it? Maybe five?

• 22:27Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I couldn't count at this point, but yeah, there's, he's in the dressing room a couple of times. He has a couple of standoffs with the, the director. And then sort of the final after the, um, after the show wraps.

• 22:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 22:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Scene. I, the other thing that it, that it does, and I couldn't tell whether this was sloppy or really interesting, which is, you know, here, it's the experience of watching this film.

• 22:54Sean Fennessey?

  It is.

• 22:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Is that the way that it segues between the real life and the, um, the onstage, the production is through like the, 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.

• 23:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, what, 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, I guess that that is purposeful.

• 23:36Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's pretty artfully done.

• 23:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 23:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I, I, 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. But getting my brain going and, and being, being relieved that it wasn't just

• 23:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Totally.

• 23:55Sean Fennessey?

  The movie that was marketed to me.

• 23:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 23:57Sean Fennessey?

  Um, 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.

• 24:10Sean Fennessey?

  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, I, 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, in the middle of the movie that I think ultimately makes the movie worth seeing.

• 24:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 24:34Sean Fennessey?

  Um, but at the conclusion of everything.

• 24:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Well.

• 24:38Sean Fennessey?

  You're left with like, uh, something that is common in Inaritu's films, which is the sort of like, you're fucked. What are you going to do about it?

• 24:46Amanda Dobbins?

  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.

• 25:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Does not matter, has not changed the way that people, uh, think about the world, has not changed the world that we live in. I, you know, I think the closing shots of the, the film and the credit sequence, um, are some of the more, I was, again, I was surprised by them and sort of affected and they, and they seem to me a signal of the film's understanding outside of its like tiny little jewel box in a way that I kind of want to give it credit for.

• 25:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I, I wonder if the, the, the idea that this kind of storytelling, uh, has emotional value. You know, the idea of pointing at something that has happened historically.

• 25:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 25:49Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 25:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 26:00Sean Fennessey?

  Does that make us feel better? Is it a temporary salve from the chaos outside?

• 26:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, yeah.

• 26:07Sean Fennessey?

  It is a pretty, these are grand ideas he's going for. I mean, 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, um, strident efforts to wow you with its very physical kind of handmade production.

• 26:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. And also production within a production.

• 26:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 26:32Amanda Dobbins?

  And self doubt of the main character in terms of whether, what their, this person is doing is valuable.

• 26:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 26:40Amanda Dobbins?

  And whether salvation can be possible for this character or for the, you know, the world at large through art.

• 26:47Sean Fennessey?

  And two movies sharply trained on a male actor, star, figure.

• 26:51Amanda Dobbins?

  And, 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.

• 27:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. What this movie means to Cruz and what Cruz means to this movie. Likewise, for Michael Keaton playing a superhero.

• 27:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 27:08Sean Fennessey?

  Some years after playing Batman. The thing with, 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, they're male fragility, they're, uh, 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.

• 27:35Amanda Dobbins?

  True. I was really taken aback on my rewatch of how much time Emma Stone's character spends talking about what goes viral on the internet.

• 27:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 27:43Amanda Dobbins?

  And the

• 27:43Sean Fennessey?

  Mock Twitter.

• 27:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, but it, it is, it's like an Aaron Sorkin level of obsession with very specific blog posts that are just, it, it makes it feel so dated, so small, so petty.

• 27:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Amanda Dobbins?

  And but it was funny that watching Birdman made tipped me back on the negative side of of 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 about Inaritu films replicated in some of the same ways. And again, I just find the experience and the, you know, the particularness. I did wonder if this is how other people feel about Wes Anderson movies.

• 28:23Sean Fennessey?

  I just think there's a huge difference. To me, Inaritu 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.

• 28:34Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I don't. Wes Anderson is just very closed off in his own world.

• 28:37Sean Fennessey?

  In the design, they're very similar.

• 28:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. But 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 Inaritu'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 in obvious. But some people do seem to respond to both op ed pages and Inaritu. So I just, there is something, there is something polarizing about him in a different way. I, you're right, that that Digger just takes on things larger than the internet.

• 29:18Sean Fennessey?

  And whether or not it's like worthy of those, 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 was worthy to me. And again, the move, 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, he does become full. There's, there's a big centerpiece in the film.

• 29:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 29:42Sean Fennessey?

  When we, when we go back to Digger's story.

• 29:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh huh.

• 29:45Sean Fennessey?

  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 this massive ecological crisis. Digger then enters the arena and Cruise like uncorks one. It's, it's just,

• 30:28Sean Fennessey?

  he's a great yelling actor. He's not a subtle actor. He never has been. He's a showman. He is, he is, he's Vince from The Color of Money. He is Daniel Caffey, you know, barking back at Jack Nicholson. He is, uh, he's maniacal Ethan Hunt, you know, and he's doing it with Jerry Jones's accent, wearing a, I guess, a red velvet cowboy suit.

• 30:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, yeah.

• 30:50Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 30:59Amanda Dobbins?

  It is, it is essentially a 10 minute version of you need me on that wall. You want me on that wall, which I was just.

• 31:06Sean Fennessey?

  I thought of the same thing. It's his Jack Nicholson moment.

• 31:08Amanda Dobbins?

  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.

• 31:15Sean Fennessey?

  Though there are dummies very specifically placed throughout, almost was like mocking the idea of this tribunal.

• 31:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Totally. And but so, you know, it's big in design and the camera is kind of following him around. And if it's, if it's not one take, then it's designed to be very much.

• 31:30Sean Fennessey?

  Well, there are times where he grabs someone's phone and he starts yelling into the phone. And then we cut to the camera.

• 31:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 31:35Sean Fennessey?

  As though it's, he's talking into it.

• 31:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. But, but there, but there's just a lot of camera work and a lot of noise going on around him visually 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.

• 32:00Sean Fennessey?

  It's a great sequence. It's a truly great sequence.

• 32:02Amanda Dobbins?

  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 Wes Anderson again because of like, the, the Hackman versus Wes Anderson Royal Tenenbaums, like tension.

• 32:17Sean Fennessey?

  Friction.

• 32:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, there is something that he is dressed up in all of the like, Inaritu stuff and is just pure rage and Tom Cruise humanness for the first time on screen in 15 years.

• 32:31Sean Fennessey?

  There's also something about the way that they've built us, built 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.

• 32:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 32:54Sean Fennessey?

  And he obviously does the thing that we expect most strident billionaires to do, which is that he, in this sense of deluded grandeur, not only defends himself, but implicates everyone.

• 33:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:08Sean Fennessey?

  And says, you want your, the things you don't, these things you don't need delivered to your house within two days. You want to be able to use your cellphone. 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, in the part that you get, you do get caught up in everything that he's communicating. And he's obviously being shouted down by the, the members in this, of this committee that are in the room. And you're kind of on Cruise's side. And this is like a common thing that happens where Cruise, you know, think of Cruise in Magnolia playing TJ Mackie, 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

• 33:51Sean Fennessey?

  movie goes back to him soon. And so, again, I, to me, it's a real price of admission moment in a movie.

• 33:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Totally.

• 33:57Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and I'm not sure that the movie ever totally like recovers from that height.

• 34:04Amanda Dobbins?

  No, but on the flip side, it gives you normal Cruise and Cruise and Repose and Cruise 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, you know, 10 minute sequence, it can be a lot.

• 34:24Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:25Amanda Dobbins?

  But it 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, you know, after that giant head pops out, the, 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 Cruise's bodies change and relax. And it's basically like they're 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, I viscerally reacted to it. I was just like, oh, there he is. There is that

• 35:09Amanda Dobbins?

  moment. And the character gets saddled through the subplot, the thing that is going on below the movie is that behind the scenes, in between the rehearsals or like, you know, during the, this tech rehearsal, Tom Cruise's daughter is traveling home from somewhere. And then her plane for a while goes missing.

• 35:33Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, 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 our earth.

• 35:44Sean Fennessey?

  The real world impact of the story that they're telling on stage.

• 35:47Amanda Dobbins?

  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.

• 36:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 36:02Amanda Dobbins?

  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. So.

• 36:23Sean Fennessey?

  A true actor in crisis movie. It's like opening night or something.

• 36:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. And but so he's quiet. He's not, uh, 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.

• 36:44Sean Fennessey?

  I had the same thought.

• 36:45Amanda Dobbins?

  And he can still do it.

• 36:48Sean Fennessey?

  I know.

• 36:49Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and what's so amazing about it is also that he's still in the prosthetics. And they seem to do something where.

• 36:58Amanda Dobbins?

  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-

• 37:02Sean Fennessey?

