Days of Thunder is a fast, formulaic movie dripping with sentiment. It’s about all of the things Top Gun is about: masculinity, friendship, and winning. It’s a great popcorn movie. It is all of these things while also being nothing. An empty, deeply-entertaining pit of a movie. If the word “radical” became colloquially used as a positive around this time, it was because of things like this.

“I’m dropping the hammer.”

I believe my reaction when I saw that Born on the Fourth of July was next in my queue of Tom Cruise movies was “eeeuuuuwwurgh.”

I do not like Oliver Stone. I do not like war movies. I do not like biopics. So I figured I was in for a slog.

My problem was Oliver Stone is that he is a master of non-subtlety. When Tom Cruise’s character Ron Kovic is feeling disoriented, Stone’s camera starts flailing around like it’s outside of a car dealership. Kovic is haunted by the horrible moments he experienced during the Vietnam war, so we get to see and hear those moments over and over again.

I find this kind of filmmaking insulting; I feel like the director is watching the movie over my shoulder and pointing out all of the moments of homage, imagery, and reference because I’m clearly not smart enough to enjoy the movie on my own.

This is a true story based on Ron Kovic’s autobiography. We see Kovic growing up on Long Island, NY, then enlisting for the marines and getting paralyzed in Vietnam. The first half of the movie is full of suffering and cliches. Then Kovic returns home and the movie slows down. He slowly changes from an outspoken proponent of the war to a leader of the movement against it. This part of the story is tolerable. It’s even interesting! I don’t know why I had to watch the first hour to get to this part.

I suppose you could argue that Kovic’s journey and transformation are an allegory for the evolution of American ideals and culture. Kovic is literally born on the fourth of July, for God’s sake. He lives an idyllic life of masculinity and willing and religion. And he slowly realizes simultaneously that the world is much more complicated than he thought it was and that the people who think the pastoral dream is true don’t want to confront the truth about America.

Okay? Fine. I admit it. There was some craftsmanship employed in making this movie. I don’t have to like it.

And Tom? Well…

There’s another Tom Cruise movie that we’ll get to eventually called “Tropic Thunder.” Ben Stiller’s character in that movie could be seen as parodying Cruise’s career. If that’s true, then “Born on the Fourth of July” is Cruise’s “Simple Jack.”

He really lays it on the line. He screams and spits and abandons his trademark handsomeness in favor of an ugly, overgrown mustache, a mullet, and the inability to walk. And the performance lacks the nuance and personality that makes Tom great in Risky Business and in Rain Man.

I guess he had to get a movie like this out of his system so he could realize that he isn’t Daniel Day Lewis. The intense connection to reality is what makes Cruise watchable and engaging, and even though this movie is based on a true story, Cruise is unable to make such an unlikable character seem real. The journeyman relevance of this movie in Cruise’s career makes it forgivable, but don’t watch it.

I think this movie also marks the end of the second phase of Cruise’s career. If 1981-1985 were the Pre-Maverick years, that is, the years before he became a huge star, then 1986-1989 are the experimental years, where Cruise tested the waters of a variety of roles of movie stardom.

It’s not that he stopped experimenting after that, but something changed in 1990. And it wasn’t the release of Wilson Phillips’ self-titled debut album.

In 1990, Cruise starred in his first movie with Nicole Kidman.

Next: Days of Thunder

Two years before Rain Man came out, Cruise starred alongside Paul Newman in The Color of Money, and was ceremoniously outclassed by a more experienced movie star capable of showing more depth, personality and character.

Rain Man is strikingly similar in some ways. It’s another Tom Cruise movie that deals closely with the relationship between money and other pursuits. It’s another “actor showcase” which mostly features Cruise and another movie star talking to each other and encountering a variety of situations. It is also, like The Color of Money, a road movie, the plot of which primarily features the two characters trying to get from one place to another.

Rain Man cleaned up at the Oscars. Dustin Hoffman won the Best Actor award. Barry Levinson won Best Director. Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow won Best Original Screenplay. And the film won Best Picture.

Do you notice someone missing from all of this?

I’ll let you in on a secret: Tom Cruise is better than Dustin Hoffman in this movie. Which isn’t to say Dustin Hoffman is bad. He just doesn’t have much to do. His character (Raymond) mostly just says “definitely” a lot and occasionally freaks out and punches himself in the face. Hoffman portrays this expertly. He changes his walk and his voice and believably pivots between stoic and psychotic. But I think the problem with actor recognition is that while it is entertaining and impressive to see an actor transform, the degree of difficulty is much higher for Cruise’s character, Charlie Babbit.

