Tom Cruise is utterly bizarre. He’s also America’s greatest movie star.



Tom Cruise is a strange human being. This is not up for debate.

Nor is the fact that he’s a great movie star and perhaps the last truly great American movie star.

Cruise doesn’t overplay the working-class persona. He simply embodies the concerns of a terrified father trying to dodge alien death rays.

Even at 64, this genetic anomaly shows no signs of slowing down. Cruise is so monomaniacally devoted to his craft that what he does off-screen should have no bearing on what he delivers on-screen.

Losin' it

Yes, he sold his soul to a sci-fi cult founded by a charlatan and a known criminal. Yes, he bounced around on Oprah’s couch like a toddler who had just inhaled a dozen Red Bulls. Yes, he left a trail of high-profile divorces behind him. And yes, his relationship with his youngest daughter, Suri, has all the warmth of a North Korean prison camp in November.

None of this matters. Not in the grand scheme of things, anyway.

That’s because Tom Cruise is essentially a diminutive delivery system for larger-than-life cinema.

We live in a culture obsessed with dragging actors into the town square to answer for their sins, whether real or manufactured. Audiences demand that stars double as Sunday school teachers. Expecting a guy who scales mountain faces for fun to have a wholesome, normal domestic life is borderline delusional.

As a young man, Cruise briefly considered becoming a Franciscan priest. That didn't work out, but he eventually found a vocation almost as all-consuming.

All the right moves

Circa 1986, Cruise abandoned the real world to become a perpetual entertainment machine. If he wants to spend his days grazing on a handful of almonds, running on a treadmill at 3:00 a.m., and worshiping cosmic conquerors, that’s his business. And in truth, it’s really none of ours. He is an actor, not a member of Congress.

The miracle of Cruise is his ability to play an everyday American while living a life that seems more alien than the creatures he runs from.

Which brings us to Steven Spielberg’s 2005 masterpiece "War of the Worlds." Cruise plays Ray Ferrier, a divorced New Jersey dock worker with a rusted V8 engine block sitting on a coffee table in his messy living room.

A man worth hundreds of millions of dollars, who flies private jets around the globe, somehow steps onto the screen and instantly radiates the exact energy of a guy who owes child support and eats cereal straight out of the box. He doesn’t overplay the working-class persona. He doesn’t force a cringeworthy accent. He simply embodies the concerns of a terrified father trying to dodge alien death rays. And he does it superbly.

Far and away

This effortless ability to play an average American sets him apart from his peers. Brad Pitt is a fine actor. But he always looks like a Hollywood A-lister playing dress-up when he tries to portray a normal civilian. Pitt was fantastic in "Fight Club" and "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," but he could never match the ferocious vulnerability delivered by Cruise in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 drama, "Magnolia."

In an ensemble that includes Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jason Robards, and William H. Macy, Cruise stands out as Frank T.J. Mackey, an obnoxious, hyper-alpha pickup-artist guru. But when Mackey sits beside the hospital bed of his estranged father, now comatose and dying, the tough-guy facade fades.

The scene had an eerie parallel in Cruise's own life. His mother left his father when Cruise was 12, and father and son didn't see each other again for a decade. They finally reunited when his father was dying of cancer in a hospital — on the condition, Cruise later said, that the son ask no questions about the past.

Cruise, who has described his father as a "bully and a coward," brought some of that history directly into the scene, rewriting the monologue himself. The result is a brutal, believable breakdown that remains one of the finest performances in modern film history.

Risky business

Cruise's range is genuinely impressive, even extending into areas where it really shouldn’t. In the 2008 comedy "Tropic Thunder," Cruise donned a fat suit, a bald cap, and inordinate amounts of fake chest hair to play Les Grossman, a psychopathic, Diet Coke-chugging studio executive. The performance was comedic gold, turning a Harvey Weinstein-esque caricature into a cult-classic figure. The idea of Maverick aggressively dancing to hip-hop while screaming expletives into a satellite phone should never have worked. But it did, with magnificent effect.

The first time I saw Cruise on screen was in Oliver Stone’s 1989 classic, "Born on the Fourth of July." I was much too young to watch it, and my father should really have known better than to let me see it. But he didn’t at the time, and I’m eternally grateful for his questionable parenting decisions.

Playing Ron Kovic, a paralyzed Vietnam veteran, Cruise captures the heartbreak of a young American patriot who was betrayed by the country he served. The performance, which earned him an Academy Award nomination, remains a masterclass in psychological horror.