  I think you described the posture well, which is he's relaxed, and I wonder if even his face is more relaxed.

• 37:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 37:06Sean Fennessey?

  He's not performing the Digger hypertension.

• 37:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 37:10Sean Fennessey?

  Whereas you have him, and he's also using a voice that honestly, we've not heard in a long time.

• 37:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 37:15Sean Fennessey?

  He's using a, a normal speaking voice that you might have heard in, gosh, what's a movie, 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?

• 37:29Amanda Dobbins?

  I think you're erasing some emotional moments in Top Gun Maverick, and so am I, but yes.

• 37:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, but I, you know, there's just something about the iconography-

• 37:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Totally. Yeah, he's reusing things rather than finding it. I get it.

• 37:42Sean Fennessey?

  But just like, just a single one-on-one conversation with a person where there's like a little bit of anguish, a little bit of unsureness. Um, that 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.

• 37:59Amanda Dobbins?

  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, uh, he can't use a proper noun.

• 38:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 38:11Amanda Dobbins?

  He's like, it's really, it's, there's just not always something there.

• 38:15Sean Fennessey?

  I know. That's the thing is in the press, he's not showing us any of this. And in movies, even, even the, the original-ish movies that he's made, American Made or The Mummy, like even in those movies, there's no, you know.

• 38:27Amanda Dobbins?

  The Mummy being like one of the original movies that he's made is just a real sign of the times.

• 38:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's unfortunate. Um, I think there's also something about the fact that the movie was shot at Pinewood, which is the legendary, uh, London studio where many Bond movies were shot, where, um, many Star Wars movies were shot, where, uh, Superman films were shot, but also like 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-

• 39:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 39:00Sean Fennessey?

  -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.

• 39:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:19Sean Fennessey?

  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 Cruise that you want to highlight. We should also talk about the rest of the cast.

• 39:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I, 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 gotta be more, specifically Jesse Plemons. And the Jesse Plemons, can we talk about that?

• 39:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 39:49Amanda Dobbins?

  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 as like image rehabilitation.

• 40:06Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 40:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 40:14Sean Fennessey?

  And that it's being revived here on some sort of anniversary, almost.

• 40:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes. And so the, the Cruise, the real-life Cruise character and Sophie Wile, the director, are like really coming at heads. And there's like, you know, the climactic bomb dropping scene that everyone is playing for, with their version of Doctor Strangelove on like so much cocaine and, uh, or even more cocaine. I don't know. And then, um, the, 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 Plemons character, because you've kind of wondered why Jesse Plemons, one of our great actors, is there.

• 40:59Sean Fennessey?

  He's just kind of skulking around the movie, occasionally getting into the actor's dressing room.

• 41:02Amanda Dobbins?

  And looking like eager and, and being funny and definitely like, you know, sending up every single producer he's ever seen just lurking around on set.

• 41:09Sean Fennessey?

  I'm sure.

• 41:10Amanda Dobbins?

  But, um, then he comes like, almost like, 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.

• 41:25Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:25Amanda Dobbins?

  And you can't trust his explanation, but it is sort of the Rosetta Stone of the movie.

• 41:32Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:32Amanda Dobbins?

  And I do find myself thinking, well, Jesse Plemons, of why I respect so much, wouldn't do anything that's like ultimately really stupid. So, so, well-

• 41:41Sean Fennessey?

  A lot of actors we love do stupid things all the time.

• 41:43Amanda Dobbins?

  I know. I know. I know.

• 41:46Sean Fennessey?

  I know what you mean, though. I mean, it extends to many other actors in this cast.

• 41:50Amanda Dobbins?

  But, but I'm just sort of like, so this explanation and this kind of, um, 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 exploration or, you know, nothing can actually save, we, we can't save the world through art. I'm sorry. Sorry to say it.

• 42:25Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think that that's what his character wants? Because I'm, I'm, that's also a little bit foggy to me.

• 42:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 42:30Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 42:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 42:37Sean Fennessey?

  Who's portrayed in the play. And, and this does seem to be sort of like a reckoning for his family name and this, but a sort of like, let's, let us not forget-

• 42:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 42:47Sean Fennessey?

  -that the Rockwells did destroy the world, but also-

• 42:49Amanda Dobbins?

  But isn't-

• 42:50Sean Fennessey?

  -there's something sadly tragic about that that we should acknowledge.

• 42:52Amanda Dobbins?

  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 masks or something?

• 43:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 43:10Amanda Dobbins?

  So there is something, um, you know, politically and financially motivated within that character, which is communicated.

• 43:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 43:16Amanda Dobbins?

  So, you know, I, I think it's ultimately like a fairly nihilistic, um, whole take on it. I'm not to, I don't totally remember the particulars of that character, other than it seems like he's, like everybody else, he's compromised.

• 43:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And it, 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 and the human condition. But the movie has this, that sequence that you're describing is a director and an actor not being on the same page.

• 43:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:48Sean Fennessey?

  A situation that I'm sure, you know, Ritu's been in many times, and I'm sure Cruise has been in many times. And the person who solves the issue is the producer. Now, that might actually be accurate.

• 43:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 43:57Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 44:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 44:04Sean Fennessey?

  And so it does have this really kind of clever, conclusionary idea.

• 44:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 44:10Sean Fennessey?

  That's just like, unfortunately, this is how the world works.

• 44:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 44:14Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 44:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 44:25Sean Fennessey?

  And they're applauding and there are these very earnest, tight close-ups on all their faces. And then-

• 44:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 44:30Sean Fennessey?

  -a warning bell goes off and we learn that we are truly living in a post-apocalyptic environment.

• 44:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 44:35Sean Fennessey?

  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?

• 44:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, the, well, the other thing, just speaking of it, is the man with the money who saves it is the, the resolution of the, the real-life Cruise character.

• 44:56Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Plotline and what happens to his daughter, which is, I, I thought, I thought this was interesting. Like, the, the way that they handle, which is it's, it's entwined into the actual story. And so the Digger character loses the, the nephew character over the side of the, the boat. And, but in the middle, he gets a phone call and, and he takes it because I guess it's a rehearsal and whatever. And also, you listen, life, life happens.

• 45:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 45:28Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and also, these people are supposed to be ridiculous, right?

• 45:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 45:32Amanda Dobbins?

  They're not, they're, they're not supposed to be aspirational people. So he takes the call. He just says, okay. Cruise does, like, it's amazing, very controlled emotional acting and then goes right back into 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, uh, used his, all of his money and resources to save her. Um, and so-

• 46:11Sean Fennessey?

  What's our takeaway from that?

• 46:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, real-life stakes that are, well, it's like, to, to me, that just undermines the art, right? That it's like, the, 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, um, what's really happening here is that just like, if you, if you have money, you're gonna be okay.

• 46:34Sean Fennessey?

  And the, the despair that is portrayed near the end of the play-

• 46:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 46:38Sean Fennessey?

  -in the story maybe can't match the despair of the actual actor who's in, whose family is in peril.

• 46:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 46:47Sean Fennessey?

  But again, the only solution is to like buy your way out of it with the elevated technologies.

• 46:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 46:52Sean Fennessey?

  And so the movie is like kind of at cross purposes. And I, I think it, 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 I, it's kind of a relief to me-

• 47:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:06Sean Fennessey?

  -that it wasn't as simplistic.

• 47:09Amanda Dobbins?

  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.

• 47:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Where Digger falls to one knee and expresses his regret for everything that he's done. And then the curtains close and it's over. Um-

• 47:25Sean Fennessey?

  I think the rest of the cast is poorly served by the movie.

• 47:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Agree.

• 47:30Sean Fennessey?

  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 Rizomed 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.

• 47:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 47:49Sean Fennessey?

  Kind of obnoxious.

• 47:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Thank you.

• 47:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 47:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Just really annoying.

• 47:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 47:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 47:54Sean Fennessey?

  That isn't the whole movie, but.

• 47:56Amanda Dobbins?

  And they're supposed to be, and that's the point. But you're just also like, this is a bad hang.

• 48:01Sean Fennessey?

  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, you know, because the C word is used. And then there are no women present, and everybody laughs heartily. And it's like, this is the worst Coen Brothers movie of all time.

• 48:28Amanda Dobbins?

  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.

• 48:35Sean Fennessey?

  It is intentional. And yet, there's a scene later in the film where the 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?

• 49:06Amanda Dobbins?

  And making something unpleasant to watch?

• 49:08Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 49:14Amanda Dobbins?

  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.

• 49:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 49:35Amanda Dobbins?

  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 Inaritu's.