You see, Raymond has built-in credibility and sympathy. The audience can’t help but pity him, and because they can’t relate to what he’s going through, they aren’t in any position to criticize Hoffman’s performance. I’m sure that there are people like Raymond in real life, but I have no idea if the performance is authentic, in the same way that I can’t criticize the performance of Stephanie Corneliussen on Mr. Robot because she delivers most of her lines in Swedish.

However, I can relate to Charlie, who has to show us from the beginning of the film that he is a selfish asshole, and slowly win our trust and sympathy to the point that we want him to stay with Raymond at the end of the story instead of letting him go back to an institution where he would clearly be better off.

This is Cruise’s best performance so far, and I don’t think it’s close. He gets to do Tom Cruise stuff like stomp away from his father’s Buick with his arms flailing in frustration, and flash his winning smile to get the attention of a dowdy bank clerk. But he also has surprisingly subtle moments, like during a hearing near the end of the story where the doctors are trying to ascertain whether Raymond wants to stay with Charlie or not. You just see Cruise in the background, and his eyes show true triumph, then disappointment, without a grin or a flail.

A good comparison, I think, is The Dark Knight, which got a lot of attention for Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker. Ledger is great in the movie, but again it’s mostly for changing his voice and his gait, whereas I think Gary Oldman’s performance is a lot more subtle and affecting.

Cruise has taken on an “apprentice” role a few times in his career – definitely, starring alongside Dustin Hoffman was an opportunity for him to take a role where he knew he would not be the showcase star, but to up his profile and show that he could star in “serious cinema.” His career for the next few years, working with Oliver Stone, Tony Scott, Ron Howard, and Rob Reiner, Robert Duvall, and Jack Nicholson, shows careful career planning as well as a desire to be considered a serious artist.

I’m not in love with the movie, though it was more lighthearted than I thought it would be. There is a lot of poetry in the script which plays a lot with the idea of communication between people who don’t fully understand each other, and isn’t afraid to make fun of Raymond. Barry Levinson also directed Wag the Dog, Bandits, Good Morning Vietnam, and the Natural, and is an underrated purveyor of late 80s / early 90s dramedies.

In the end, though, Rain Man is sort of what you expect.

Next: Born on the Fourth of July

Cocktail is a strange movie. So strange that I’m not sure what to say about it. I think my perception before I saw it the first time was that it was mostly just about Tom Cruise flipping bottles and grinning at people. But it’s actually largely about pursuing money. I think in a lot of ways this movie could even be seen as a companion to Risky Business.

Cruise’s character, Bryan Flanagan, does a lot of things in the pursuit of money during the course of Cocktail including moving to Jamaica, and cheating on his girlfriend with whom he has just had sex in a waterfall. He gets a job at a massive bar designed to look like a prison, where the loud synth-based dance music is occasionally interrupted to allow people to recite horrible poetry, and we are told that this is the hottest club in New York City.

The Color of Money is two hours long. For the first hour, I thought it was about the complicated paradox of talent versus experience. Tom Cruise’s character, Vince, is a young pool player. He’s competitive and wins a lot. He’s arrogant, like Maverick in Top Gun. He exhibits the same smarmy smile, which I imagine 1986 Tom Cruise thought was rougish, but comes off as creepy if not a bit inhuman.

Paul Newman’s character, “Fast Eddie” Felson, is a wise old pool shark. He knows the tricks of the trade of swindling people out of their money. He sees how good Vince is and knows he can use his talent to win big on a longshot bet if he can just get him into a big pool tournament in Atlantic City.

That’s the plot of The Color of Money. Vince, Eddie, and Vince’s girlfriend Carmen travel across the country hustling 9 ball games. Vince keeps fucking up the cons because he doesn’t like to lose games on purpose. He just likes to win. Early in the movie, he offers to front another player the customary $20 per rack bet because he doesn’t care about the money. He says, “I just want your best game.”

Eddie knows that you can’t make a living that way. 26 years before this movie came out, Newman played the same character in the Hustler, in which he was the young hotshot. His skills have atrophied but he still knows the game. It’s interesting how the presence of these two actors in the film mirrors that relationship, the tension between a legend on the decline of his career in Newman and an up-and-coming superstar in Cruise.