Yet people still wax lyrical about Daniel Day-Lewis and his much-discussed commitment to method acting, while treating Cruise as little more than a charismatic movie star. The disrespect is almost automatic. Cruise gets lumped in with Jason Statham and Keanu Reeves, as though physicality and box-office appeal somehow disqualify an actor from serious dramatic greatness. That’s the great irony of Cruise’s career. One of Hollywood’s most technically gifted dramatic actors has spent decades being dismissed because he also happens to be one of its biggest movie stars.

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Minority report

At an age when most Hollywood legends are retired or playing roles no one cares about, Cruise instead chooses to hang off the side of an Airbus A400M aircraft at 5,000 feet. He breaks his ankle while jumping between buildings in London, gets up, finishes the shot on camera, and then gets physiotherapy so he can do it all over again. The sexagenarian treats his body like an industrial turbine. He treats his craft with the devotion it deserves. Tom Cruise is an absolute machine, and he has given so many memorable performances.

The obsession with his off-screen antics reveals a sickening hypocrisy in how we consume art. We routinely listen to songs sung by disgusting individuals and admire paintings by violent lunatics, yet we expect our action heroes to be salt-of-the-earth types who adopt African children and fight for Zelenskyy on the front lines.

Cruise traded a quiet life for total mastery of cinema. When you sit down to watch a newly minted sequel to "Days of Thunder," you’re not buying a ticket to a lecture on family values. Instead, you’re paying for two hours of pure, unfiltered adrenaline, delivered by someone who sacrificed his sanity and his physical safety to make sure you enjoy your popcorn. Forget the trampolining on a couch. Forget the celebrity gossip. Tom Cruise is bizarre, but his body of work is damn near unimpeachable.

Nothing Says America 250 Like Top Gun Back In Theaters

If you’re looking for something to get you more excited to celebrate America’s 250th birthday than you already are, drop everything you’re doing and go see the Top Gun movies in theaters right now. To commemorate the iconic 1986 film’s 40-year anniversary, Paramount Pictures re-released Top Gun and its riveting sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, in […]

Palantir insiders aim to make Hollywood great again



A group of Palantir insiders close to co-founder Peter Thiel are raising funds for a new film studio — one that aims to reawaken the bolder, more unapologetically American spirit of Hollywood classics like "The Searchers" and "First Blood."

The privately circulated pitch deck for Founders Films — led by Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, Palantir employee Ryan Podolsky, and investor Christian Garrett — states the problem bluntly. After years of cultural drift, “movies have become ideological, more cautious, and less entertaining."

First, rebuild what he calls the American Cinematic Universe, a category that includes 'Red Dawn,' 'Rocky IV,' 'Top Gun,' and 'The Hunt for Red October.'

Couldn’t agree more.

The American Cinematic Universe

So far, those involved are all playing it close to the chest. But we can surmise a few things from Sankar's public remarks to date.

Founders Films has a twofold strategy: First, rebuild what Sankar calls the American Cinematic Universe, a category that includes "Red Dawn," "Rocky IV," "Top Gun," and "The Hunt for Red October." Solid list.

Step Two: Take Hollywood back altogether — from foreign influence; from heavy-handed, overtly divisive progressive ideology; and perhaps, if he pulls it off and if we’re lucky, from the sort of suffocating, entirely numbers-driven decision-making that for too long has hamstrung real filmmakers and pushed millions away from cinema altogether.

Very interesting indeed, then, that from the otherwise confidential slides of the circulating pitch deck, we get this bit, which sounds like a promise: “Back artists unconditionally, take risk on novel IP.”

Now you’re talking. America needs to back artists. Period.

The return of fun

Of course, not every last American is going to care deeply about every one of Founders Films' potential projects, but that's the case with every movie house and every movie! American filmgoers and cinephiles have for almost two decades lived in an ever-shrinking box populated only with childish drivel, rehashed/remixed IP, and (face it) corporate progressive propaganda.

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Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

With luck, Founders Films garners investment, takes its shot, and succeeds. And you should want this, even if you don't find yourself on the so-called tech right or have any interest in Palantirian sorts of worldviews, for the following reason: The pendulum must swing for any real cinema to flourish again. Set aside high-minded cinema for a moment: When was the last time you saw a fun (or funny, for that matter) movie in a theater?

Founders Films, operating like a depth charge, may be just the thing to shake everyone out of their tedium and agitate the medium. Progressive narratives have dominated long enough that the entire exercise, even for progressives, has been emptied of vital spark.