• 49:47Sean Fennessey?

  No doubt.

• 49:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Objective.

• 49:48Sean Fennessey?

  It's in The Revenant, it's in The Morse Paros, it's in all his movies.

• 49:51Amanda Dobbins?

  So, I do think that it's intentional. And.

• 49:57Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 50:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 50:11Sean Fennessey?

  And that in and of itself is not of value to me. And it's hard to not hold past prejudices against him.

• 50:19Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, and that's why when I watched Birdman, 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 was really annoying.

• 50:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 50:57Amanda Dobbins?

  And I know most of the stuff that you said.

• 51:00Sean Fennessey?

  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?

• 51:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 51:06Sean Fennessey?

  Question of the movie. And I, 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, well, it's okay. It's just a movie.

• 51:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 51:26Sean Fennessey?

  You know, the Love Hypothesis is just a 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.

• 51:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 51:36Sean Fennessey?

  Is like, let us confront you.

• 51:38Amanda Dobbins?

  And it.

• 51:39Sean Fennessey?

  With the agonizing potential of our future.

• 51:43Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 51:53Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't, yeah.

• 51:55Sean Fennessey?

  Those people are very happy at the end of the play. They're very happy. They're moved.

• 51:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. But to me, that's, and then they put on their gas mask. It is right there in the same scene. To me, I don't think that, I don't even, I don't think the play is presented as any sort of long term achievement.

• 52:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 52:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Beyond making these people happy for a moment in the total nightmare that they're, but it's like, we made a play about this, and then nothing happened.

• 52:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. The movie, if you look at it from one direction, does have the same effect of a person during an acceptance speech at an award show, lecturing the world about what's wrong with the world. And it's sort of like, you're Tom Cruise.

• 52:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 52:37Sean Fennessey?

  Like, if you're concerned about this, and perhaps you should be about the potential ecological nightmare forthcoming, address that in the press.

• 52:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 52:48Sean Fennessey?

  Publicly speak about it.

• 52:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, I definitely don't think that the movie, or Inaritu, or Cruise, or anyone involved, is actually interested in any lessons about, like, the actual earth, or oil, or billionaires.

• 53:04Sean Fennessey?

  Springboard. Because I think, I think,

• 53:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I do.

• 53:06Sean Fennessey?

  I think Don't Look Up is a really interesting comp for the movie.

• 53:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 53:08Sean Fennessey?

  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 as very similar to this movie, where it's attempting a very difficult tone. It's using stardom as a refracting tool. And, but I know that Adam McKay comes to that movie honestly. That he, like, 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 skipped a step. And it's just like, you're

• 53:53Sean Fennessey?

  doomed.

• 53:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 53:56Sean Fennessey?

  Which, okay. Thanks, Tom Cruise.

• 54:01Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 54:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 54:09Sean Fennessey?

  And that is what the movie is about, which is.

• 54:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. That's what it is.

• 54:11Sean Fennessey?

  You can't do anything else but make art.

• 54:13Amanda Dobbins?

  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.

• 54:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 54:25Amanda Dobbins?

  I like, I don't think this movie is like, materially interested in it, and/or an argument against.

• 54:32Sean Fennessey?

  Until the end. Because it's just, 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.

• 54:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 54:43Sean Fennessey?

  The devastation, and the way that the people are living now, in this future world. I thought that that was sincere. I don't, you know.

• 54:51Amanda Dobbins?

  For sure. But I mean, that's like, that's a grace note. You know, I don't, 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.

• 55:03Sean Fennessey?

  Although that would be okay.

• 55:05Amanda Dobbins?

  I welcome it, you know?

• 55:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. You could use of.

• 55:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 55:09Sean Fennessey?

  Of status and wealth. The other movie I thought about is Megalopolis.

• 55:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Same.

• 55:17Sean Fennessey?

  The difference between the two movies is that Megalopolis is so romantic. It's so passionate. And it 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 solipsistic to this movie. But this idea of like, only I can process the great trauma of our times through my singular vision.

• 55:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 55:41Sean Fennessey?

  It's something I kind of enjoy when directors do, even if the movies don't work. Like, it is kind, it is what I want these artists to do.

• 55:46Amanda Dobbins?

  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, 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.

• 56:27Sean Fennessey?

  Very madcap satirical.

• 56:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Sean Fennessey?

  The performance style is very similar. So if you found that movie to be a turnoff, Digger is not for you.

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• 57:58Sean Fennessey?

  Inaritu, obviously, we've been unkind to him on the show. This is his eighth feature film. He has a case for.

• 58:09Sean Fennessey?

  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?

• 58:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 58:22Sean Fennessey?

  This has been a 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? That has been making great works over that time. People love Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón, his, you know, Eneritu's friends and compatriots from Mexico.

• 58:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Trying to think, so on the 25 for 25 list, we had a Cuarón, no del Toro, no Eneritu.

• 58:44Sean Fennessey?

  Nope.

• 58:45Amanda Dobbins?

  No Spielberg.

• 58:47Amanda Dobbins?

  We had a Nolan, we had.

• 58:50Sean Fennessey?

  No Villeneuve, but Villeneuve is obviously been active throughout this entire century. But I mean, he's only made eight movies, but two of those movies have won him best director. He's one of the most decorated filmmakers alive.

• 59:02Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, yeah.

• 59:02Sean Fennessey?

  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. And it didn't, 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 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.

• 59:41Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 59:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 59:55Sean Fennessey?

  He, he makes a lot of choices.

• 59:57Amanda Dobbins?

  He has, he has style.

• 59:58Sean Fennessey?

  He has style.

• 59:58Amanda Dobbins?

  He, yes, and whether it is, and I guess even taste. I mean, I do remember the kitchen in Bardo, just 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 I, yeah, it's all, it's, it's all surface and, and the writing is, and the ideas are always the problem for me.

• 1:00:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, the first three movies of his career, or four movies of his career, Amorós Peros, 21 Grams, Babel and Beautiful, are very different. They're very, they're grounded, extremely intense human dramas that have no outsized or fantastical components to them.

• 1:00:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but they still are all the, the storytelling interconnected, you know, there, there is something extra.

• 1:00:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, a lot of latticework in all the, in all the movies.

• 1:00:52Amanda Dobbins?

  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.

• 1:00:58Sean Fennessey?

  It's interesting, though, that it is now evenly distributed, where you've got the first four films that are these kind of much more tightly focused character dramas, even if they're globe 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 admire that I didn't see in Bardo. Like Bardo feels like fake self-lacerating, whereas this, there are times where I'm like, you, it feels like you're kind of powerless. Like you've been a little bit denuded or, or like destroyed by your inability to like get anybody to pay attention to what it is you've been trying to say with your films over the past seven years.

• 1:01:42Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe I'm being a little too generous to him, but I, 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.

• 1:01:52Amanda Dobbins?

  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 and.

• 1:02:04Sean Fennessey?

  There's a, there's a part of his films that I, 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 you're striving 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 to be really shallow. So I feel this way through all of his movies.

• 1:02:47Sean Fennessey?

  I think they're kind of interesting to think through, think they're kind of annoying. I think they're, they look really great. And then I watched them a second time and I'm like, eh.

• 1:02:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I don't want to be a part of this.

• 1:02:56Sean Fennessey?

  I wish I wasn't watching this.

• 1:02:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Exactly.

• 1:02:58Sean Fennessey?

  And so I, I wonder where I'll net on this one.

• 1:03:02Sean Fennessey?

  I do think that the Cruise component of it just makes it more special.

• 1:03:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Why did Tom Cruise sign on to this movie?

• 1:03:09Sean Fennessey?

  A great question. I don't know the answer. I, it's almost like he spun a wheel. There were 20 autors on it. And he was like, well, there's 20 people who are great.

• 1:03:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:03:18Sean Fennessey?

  And I gotta do one with one of them. And that's what I did in the past, you know?

• 1:03:22Amanda Dobbins?

  There still are layers of artifice to this role that I wonder whether, you know, he didn't jump right back in to Magnolia.

• 1:03:32Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 1:03:33Amanda Dobbins?

  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, then in the movie.

• 1:03:51Sean Fennessey?

  A couple of moments.

• 1:03:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but so, 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 for much of this movie.

• 1:04:01Sean Fennessey?

  It's a lot of Les Grossman from, 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.

• 1:04:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:12Sean Fennessey?

  But again, him showing us the actor in crisis stuff is a way more interesting choice and a, 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 there's, there's, 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 it, since 16, it's Jack Reacher, Never Go Back, then the failed Mummy film, which is not original, I agree.

• 1:04:53Sean Fennessey?

