Karen#1
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TONY ORTEGA
Excerpt:
Once again, we’re privileged to have a review from our longtime friend and film critic, Luke Y. Thompson. Digger opens wide in theaters today.
Welp, Tom Cruise has finally made his most interesting movie in a long time with Digger, and given that Top Gun 3 and Days of Thunder 2 are on deck, probably his last interesting movie for a long time.
He’s taking a breather from pretending to be a stuntman: If you want to see what real stuntmen think of him, watch David Leitch’s The Fall Guy, where the villain is a narcissist celebrity with a familiar laugh who pretends he actually takes big risks. Whatever the reason, though, we appear to have a short window of Cruise reverting to prime ‘90s mode, when he made a sincere effort to work with all the best directors and let them utilize him as they wished. He says he’s been a longtime fan of Amores Perros, and it certainly can’t have escaped his notice that director Alejandro G. Iñárritu finally scored Leo DiCaprio his Oscar after years of the actor’s trying, and did so by breaking Leo down and finally taking away his overt “I’m acting as hard as I can!” shtick.
Iñárritu, like Cruise, is a bit of a man out of time. He made his name with ultra-serious social issue movies like Babel, and still gets less critical love than his BFFs in the “Three Amigos” — Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron, who are beloved for making fantasy movies and fairy tales. It’s a generational shift, of sorts; there was certainly a time when Iñárritu’s capital-A Art attempts would have been my parents’ favorite films, or so they might pretend for social clout. But times have changed, and my generation feels differently — Iñárritu finally reacted by ditching the earnestness and giving in to whimsy with his masterpiece to date Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, a fake biopic that embraces magical realism and Mexican history through a fantastical eye. Considering that Tom Cruise apparently believes completely insane, false things about the history of the universe and planet Earth, one can understand why he might have thought Iñárritu a potentially kindred spirit.
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tonyortega.substack.com
Excerpt:
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[/td]Welp, Tom Cruise has finally made his most interesting movie in a long time with Digger, and given that Top Gun 3 and Days of Thunder 2 are on deck, probably his last interesting movie for a long time.
He’s taking a breather from pretending to be a stuntman: If you want to see what real stuntmen think of him, watch David Leitch’s The Fall Guy, where the villain is a narcissist celebrity with a familiar laugh who pretends he actually takes big risks. Whatever the reason, though, we appear to have a short window of Cruise reverting to prime ‘90s mode, when he made a sincere effort to work with all the best directors and let them utilize him as they wished. He says he’s been a longtime fan of Amores Perros, and it certainly can’t have escaped his notice that director Alejandro G. Iñárritu finally scored Leo DiCaprio his Oscar after years of the actor’s trying, and did so by breaking Leo down and finally taking away his overt “I’m acting as hard as I can!” shtick.
Iñárritu, like Cruise, is a bit of a man out of time. He made his name with ultra-serious social issue movies like Babel, and still gets less critical love than his BFFs in the “Three Amigos” — Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron, who are beloved for making fantasy movies and fairy tales. It’s a generational shift, of sorts; there was certainly a time when Iñárritu’s capital-A Art attempts would have been my parents’ favorite films, or so they might pretend for social clout. But times have changed, and my generation feels differently — Iñárritu finally reacted by ditching the earnestness and giving in to whimsy with his masterpiece to date Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, a fake biopic that embraces magical realism and Mexican history through a fantastical eye. Considering that Tom Cruise apparently believes completely insane, false things about the history of the universe and planet Earth, one can understand why he might have thought Iñárritu a potentially kindred spirit.
READ MORE
In ‘Digger,’ Tom Cruise goes for broke in a movie that never quite finds its purpose
Once again, we’re privileged to have a review from our longtime friend and film critic, Luke Y.
tonyortega.substack.com
