Tom Cruise Tuesday! – Creator’s Corner: Tom Cruise Top Five

Welcome to Tom Cruise Tuesday! It’s our favorite day of the week – the day we take time out to celebrate Tom Cruise!

As you know, every day is Tom Cruise Day at Buttered Popcorn. If you’re following us on Twitter, you may have read our recent announcement. We will be hosting Tom Cruise Tuesday directly on Twitter each week, and plan to have a post here on the site once a month, rather than every week. We hope that this will give us more time to work on reviews, and to write some of our other fun Tom Cruise Tuesday posts, like Character Interviews and Trivia posts.

For our first monthly Tom Cruise Tuesday post, we thought we would bring you another insight into the minds of your lovely hosts! We’ve seen a few people posting their Top Ten Tom Cruise movies on social media, and we decided to do a top ten ourselves! Then we found we had a tough time narrowing our choices down to ten. We we both ended up with more of a top 14 with 5 or 6 honorable mentions. We also each had the same list of favorites up to about 9, when our paths diverged.

So! In the interest of time and simplicity, we narrowed our choices down to our top five VERY favorite Tom Cruise movies of ALL TIME. Selections were based on what we would watch most, if we had nothing to choose from but Tom’s movies (which… is honestly kind of how we live our lives). Here’s a lovely little image for you.

Can you guess where this one will end up on our list?

You’ll find out soon enough! Let’s dig in!

#5: Vanilla Sky

What can we say about Vanilla Sky? Beautiful, vibrant colors, just like the artwork for which the movie was named, and an equally beautiful, yet haunting story. And a soundtrack to DIE for! We could watch this movie over and over again, and never get tired of it.

#4: Oblivion

This movie was horribly underrated by the press, in our true and correct opinion! Oblivion is a heart-wrenching tale about perseverance, the resilience of the human spirit, true love and the importance of Home. It’s chock full of beautiful messages without being preachy or overbearing. It’s also a visually stunning, absolutely gorgeous to watch, and the soundtrack is P E R F E C T . We can’t even get past the opening sequence without crying about how INSANELY beautiful this movie is. It is love.

#3: Rock of Ages

Another criminally underrated film, Rock of Ages is SO DAMN GOOD!!! It’s fun, it’s touching, it’s uplifting, and TOM CRUISE’S STACEE JAXX IS THE ONLY THING YOU WILL EVER NEED. He pulls off the carefree, turned careless rocker persona flawlessly, and it doesn’t hurt that the world’s biggest rock star is being played by the world’s biggest movie star (yeah, we said it). It was both cool, and kind of poignant to see that some of the misunderstandings of Stacee’s character, the slander in the media, and the assumption that Stacee is something that he isn’t could be applied to things we’ve seen happen to Tom in real life. And then, let’s face it. Tom spends 95% of his screen time without a shirt on, and HE IS THE ONE SINGING. He put in HOURS a day with a vocal trainer (the same vocal trainer that trained Axl Rose, believe it or not). HOW can you get anything better than that? Tom Cruise, dressed as a Rock god, BEING a Rock god, and completely owning the role – giving it that 2357951% that Tom always gives. WHAT’S NOT TO LOVE?

#2: American Made

Guys! Guys. Guysssssss. Guyeeeeezzzz! (+10 points if you get that last one.) American Made is AMAZING. It’s SO good. We’ve talked about how wonderful it is in our review, and there are so many reasons why this movie made it so close to the top of our Top Five Tom Cruise movies of ALL TIME. This movie hits all the notes – it has beautiful, vivid scenery, it features Tom doing skilled stunts (every time Tom’s flying a plane in the movie, he’s really flying the plane), Tom’s character has the perfect look, and Tom shows us every range of emotion – joy, fury, fear, sadness, soul-crushing love of wife and family, just… it’s all there, and it’s all beautiful. The plot was interesting, each and every actor in the movie performed skillfully, the direction and cinematography were fantastic, the whole movie came together in SUCH a lovely way. It’s fantastic!

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Well. It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for! What movie could possibly have made it to the very top of our list? Have you guessed it yet?

No?

Okay, wait for it…

…

Waaaaaait for it…

#1: Ghost Protocol!!!

Is there anything more wonderful, more beautiful, more exciting, more absolutely PERFECT than Ghost Protocol? No. No, there is not. Ghost Protocol is at the top of the list for many reasons. This is the movie that brought your lovely hosts completely, deeply, and eternally into the heart of Tom Cruise obsession. We may have mentioned this in our previous Creator’s Corner post, but when we decided to watch this movie in theaters, we had a mini-marathon of all the Mission: Impossible movies, and we fell deeply in love with Ethan Hunt and Tom Cruise all at once. Then, we saw Ghost Protocol and… we saw it again. And again. And again. Yeah. It was ALL OVER.

What’s so great about Ghost Protocol? Bruh. EVERYTHING. The action, the tech, the magnificent locations, the emotions! This is our favorite IMF team combination, and we love the fact that they were thrown together by circumstances and still managed to do what was needed to save the world. From the Kremlin to the ridiculous party in India, there’s so many lovely things to see in this film. Each of the main characters grows during the course of the movie, which is not something you see every day in an action movie. Benji goes from a nervous rookie, to an agent willing and able to kill to protect his teammate. Brandt goes from an edgy, closed-off analyst, to trusting his teammates fully and gaining their trust in return. Jane, our favorite, badass, heavy-hitting lady of the IMF, learns how to use a gentle hand as well for the team effort. Even Ethan learns a lesson in this one – that despite mistakes and bickering among the team, he still has to depend on them, and he can still find a way to get his team to work together and pull them through disaster to victory.

The bad guy is cold, cruel, and crazy, but also extremely smart and clever, making him a worthy adversary for the IMF. The stakes are high, and they keep getting higher, and the surprises just keep you on the edge of your seat the whole time. And the acting is impeccable from each person, right down to the extras. And there’s something pretty damned impressive about the fact that this is Brad Bird’s first foray into live action directing. He did a hell of a job.

We haven’t reviewed this one yet, so we do want to save some of our praise for the eventual review, but… oh man. The movie only gets better with every viewing. Many movies begin to break down when you think about them too hard – especially mysteries and intrigue stories. Not Ghost Protocol. The more you think bout it, the more ways you notice its absolute and undeniable perfection. It is absolutely flawless. Period.

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Thank you so much for joining us, and we hope you enjoyed reading about our favorites of the favorite! Join us again next week (on social media) and next month right here for Tom Cruise Tuesday!