  Then 2017's American Made, which I think is underrated and it's kind of an interesting movie, not, 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.

• 1:05:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:09Sean Fennessey?

  This isn't a better movie than Mission Impossible Fallout, which is just a fucking delight. You know, which is the joyful action movie.

• 1:05:16Amanda Dobbins?

  This is not a better movie than Top Gun Maverick.

• 1:05:18Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 1:05:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:05:19Sean Fennessey?

  I agree. But what do those two movies have on their mind? I guess is the question.

• 1:05:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Sean Fennessey?

  Like not really anything.

• 1:05:26Amanda Dobbins?

  They, they have the, the idea of Tom Cruise on their mind. They are Tom Cruise mythology, mythology vehicles. And this does as well in a, in a different way, but it's about more. He's less at the center of it.

• 1:05:42Sean Fennessey?

  When you ask like, why did he do this? Like, why do you think he did it?

• 1:05:48Amanda Dobbins?

  I can't figure out how self-aware Tom Cruise is either to put that, you know, it's, and maybe in that way, he and Eneritu 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 of Mission Impossibles didn't really deliver in the way that we, you know, that they expected, both commercially and artistically, in, in one podcast's opinion.

• 1:06:32Amanda Dobbins?

  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 Amorós Peros before everyone else in town? Which was one of the lines from his interview on GQ.

• 1:06:56Sean Fennessey?

  One of the only things he's been saying.

• 1:06:56Amanda Dobbins?

  He said that, 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 in 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 are, 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.

• 1:07:38Sean Fennessey?

  I'll psychoanalyze because what else, what else am I going to do here?

• 1:07:42Sean Fennessey?

  Obviously he's made some, what you could describe as mistakes in the press in the past. The jumping on the couch, the hectoring 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,

• 1:08:07Sean Fennessey?

  but that he was debunking the wonderful mystery of the movie star. And he's retrenched completely.

• 1:08:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:15Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 1:08:41Sean Fennessey?

  I think you're expected to have something to say.

• 1:08:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:44Sean Fennessey?

  To have some point of view. That doesn't mean you need to talk about your, 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.

• 1:09:04Sean Fennessey?

  I do think that it would be helpful.

• 1:09:06Amanda Dobbins?

  I do also, I mean, again, we, 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.

• 1:09:19Sean Fennessey?

  There's a whole sense of the secret, you know, and kind of like the manifestations of, of things. And, and this movie, maybe you could make the cases reflective of that, of the way that he sees the world in that specific respect.

• 1:09:32Sean Fennessey?

  It's really interesting that he made his bones mostly playing ordinary guys doing extraordinary things. That was kind of his superpower. And 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 in Interview with the Vampire, 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

• 1:10:12Sean Fennessey?

  Business. And he plays the American every boy who just happens to be beautiful and stunningly charismatic. And so doing a trans, like a transformational part at this 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.

• 1:10:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, so you think that's why? And, and it got one for Leo and it got a bunch of, and Birdman got a bunch of them.

• 1:10:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, Inaritu 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.

• 1:10:51Amanda Dobbins?

  He is.

• 1:10:53Sean Fennessey?

  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

• 1:11:03Sean Fennessey?

  if you're being cynical,

• 1:11:05Amanda Dobbins?

  You think, yeah.

• 1:11:06Sean Fennessey?

  He wants to win an Oscar.

• 1:11:07Amanda Dobbins?

  But I, I still, I would have liked to been in, 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.

• 1:11:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. It's interesting because like, he could have also done a very intense human drama. I've always, I've, I've always wanted him and Cameron Crowe to reunite on a movie because I just think that, that Cameron Crowe 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.

• 1:11:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 1:11:44Sean Fennessey?

  You know, reflecting one another. But

• 1:11:48Sean Fennessey?

  I, I think I understand where he's going here. Let's talk about best actor before, before we get into like the other Cruise movies that we really like. Because I think that's why this movie exists. I think this movie exists as a $100 million production.

• 1:11:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:11:59Sean Fennessey?

  Because Tom Cruise was like, yeah, I'll make an Inaritu movie. Let's, and let's make it fucking big.

• 1:12:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Well, we, yeah, we know that. But I just, I have some, 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.

• 1:12:17Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think I do either.

• 1:12:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Sean Fennessey?

  I'm, the, 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

• 1:12:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:31Sean Fennessey?

  about this race. And this is an interesting race. And it's a race

• 1:12:36Sean Fennessey?

  that seen from one direction includes Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and Tom Cruise.

• 1:12:43Sean Fennessey?

  Seen from another direction

• 1:12:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:45Sean Fennessey?

  includes a lot of older actors.

• 1:12:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:12:48Sean Fennessey?

  And an, a complete unknown.

• 1:12:54Sean Fennessey?

  I'll read from the bottom up, the list I made.

• 1:12:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. Oh, this is in order?

• 1:13:01Sean Fennessey?

  More or less, but it doesn't include Tom Cruise.

• 1:13:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, yeah. And they're, okay. Go ahead.

• 1:13:07Sean Fennessey?

  Jack O'Connell in Ink.

• 1:13:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Don't think it's happening.

• 1:13:10Sean Fennessey?

  Brad Pitt and the Further Misadventures of Cliff Booth.

• 1:13:13Amanda Dobbins?

  We haven't seen it yet.

• 1:13:14Sean Fennessey?

  We haven't seen it. He's already won for this part, which means there'll be, and it's a Netflix film, there will be maybe a little bit less

• 1:13:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:20Sean Fennessey?

  positivity in that direction. Robert Pattinson in Primetime. Now, this movie's

• 1:13:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Doing really well.

• 1:13:25Sean Fennessey?

  Successful.

• 1:13:25Amanda Dobbins?

  And young people really like it.

• 1:13:26Sean Fennessey?

  It was number one yesterday at the box office. It beat Avengers, which is interesting.

• 1:13:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Also just say anecdotally, you know, they, Press Box did a whole episode about it and Brian and David both loved it, kind of unreservedly. We, when we talked about it, we were like,

• 1:13:40Sean Fennessey?

  I saw it with Brian, actually.

• 1:13:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. We, 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.

• 1:13:52Sean Fennessey?

  And, and your point is right. And I think a huge part of it is Pattinson, who I think now has like, has been rubber stamped

• 1:13:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:00Sean Fennessey?

  in a way that he was not when he made Mickey 17.

• 1:14:02Amanda Dobbins?

  That's true.

• 1:14:03Sean Fennessey?

  But I, I've got him low. Maybe that's wrong. You can tell me if that's wrong.

• 1:14:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:14:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yurbaursav in Artificial. We haven't seen that movie yet.

• 1:14:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:09Sean Fennessey?

  Sebastian Stan in Fjord, which six months, three months ago, I would have said is probably in a good spot.

• 1:14:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:14:14Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 1:14:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:14:21Sean Fennessey?

  Seth Rogen in 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, so liked.

• 1:14:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:14:28Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 1:14:37Amanda Dobbins?

  I guess that's true. And

• 1:14:42Amanda Dobbins?

  I, but he's so liked.

• 1:14:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, he's great.

• 1:14:45Amanda Dobbins?

  But it is also not classically what we think of as a best actor performance.

• 1:14:50Sean Fennessey?

  It's more comic.

• 1:14:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:51Sean Fennessey?

  And, and sly and sarcastic.

• 1:14:53Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and sad.

• 1:14:55Sean Fennessey?

  And sad. Jafar Jackson for Michael.

• 1:14:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I mean, yes.

• 1:15:03Sean Fennessey?

  Ryan Gosling for Project Hail Mary.

• 1:15:05Amanda Dobbins?

  I, 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, they haven't gotten in the mix yet.

• 1:15:14Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think Gosling's going to get nominated, but I do think the movie's going to get nominated for a bunch of awards.

• 1:15:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:19Sean Fennessey?

  I like Project Hail Mary. Okay. Here's, I've got six people here plus Cruise.

• 1:15:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:15:27Sean Fennessey?

  Right now, this feels like the race to me.

• 1:15:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:15:30Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe Pattinson has a surge, maybe something else happens that I don't know about. Maybe Yurbaursav is extraordinary in the movie. Artificial. But I think it's Anthony Ippolito for I Play Rocky.

• 1:15:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:15:42Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 1:15:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:15:49Sean Fennessey?

  It's going to get attention. Whether it gets in is debatable. He's very, very good in the film. Pedro Pascal Behemoth.

• 1:15:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. If you say so.

• 1:15:57Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think he's getting in.

• 1:15:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:59Sean Fennessey?