Vision first

Hollywood needs the proverbial shot in the arm, even if it hurts: a genuine quasi-ideological counterweight, placing the director's or writer’s vision behind the wheel. Lefties have fought for this exact treatment since the 1970s.

That kind of shake-up may be the absolute best thing that can happen to Hollywood, regardless of politics. A plurality of voices apolitical, political, etc., should have a shot at prying open the death grip of progressive control over the arts. That alone may change the entirety of the game.

Milius-pilled

We don’t know much at this point. There are rumors that Elon Musk is the shadows of the project. A variety of military-based or -adjacent projects have been floated, and Sankar, writing at Substack, has hailed the work of legendary director/writer John Milius. If that's the direction Founders intends, cinema could heat up fast.

Can we assume the incredible technological power running under the Palantir umbrella is reapplied into film? Likely so. If (wisely) they bring in organic, human-oriented leavening agents in the form of true artists (less so the compliant, meek striver) to offset the use of AI, the impact on the industry and creatives nationwide could be powerful.

While there’s a baked-in audience for defiant right-coded material and Founders should serve them, with luck, Founders Films will consider the whole of the American film ecosystem and take a broad, long-term approach — launching propaganda-geared works designed to counter ideological opposites, sure, but also backing art “unconditionally” to open up the whole creative spectrum.

Let everyone take a shot. Allow non-ideological cinema a chance to flourish again: indies, new IP from dangerous artists, edgy comedy, the works. This was the '80s, the zeitgeist behind all those right-coded classics. Bring it back.

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'The Acolyte' star: Asians need a Tom Cruise of their own



"Star Wars" actor Manny Jacinto argued that there aren't enough Asian people in Hollywood movies and therefore people should write more stories for their own races.

Jacinto, who has starred in the heavily criticized "Star Wars" series "The Acolyte," reflected on his time filming "Top Gun: Maverick" in an interview with GQ.

He commented on how the majority of his lines were left on the cutting room floor, an outcome he generally connected to the idea that producer and star Tom Cruise is making movies for white people.

'At the end of the day, Tom Cruise is writing stories for Tom Cruise.'

"It's flattering that there was a little bit of an outcry, but it wasn't shocking to me," Jacinto said regarding his reduced role in the film.

"There was this sense of where the film was going [on set], like I can see them focusing the camera more on these [other] guys and not taking so much time on our scenes. Fortunately, it still was a great experience — you get to see this huge machine at work, see how Tom Cruise works, and you get to be a small part of this huge franchise," he explained.

Jacinto said an experience like that "fuels you" because "at the end of the day, Tom Cruise is writing stories for Tom Cruise."

"It's up to us — Asian-Americans, people of color — to be that [for ourselves]. We can't wait for somebody else to do it. If we want bigger stories out there, we have to make them for ourselves."

"The Acolyte" seemingly meets those diversity initiatives, according to Jacinto, who said he felt that actors of his race in the "Star Wars" series proved to be meaningful.

"I know there are plenty of 'Star Wars' fans that look like you and me already [in 'The Acolyte']," he told GQ's writer, who is also Asian. "But it's exciting that in this new iteration we have Lee Jung-Jae, myself, Amandla [Stenberg], [and] Jodie Turner-Smith," he added. "Even more people of color will be able to relate to and celebrate and see themselves in this entity that is 'Star Wars.'"

"Star Wars" projects that were released during Jacinto's youth — Episodes I-III — were most certainly diverse, but apparently not to the degree that Jacinto found satisfactory.

"I remember watching all of the movies with my parents growing up, [but] if I'm completely transparent with you, ['Star Wars'] was cool, it was something I admired, but almost from afar. Maybe because I didn't see anybody like me in 'Star Wars,' it was never something I aspired to be in, the way I'd watch a Jackie Chan film or something and go, 'Oh, I want to do that.'"

Creator George Lucas addressed this issue of diversity and representation at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

"They would say, 'It's all white men,' [but] most of the people are aliens!"

"The idea is you're supposed to accept people for what they are, whether they're big and furry or whether they're green or whatever. The idea is all people are equal," he continued, per the Independent. "In the first [movie] there were a few Tunisians who were dark, and in the second one I had Billy Williams, and the [prequels], which they were also criticizing, I had Sam Jackson. He wasn't a scoundrel like Lando. He was one of the top Jedi."

Fending off more criticism, Lucas also addressed complaints that the women in his films appeared too typically feminine.

"You can't just put a woman in pants and expect her to be a hero. They can wear dresses; they can wear whatever they want," he said, noting that female characters were the drivers of the films.

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