As Eddie is frustrated over and over again by Vince’s idealism and naivete, he finds himself pulled back into playing pool himself. He starts hitting pool halls on his own, and getting hustled by the same sharks he used to beat. He’s old, and his vision is fading, and he’s out of practice.

So for the first hour of the movie, I thought that was what it was about. How when you’re a kid and your parents say “when I was your age” and you roll your eyes because how could they ever understand what it was like to be you, right now? You can see both of the characters struggle with this divide, Eddie knowing what he could do with his knowledge and Vince’s talent, and Vince confused about why he has to follow a set of rules instead of just play the game he loves.

Then the movie takes a sharp turn. Eddie makes a comeback. Vince becomes a competent hustler. It’s a strikingly fast change in a movie that moves fairly slowly in terms of plot. And I realized that this movie is actually about something else. It’s about winning.

What does it mean to win something, and how do you define a winner? Is it simply the party that follows the rules to the best result? Is the person who gets the best prize? What happens when someone decides that the rules don’t apply to them?

Vince is competitive and just wants to win. We see that his desire to be the best isn’t limited to pool, it’s about everything in his life. He gets jealous when Carmen or Eddie don’t pay full attention to him. His fear that Carmen might get bored with him and leave him borders on violence. He isn’t content knowing that he is great at pool, he has to beat the best player in the room to prove to everyone that he is better.

For Eddie, winning is about making the maximum possible amount of money. Like Vince, the desire isn’t limited to pool. He sells liquor. He gambles. He cares not just about the value of money but the status it portrays.

The amazing thing about this movie is that each of the characters have such a profound effect on each other that they completely swap worldviews during the film while everything else about them stays the same. Vince is still a young, arrogant prick who now cares more about money than anything else. Eddie is a wise, dodgy old hustler who wants to prove that he’s the best at pool.

Ok. We’re approaching Peak Cruise. The aforementioned smile is in full display. He struts around the table swinging his cue like a katana. He hasn’t mastered the bellowing, smothering charm that dominates films like Jerry Maguire, but it’s close. Unfortunately for Tom he is completely out-acted by Paul Newman. Newman smokes, calls his girlfriend a “shrimp,” throws around hundred dollar bills, and basically spreads his seed all over the reel.

For a movie starring two of the top five or so Hollywood actors of all time, directed by one of the most celebrated directors of all time, it feels pretty small in scale. But it’s fun, engaging, and worth a watch. In case it wasn’t already clear, I really liked it.

Next up: Cocktail, in which we discuss the world’s first barman/poet.

Top Gun left me with a lot of questions, the foremost of which is, “What does a co-pilot actually do?”

Maverick and Goose fly together, but it seems like it’s Maverick’s job to fly the plane and Goose’s job to constantly crane his neck to watch a MIG fly by and say “there it goes!” Why is there an elite position in a top flight school for that guy?

This concludes the part of Tom’s career that I’d like to call the pre-Maverick years. This is a bit of a strange finale to that era because, prior to Legend, Cruise worked as mostly a straight-man in realistic movies. Realism has become kind of a trademark for him and it’s clear from his early career that he expresses that through his intense dedication and presence to otherwise boring character parts. Only Risky Business really stands out to me as a great performance and an interesting character.

Well, this seems like a standard teen drama, and probably an inspiration for Friday Night Lights, also…wait a minute, why is there full frontal male nudity in this? Tom Cruise had a penis double!

This is the first Tom Cruise movie featuring the Tom Cruise run. Tom Cruise is the best movie runner of all time. In this movie, he races his girlfriend to his house after meeting her outside on the street corner where she is playing the saxophone (yes, that is an actual scene from this movie). He DESTROYS her in this race. Lea Thompson cannot movie run for shit. Tom Cruise looks like he’s auditioning for the Olympic 100 meter dash.

“It was great the way her mind worked. No guilt. No doubt. No fear. None of my specialties. Just the shameless pursuit of immediate material gratification. What a capitalist.”

I’m getting the impression from watching these movies that there was an incredible tension in the 80s between the revulsion to authority and selling out and the growing cultural understanding that success equaled money. There are a ton of examples in pop culture of young people taking risks that feel adult but aren’t inherently risky. You’re in high school and your overprotective parents are leaving for the weekend? Better take off your pants, crank the bass, and dance around to Bob Seager.