  But I think he's in the, on the periphery.

• 1:16:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:16:02Sean Fennessey?

  John Turturro for The Only Living Pickpocket in New York.

• 1:16:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:16:05Sean Fennessey?

  I think this is happening.

• 1:16:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:06Sean Fennessey?

  And I think these next three are definitively happening. Andrew Scott, Nelson, or Matt Damon in The Odyssey, and John Malkovich in Wild Horse 9.

• 1:16:13Amanda Dobbins?

  I completely agree on the top three. I think Pattinson is a little closer than you think, though we are, of course, in

• 1:16:19Sean Fennessey?

  You might be right.

• 1:16:19Amanda Dobbins?

  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.

• 1:16:35Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 1:16:44Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 1:16:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:53Sean Fennessey?

  Where does Tom Cruise fit in?

• 1:16:56Amanda Dobbins?

  So the Academy loves Inaritu, or did in Tobardo.

• 1:17:00Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:01Amanda Dobbins?

  And has historically not understood Cruise 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?

• 1:17:16Sean Fennessey?

  He has three competitive acting Academy Award nominations.

• 1:17:19Amanda Dobbins?

  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, and I love that for you. And it just feels how the Academy feels about Tom Cruise.

• 1:17:44Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I've, I've said this many times. I, I feel that the Jerry Maguire year was his Oscar. He lost to Jeffrey Rush that year.

• 1:17:55Sean Fennessey?

  The Geoffrey 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 Helfgat was so, so big and so emotionally powerful. And Cruise, when he lost there, that was his second nomination after Born on the Fourth 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.

• 1:18:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:18:39Sean Fennessey?

  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, you know, the beautiful men of movie history.

• 1:19:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:02Sean Fennessey?

  He's doing way crazier shit than them. He made Eyes Wide Shut. He made Magnolia.

• 1:19:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:08Sean Fennessey?

  He did Last Grossman. Like, he's a weird guy. He does weird stuff. He's a rock of ages. Like, he's a kook.

• 1:19:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Rock of ages.

• 1:19:16Sean Fennessey?

  I know. And sometimes it don't work. That's the thing. When you take risks, it don't work. And the last 10 years is saying like, whoa, actually, slow down.

• 1:19:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. And with the exception of Rock of Ages, everything that you were listing is, is 2000, it's, you know, 25 years ago. Yeah, it's pre.

• 1:19:31Sean Fennessey?

  But he made Interview with the Vampire. Have you seen him in Interview with the Vampire? It's so weird.

• 1:19:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it's really weird. Kirsten forever, you know? Does he still send her shoes? The coconut, no, or maybe, maybe someone else sends. No, I think he sent her shoes. Someone sending someone shoes. Um, 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.

• 1:20:03Sean Fennessey?

  I'm just giving him credit for being, for taking risks, for doing things that many of his peers wouldn't do. And Valkyrie was a swing, man. He was like, I'm gonna 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 was the sort of thing that you would see in a movie in the 70s, but not in 2008, and certainly not with Brian Singer.

• 1:20:28Amanda Dobbins?

  I just want to let you know that he sends Dakota Fanning shoes.

• 1:20:32Sean Fennessey?

  Dakota Fanning. Got it. That makes sense. Have you seen Collateral recently?

• 1:20:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Not in the past, like, three or four years, but he's amazing in it.

• 1:20:39Sean Fennessey?

  Post 2000.

• 1:20:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, sure. What year?

• 1:20:42Sean Fennessey?

  2004.

• 1:20:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. What I said, I said 2005 is the dividing line.

• 1:20:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay? And that was 21 years ago.

• 1:20:48Sean Fennessey?

  Edge of Tomorrow, that's a slapstick comedy in a sci-fi action thriller.

• 1:20:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Listen, it is, it is very good. And he is good running around in it. And Emily Blunt's arms are amazing.

• 1:20:58Sean Fennessey?

  Uh huh. Those are your takeaways.

• 1:21:01Amanda Dobbins?

  But it's different. That's not, that's not 90, that's not 86 through 96.

• 1:21:07Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, it's not cutting time. Is Tom Cruise getting nominated for Best Actor?

• 1:21:09Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 1:21:13Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think this movie will be an epic financial fiasco?

• 1:21:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:21:17Sean Fennessey?

  Or just a disappointment?

• 1:21:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Where did Mickey 17 net out?

• 1:21:23Sean Fennessey?

  I think worldwide, not terrible.

• 1:21:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:21:25Sean Fennessey?

  But I don't, I think this movie is gonna end up doing worse.

• 1:21:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. But I'm just, I'm looking for, as we learned from the summer box office game, comps don't help. We learned that in business, too. But I'm just curious.

• 1:21:38Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, Mickey 17 made $134 million worldwide. Is Deere gonna make $134 million worldwide? I don't think so.

• 1:21:44Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 1:21:45Sean Fennessey?

  It might open sub 10 million this weekend, and come in like, fourth place behind.

• 1:21:51Amanda Dobbins?

  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, that's not a good look. It's not auspicious.

• 1:22:04Sean Fennessey?

  This is the challenge, too, with movies like this, is in our, in our society,

• 1:22:11Sean Fennessey?

  a movie that doesn't work is a wait for streaming.

• 1:22:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:14Sean Fennessey?

  It's not actually, we haven't gotten to the place yet, in the revival of movie-going 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.

• 1:22:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:30Sean Fennessey?

  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?

• 1:22:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I mean, I think that's just a larger question about the movie. Why go to all this trouble?

• 1:22:42Sean Fennessey?

  You're right.

• 1:22:43Amanda Dobbins?

  To make a good, to make an interesting podcast. It's fun to just talk about stuff.

• 1:22:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I've been looking forward to this. And I still don't know.

• 1:22:52Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't feel resolved on it.

• 1:22:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:56Amanda Dobbins?

  And I don't think, I mean, that was the interesting thing.

• 1:22:58Sean Fennessey?

  It also would have been so easy for us to just be like, Inari Two sucks, fuck this movie.

• 1:23:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:02Sean Fennessey?

  And I don't feel that way.

• 1:23:05Amanda Dobbins?

  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, what is comedy? And what is the, 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, is interesting. But I don't know if I want to watch it again. That's the thing. I will. But that was, that was the other interesting thing in doing the Inari Two rewatch that I did, that I did, because it is such an Inari Two movie.

• 1:23:47Amanda Dobbins?

  So I went back, I did Amaris Peros, just didn't enjoy it 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, and the, you can only be provoked in the way these films provoke you once. And after that, you get it.

• 1:24:12Sean Fennessey?

  Well, you got to remember that with Birdman, that was a pretty dramatic recontextualization, redefinition of an Inari Two movie. You know?

• 1:24:19Amanda Dobbins?

  True.

• 1:24:20Sean Fennessey?

  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. You know, like, he really pulled something off here. Plus, the sort of, the bravura nature of the acting style and the cleverness, air quotes, of the, of the script was just different from his previous four movies. I mean, his previous four movies were these, like, dead, serious triadises on the pain in the world, and how, you know, demolished we are.

• 1:24:55Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's all interconnected. Yeah.

• 1:24:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. Right. Yeah. It's 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 a, any critical lens, the movie just feels really shallow.

• 1:25:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:13Sean Fennessey?

  I, I'm gonna see this again. I'm probably gonna see this again on a big screen.

• 1:25:19Speaker 05

  But do you think it's getting, do you think Cruise is getting nominated, Sean? I don't think you gave your answer.

• 1:25:23Sean Fennessey?

  I do.

• 1:25:24Amanda Dobbins?

  You do?

• 1:25:25Sean Fennessey?

  I do. I also think, I'll, I'll add this. This movie is ripe for a 10 years later reclamation.

• 1:25:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, totally.

• 1:25:32Sean Fennessey?

  There will be a cult to this movie.

• 1:25:33Amanda Dobbins?

  A thousand percent.

• 1:25:34Sean Fennessey?

  Because it's gonna 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, 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.

• 1:25:54Sean Fennessey?

  And it's, to me, it's really a question of, if I play Rocky, it plays really, really well. And they campaigned at Bolito 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 how the top three contenders in Best Actor this year have all played Ripley.

• 1:26:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:16Sean Fennessey?

  Isn't that great? Malkovich in Ripley's Game, Andrew Scott in the Ripley TV series, and of course, the talented Mr. Ripley for Damon. And, and there's something Ripley-esque about Tom Cruise, the way that he moves through the world. Wouldn't you say?

• 1:26:30Amanda Dobbins?

  He would be good at it.

• 1:26:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. He would be, he would have been a hell of a Ripley.

• 1:26:34Amanda Dobbins?

  I would watch it now. Does it have to be, yeah, listen.

• 1:26:37Sean Fennessey?

  No, there's older Ripley stories, right? Aren't some of the later Highsmith novels about him being older guy? I think that's what the Malkovich film is, is the later stage Ripley. Okay, top 10 Cruise performances.

• 1:26:47Amanda Dobbins?

  I forgot to rank them. I just wrote out 10, so I'll, I'll do it live now.

• 1:26:51Sean Fennessey?

  You'll do it live?

• 1:26:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:53Sean Fennessey?

  We don't have to talk through every single movie.

• 1:26:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Did you rank yours as well?

• 1:26:56Sean Fennessey?

  I did. I have to make a decision right now, because I'm stuck on something at the moment about what to do.

• 1:27:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:27:02Sean Fennessey?

  Would you like me to do mine, and then you can do yours, since you're not ranked?

• 1:27:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. You don't want to go?

• 1:27:08Sean Fennessey?

  You want to go back and forth?

• 1:27:09Amanda Dobbins?

  I thought that we could, but we don't have to.

• 1:27:11Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:27:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:27:13Sean Fennessey?

  Number 10, what do you got?

• 1:27:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Risky Business.

• 1:27:15Sean Fennessey?

  Not on my list.

• 1:27:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Wow. Okay. You don't know how to have fun, and you don't know the power of dancing in your socks.

• 1:27:23Sean Fennessey?

  Never done that.

• 1:27:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. That's not surprising to me.

• 1:27:26Sean Fennessey?

  I've danced.

• 1:27:29Sean Fennessey?

  I danced, I danced every day with my daughter.

• 1:27:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:32Sean Fennessey?

  In my underwear while wearing Ray-Bans.

• 1:27:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:27:34Sean Fennessey?

  It's never happened.

• 1:27:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:27:35Sean Fennessey?

  It will never happen. It's my solemn promise to you on this show. My number 10 is Mission Impossible, which is just an acknowledgement.

• 1:27:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:27:42Sean Fennessey?

  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 Cheery and he's like, "Kittridge, you've never seen me very upset." I think is fantastic.

• 1:27:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:56Sean Fennessey?

  De Palma aids it. His performance in the other movies is like, up and down, you know, a little, a little.

• 1:28:03Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know. I think.

• 1:28:03Sean Fennessey?

  Non-entity at times.

• 1:28:05Amanda Dobbins?

  So I, at nine, just to, to build a beautiful list and podcast together, at nine, I'll do Fallout, which is my Mission Impossible choice.

• 1:28:13Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:28:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Because I do think that we need to honor just the Tom Cruise jumping out of planes.

• 1:28:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:19Amanda Dobbins?

  And just absolutely like ripping on guys. And that is, that's the peak of it for sure.

• 1:28:23Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 1:28:24Amanda Dobbins?

  That is a form of acting.

• 1:28:25Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 1:28:34Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, good. We're getting a little bit of differentiation already.

• 1:28:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:28:37Sean Fennessey?

  Number nine, I've given myself a real challenge here.

• 1:28:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. Are you also ranking these, life?

• 1:28:45Sean Fennessey?

  No, no, I've just, I have to pick one or the other of these two movies.

• 1:28:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:28:48Sean Fennessey?

  So here's what I'll tell you what I'm choosing between for number nine.

• 1:28:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:28:51Sean Fennessey?

  I'm choosing between The Color of Money and Rain Man. I feel that Rain Man is his most underrated performance.

• 1:28:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, yes. Same era, yeah.

• 1:28:57Sean Fennessey?

  You know, and they come right around the same time. And it's when he's hot shit young Cruz, but he's no longer like high school student Cruz.

• 1:29:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:04Sean Fennessey?

  And we've talked about this many times. This came up on the rewatchables 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's on fire.

• 1:29:25Amanda Dobbins?

  He's, you can't look away from him.

• 1:29:28Sean Fennessey?

  I know.

• 1:29:28Amanda Dobbins?

  In every single scene.

• 1:29:29Sean Fennessey?

  He's a light show, but it's Paul Newman's movie. I'm, I want to know where Paul Newman is going.

• 1:29:35Amanda Dobbins?

  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.

• 1:29:42Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:29:42Amanda Dobbins?

  In terms of like the young peacocking Cruz, which is a real element of, of what he did. He, 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.

• 1:30:03Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:30:03Amanda Dobbins?

  And Color of Money, you know, werewolves of London forever.

• 1:30:08Sean Fennessey?

  I love how we're mixing it up right now.

• 1:30:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:30:09Sean Fennessey?

  My number eight is Vanilla Sky.

• 1:30:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. You, so you just want to be in the club with, with Lance Oppenheim?

• 1:30:16Sean Fennessey?

  No, I was in the club before Lance was born.

• 1:30:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:30:18Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I, I built the club.

• 1:30:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:30:21Sean Fennessey?

  Lance is welcome.

• 1:30:23Sean Fennessey?

  As I said, the Cruz-Crow project matters to me.

• 1:30:25Amanda Dobbins?

  I think it's nice that you guys have this club. And once again, it's for you.

• 1:30:29Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it's not, I mean, Lance said it's his favorite movie of all time.

• 1:30:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, I know.

• 1:30:33Sean Fennessey?

  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. I, it's always been interesting to me that Cruz and Crow together made these like, this pair of midlife crisis movies.

• 1:31:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:02Sean Fennessey?

  But you can make the case that Cruz was not yet at his midlife crisis when he made these movies, but he almost like foretells them.

• 1:31:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm. Or he just has several, you know?

• 1:31:10Sean Fennessey?

  Or yeah.

• 1:31:10Amanda Dobbins?

  You can do a lot when you're that rich and famous.

• 1:31:12Sean Fennessey?

  He keeps going, every quarter he hits a new one. But yeah, I've always been a big fan. Uh, so your number eight will be The Color of Money. So what's your number seven?

• 1:31:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Great question. Let's go with Top Gun Maverick.

• 1:31:28Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:31:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Which is, you know, him in old guy nostalgia Jesus mode.

• 1:31:34Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:31:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, but I found it very moving. And he plays, listen.

• 1:31:40Sean Fennessey?

  One of the signature notes of this podcast, you being moved by Top Gun Maverick.

• 1:31:46Amanda Dobbins?

  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? Uh, 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 Jon 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.

• 1:32:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:25Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's the best type of nostalgia.

• 1:32:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Maverick is a, is a certain kind of a Cruz part. It's like a little more wolfish, a little more devilish, you know?

• 1:32:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:36Sean Fennessey?

  He's like, he's the risk taker character. He's the, the loose cannon, um, who breaks the rules.

• 1:32:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:32:42Sean Fennessey?

  You know, he lives, he lives his own way.

• 1:32:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:32:44Sean Fennessey?

  That's why he's never elevated.

• 1:32:46Amanda Dobbins?

  But in.

• 1:32:46Sean Fennessey?

  What's he supposed to, you should have been a Colonel by now? Is that what, is that what Hamm says to him?

• 1:32:50Amanda Dobbins?

  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.

• 1:32:58Sean Fennessey?

  Maniacally laughing in bed, fully clothed with Jennifer Connelly.

• 1:33:01Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, that scene is interesting.

• 1:33:04Sean Fennessey?

  Uh-huh.

• 1:33:04Amanda Dobbins?

  But, uh, he made up a whole new version of football.

• 1:33:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:09Amanda Dobbins?

  To create teamwork.

• 1:33:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. What's that game called?

• 1:33:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, Double, Double Offense to some, I don't know.

• 1:33:16Sean Fennessey?

  No, it's like Thunderball or something. It's something very stupid.

• 1:33:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:33:19Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, my number six is Collateral.

• 1:33:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Oh, I'll do Collateral at six, too.

• 1:33:23Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, great.

• 1:33:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, there we go.

• 1:33:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yo, homie, is that my briefcase?

• 1:33:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:33:27Sean Fennessey?

  Um, no, again, another thing that, um, 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. Uh, it was interesting, I was rewatching some sequences from this last night. The scene where he assassinates the jazz musician.

• 1:33:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:33:41Sean Fennessey?

  The scene where he, uh, gets his briefcase back after Jamie Foxx is, is mugged, um, 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.

• 1:33:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:55Sean Fennessey?

  And he should be a little older and a little more grizzled. And I watched him on GMA and I was like,

• 1:34:01Sean Fennessey?

  why, why is it important to you to look like this now?

• 1:34:03Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I know. You know, I was, I was thinking about this recently because, I mean, should's a powerful word, right? And should is, should's a strong word. It's how he would look if it were the eighties. 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 fifties and early sixties. 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 Talbot's? Like, can't we, as, as the world, you know, turns?

• 1:34:43Sean Fennessey?

  I honor your fears, fears about aging. I'll just say for an actor.

• 1:34:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:47Sean Fennessey?

  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 does in Digger, which is pretend to be an older person.

• 1:35:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:35:14Sean Fennessey?

  Which if he did not have the psychotic diet and, you know, physical regimen and, and beliefs and dying his hair, he might actually just look like Digger. You know, like most normal men, when they get into their sixties and seventies, 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.

• 1:35:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:40Sean Fennessey?

  He's handsome in Network.

• 1:35:41Amanda Dobbins?

  I know.

• 1:35:42Sean Fennessey?

  He's very, he's actually quite sexy in Network, even though he's a grizzled sixty-something. He, he, he draws Diana Christensen in that movie.

• 1:35:50Amanda Dobbins?

  That's true, but what he's playing in Network is very different than the types of roles that Cruz wants to play.

• 1:35:57Sean Fennessey?

  Sure.

• 1:35:57Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, Russell Crowe has aged naturally. And now he's just like in Nuremberg, so.

• 1:36:03Sean Fennessey?

  Doing fine work. I kind of enjoyed Nuremberg.

• 1:36:07Amanda Dobbins?

  So I don't, I just, I don't know if it's limited to the bankability and, and what you want to do and what audiences and/or studios or the,

• 1:36:16Amanda Dobbins?

  accept in terms of the way you look and what roles you can play. I don't think is, is gender specific.

• 1:36:21Sean Fennessey?

  There's, I think, a much wider.

• 1:36:25Sean Fennessey?

  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

• 1:36:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:36:34Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 1:36:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:36:44Sean Fennessey?

  And now has become far more common amongst people with means.

• 1:36:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:36:49Sean Fennessey?

  And

• 1:36:50Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, it's not limited to just Gen X and boomers. I mean, there are many 25 year olds also.

• 1:36:55Sean Fennessey?

  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, we are culture 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.

• 1:37:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:37:27Sean Fennessey?

  And again, I do think there is a difference in the genders and sort of like what the expectations are.

• 1:37:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, sure. There's some.

• 1:37:34Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 1:37:56Amanda Dobbins?

  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.

• 1:38:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:27Amanda Dobbins?

  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?

• 1:38:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:38:47Amanda Dobbins?

  And that is weird, but also why do I need to, you know, why do I need to look 90?

• 1:38:53Sean Fennessey?

  I have another theory about this.

• 1:38:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, go ahead. I mean,

• 1:38:54Sean Fennessey?

  This is, this is really down the rabbit hole.

• 1:38:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, whatever.

• 1:38:58Sean Fennessey?

  I think MILF culture has completely infected this.

• 1:39:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:39:03Sean Fennessey?

  Now, I'm obviously 44. And the thing that happens when you get older as a man is

• 1:39:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:39:07Sean Fennessey?

  women who are a little older are much more attracted 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.

• 1:39:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:39:15Sean Fennessey?

  And I never thought about this this way. And then you get to 44 and you're like, all the moms are hot.

• 1:39:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:39:20Sean Fennessey?

  But because of the way that MILF post Stifler's mom is like 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 out away from that as kind of like the, the way that Marilyn Monroe was once a vision of sexual desire.

• 1:39:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:39:43Sean Fennessey?

  This is all interconnected to Cruise, though, because Cruise similarly is like, what is my most appealing masculine age? When was I at my absolute, absolutely most beautiful and appealing to the widest swath of people?

• 1:39:56Amanda Dobbins?

  I do know the answer to that.

• 1:39:58Sean Fennessey?

  What is it?

• 1:39:58Amanda Dobbins?

  It's 1992, A Few Good Men, which is not my number five, but that's when he's the hands most.

• 1:40:03Sean Fennessey?

  You can put us back on track, but these are some interesting thoughts I'm having in my 40s.

• 1:40:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Some of it is also just about like, the 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 and everything 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.

• 1:40:36Sean Fennessey?

  We both have collateral at number six.

• 1:40:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:37Sean Fennessey?

  What's your number five?

• 1:40:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, I don't know. This gets really hard. I guess Top Gun.

• 1:40:42Sean Fennessey?

  You've got Top Gun and Top Gun Maverick.

• 1:40:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, they're different phases of life. I acknowledge Tom Cruise's aging process, even if you don't.

• 1:40:50Sean Fennessey?

  He's not aging.

• 1:40:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Emotionally, he's experiencing things. Old people have value.

• 1:40:58Sean Fennessey?

  Well, of course, I agree. I'm advocating for him to get old. I love old people.

• 1:41:03Amanda Dobbins?

  He can get old and still color his hair.

• 1:41:06Sean Fennessey?

  I was obsessed with my grandparents, my great uncles and aunts. I was, I was so interested in them.

• 1:41:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Do you think that if you were like, so you have like a good silver gray going, right?

• 1:41:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Not according to my daughter, who says my hair is gray.

• 1:41:18Amanda Dobbins?

  No, but it's like, if it goes white, if it changes color.

• 1:41:22Sean Fennessey?

  It will.

• 1:41:22Amanda Dobbins?

  It's gonna go totally white.

• 1:41:23Sean Fennessey?

  My dad is white right now.

• 1:41:24Amanda Dobbins?

  And then are you gonna intervention? You're just gonna go?

• 1:41:27Sean Fennessey?

  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'll probably be weird. That wouldn't be ideal.

• 1:41:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:38Sean Fennessey?

  But I am who I am. I mean, I really believe in this. Like, I actually think.

• 1:41:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. Well, listen, you're, you're an example to the kids, but it's 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.

• 1:41:52Sean Fennessey?

  Your mom is white silver?

• 1:41:54Amanda Dobbins?

  My mom is just, it's like pure white at this point. And my dad, you know, slowly went from salt and pepper to, to just, I mean, just great hair on my dad. And

• 1:42:06Sean Fennessey?

  You guys have a good head of hair.

• 1:42:07Amanda Dobbins?

  So if it's gradual, maybe I would lean into it.

• 1:42:13Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not, I'm not prescriptive about this. It's just for me.

• 1:42:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:42:16Sean Fennessey?

  For me, I don't really like spending a lot of time on this stuff.

• 1:42:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Okay. I know. You gotta be in your spreadsheets. Congratulations.

• 1:42:23Sean Fennessey?

  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 it back to Cruise, I'm like, he's really worried about this. He's really interested in this. He's like got a whole machine that accounts for all of these things and maybe machines that he uses to account for them as well.

• 1:42:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but it is a huge part of his job and has been. His, it's not like he, he was always the huge matinee movie star idol. Like even, you know, and I, Top Gun is because just him in the, in the jacket, it's him playing volleyball.

• 1:42:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:57Amanda Dobbins?

  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.

• 1:43:09Sean Fennessey?

  I

• 1:43:09Amanda Dobbins?

  You don't have Maverick on the list.

• 1:43:11Sean Fennessey?

  I forgot to mention my number seven, which is Minority Report.

• 1:43:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:43:14Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know how I oversaw that.

• 1:43:15Amanda Dobbins?

  He's good in it. He is really good in it.

• 1:43:16Sean Fennessey?

  He is very good in it. Again, being asked to play grief, being asked to play fear and, you know, very Hitchcockian thriller, very Cary Grant kind of performance of like a man wrongfully accused, desperately trying to get away from something. But my, my, my top six, I think is indicative of kind of what I like about Cruise 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 Fourth of July, which I think is

• 1:43:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:43:48Sean Fennessey?

  one of his very best performances.

• 1:43:50Amanda Dobbins?

  I think that's my number two, I think. It's like, he's incredible in it.

• 1:43:53Sean Fennessey?

  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 is Top Gun. So what is your number four? Born on the Fourth of July, of course.

• 1:44:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:44:06Sean Fennessey?

  He plays Ron Kovik, Vietnam veteran who comes to speak out against the war, a Long Island classic and transformational performance.

• 1:44:14Amanda Dobbins?

  And this, this should have been his Oscar. I think, I know you think it's Jerry Maguire. Who did he lose to?

• 1:44:20Sean Fennessey?

  I'm gonna look it up.

• 1:44:21Amanda Dobbins?

  But I mean, he's, he's sensational in it and

• 1:44:25Sean Fennessey?

  I think he lost to someone very worthy, as I recall.

• 1:44:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes. I think it's one of those tough years, but.

• 1:44:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he lost to Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot.

• 1:44:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, well, that's one where it's like, then DDL is gonna get a, he's, Daniel, Daniel Day-Lewis is really good, but I would give it to Tom Cruise in that one. It's fine.

• 1:44:43Sean Fennessey?

  Can't argue.

• 1:44:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. So I guess at four,

• 1:44:48Amanda Dobbins?

  I'll do A Few Good Men.

• 1:44:52Sean Fennessey?

  A Few Good Men is also my number four.

• 1:44:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, that's beautiful. This is my, this is my favorite performance. This is, I mean, you know, this is one of the most important movies on this podcast.

• 1:45:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:45:02Amanda Dobbins?

  And

• 1:45:03Sean Fennessey?

  Rock star movie star shit.

• 1:45:04Amanda Dobbins?

  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.

• 1:45:21Sean Fennessey?

  I believe he wins in that battle.

• 1:45:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. Yeah. I mean, well, I think he does in the actual court of law.

• 1:45:27Sean Fennessey?

  Well, we know that, but I think in the court of acting, many people would give Nicholson the W, but I've always thought Cruise gives the more thrilling performance.

• 1:45:37Amanda Dobbins?

  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?

• 1:45:50Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I think both.

• 1:45:51Amanda Dobbins?

  I strenuously object.

• 1:45:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, anyway.

• 1:45:54Sean Fennessey?

  You doctor the logbooks. Um, yeah. I mean, A Few Good Men is just a showcase for a very specific kind of movie star part. Lawyer gets to give big speeches, gets to be highly emotional, gets to be skeptical, gets to be downtrodden, gets to be drunk.

• 1:46:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:46:09Sean Fennessey?

  Gets to be absurd, gets to play softball.

• 1:46:13Sean Fennessey?

  Number three, what is it?

• 1:46:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, so I guess, I don't know. So, I mean, the two movies I have left are Magnolia and Jerry Maguire. What's your, what is, what are your, I know both of those are in there for you. What's?

• 1:46:26Sean Fennessey?

  Eyes Wide Shut is number three for me.

• 1:46:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Did I forget Eyes Wide Shut? Oh, I did. Oops. Okay.

• 1:46:32Sean Fennessey?

  You've got two Top Gun movies on your list.

• 1:46:34Amanda Dobbins?

  You're not gonna take the Top Gun movies away from me, but maybe I would take Eyes Wide Shut instead of

• 1:46:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Color of Money? I don't know. Okay, you have Eyes Wide Shut. It's fine. We have them all. I didn't mean to forget Eyes Wide Shut.

• 1:46:51Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 1:47:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:47:03Sean Fennessey?

  How much of those were self-reflexive acts to take those parts?

• 1:47:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:07Sean Fennessey?

  Because Eyes Wide Shut, which is about a doctor who enters a world of mystery and sexual ridiculousness 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 Vanilla Sky. Like, 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.

• 1:47:51Sean Fennessey?

  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, you know, 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 maestros 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 Inaritu, 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

• 1:48:34Sean Fennessey?

  stuff that he's been doing. So number three is Eyes Wide Shut. What's number three for you?

• 1:48:38Amanda Dobbins?

  I'll do Magnolia at three.

• 1:48:39Sean Fennessey?

  Magnolia is my number two.

• 1:48:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:43Sean Fennessey?

  You know, obviously not as much of the movie as on his shoulders. Speaking of people I'd like to see him reunite with.

• 1:48:52Sean Fennessey?

  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 to their relationship.

• 1:49:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:02Sean Fennessey?

  He's extraordinary, is Frank T. J. Mackey. 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.

• 1:49:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. But 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 Maguire, which is the whole range of what he can do.

• 1:49:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yep. Total package.

• 1:49:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:45Sean Fennessey?

  Still think it's his best performance. 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.

• 1:50:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:50:03Sean Fennessey?

  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. It's aided by the fact that it's got supporting performances and a world around it that is so rich that lets it be this proper character study. But yeah, I mean, I've always felt like this is him at his best.

• 1:50:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. It's so specific and strange and also so popcorn at the same time.

• 1:50:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:50:34Amanda Dobbins?

  And has all of the, his character gets a lot of moments from, you know, Show Me the Money, but also that everyone else remembers 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.

• 1:50:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, he's also playing like a, not a very good guy.

• 1:51:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. Well, he often doesn't play good guys. That's the thing.

• 1:51:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's true.

• 1:51:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Until Ethan Hunt.

• 1:51:08Sean Fennessey?

  What's he trying to tell us?

• 1:51:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Well, then he tried to tell us that he was asking us to trust him one last time.

• 1:51:16Sean Fennessey?

  I'll take another Mission Impossible movie tomorrow.

• 1:51:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. I mean, the last, the biplanes. Listen, wonderful stuff.

• 1:51:22Sean Fennessey?

  Tom and Tramell Tillman together. Bring him back.

• 1:51:26Amanda Dobbins?

  You must be out of your mind.

• 1:51:29Sean Fennessey?

  We did talk about Tramell Tillman in Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother.

• 1:51:31Amanda Dobbins?

  I know, because I didn't really want to spoil it for people, but when that happened, I just sat right up like, hello!

• 1:51:35Sean Fennessey?

  Nice to see him not doing, doing a normal performance, too. Not that, like, really mannered Severance, Mission Impossible kind of performance. All right, well, that's it. We did it.

• 1:51:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:51:45Sean Fennessey?

  This was the Digger episode.

• 1:51:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Great.

• 1:51:47Sean Fennessey?

  How do you feel?

• 1:51:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Unresolved, but okay. You know, I'm glad we had the discussion. I'm glad that you weren't like...

• 1:51:55Sean Fennessey?

  I loved it. Masterpiece?

• 1:51:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. And/or this is a, this is total dreck. I'm glad that you at least thought it was interesting. It's interesting.

• 1:52:02Sean Fennessey?

  I thought you were really gonna hate it. And I did feel, I sensed that the turn, that 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.

• 1:52:33Amanda Dobbins?

  You mean, the critics have their knives out, not, it's not Ryan Johnson's knives-out.

• 1:52:41Sean Fennessey?

  That usually means that, like, it's accomplished something.

• 1:52:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:44Sean Fennessey?

  It's gotten a reaction.

• 1:52:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:46Sean Fennessey?

  So, and it got one out of us, even if we are still a little bit trying to figure out where that is.

• 1:52:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:52:53Sean Fennessey?

  All right. Good chat.

• 1:52:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Good job.

• 1:52:56Sean Fennessey?

  I'm headed to New York.

• 1:52:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Congratulations.

• 1:52:58Sean Fennessey?

  Five movies in five days. That's my plan.

• 1:53:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. I think I may be seeing several of those movies here while you're there.

• 1:53:06Sean Fennessey?

  You're seeing Cameron Winter? You may be seeing Artificial?

• 1:53:09Amanda Dobbins?

  I need them to confirm that. I am seeing Artificial. I think I'm gonna be able to see another film. I'm gonna see Making Marie Antoinette.

• 1:53:17Sean Fennessey?

  Saw that last night.

• 1:53:17Amanda Dobbins?

  I know.

• 1:53:19Sean Fennessey?

  Lots to discuss. October, can I tell you something?

• 1:53:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:53:24Sean Fennessey?

  I was thinking about this on the way here.

• 1:53:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:53:26Sean Fennessey?

  I feel like a lot of October is gonna be this same kind of conversation about Digger.

• 1:53:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Where?

• 1:53:32Sean Fennessey?

  It's like, this is interesting.

• 1:53:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:35Sean Fennessey?

  Did this work?

• 1:53:37Amanda Dobbins?

  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.

• 1:53:55Sean Fennessey?

  More to talk through.

• 1:53:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:56Sean Fennessey?

  I know.

• 1:53:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:57Sean Fennessey?

  But 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.

• 1:54:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:54:03Sean Fennessey?

  And I love October. And this October...

• 1:54:05Amanda Dobbins?

  You also hate March and April for that reason, because you're tired and you're hungover from the Oscars.

• 1:54:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. We got Prostate Talmira 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.

• 1:54:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:19Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 1:54:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:43Sean Fennessey?

  Plus, we got a live show. It's gonna be good. It's gonna be fun.

• 1:54:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. I'm glad to see your spirits are up.

• 1:54:49Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders, for his work on this episode. Thanks to Lucas Kavanagh for his production support. They both came today wearing cowboy hats. Shout out to them. Yeah, Verity, Monday. Colin Hoover adaptation, Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett. We'll see you then.