Interesting Cruise Companion Piece to "Magnolia" (1999)

Tom Cruise is an interesting fellow.

Photographed away from the big screen, he looks small, eternally boyish, inconsequential.

But he remains a star. A big star and one who has survived since his big launch in Risky Business(1983) AS a star.

The truth of the matter at this late date (2020) is that his bankable stardom rests on only one franchise: Mission:Impossible. (A long awaited Top Gun sequel will finally join that franchise in earning power.)

But Cruise still gets cast in other things, and he invariably proves the star of whatever it is.

Even when he is not the star.

In "Magnolia"(1999), Cruise took no billing on the poster or in the movie -- you can vaguely make out a faded shot of his face in the poster's ensemble but...nothing else.

In "Rock of Ages" (2012) Cruise takes billing on the poster and in the movie, but with that "And Tom Cruise" manner that suggests he isn't the star of this show, either.

But both times...Magnolia and Rock of Ages...Cruise proves: yep, dammit, for better or worse, that intense little fellah IS a movie star. He outshines everybody else, and brings up the game of some fairly good actors around him(In Magnolia: Philip Seymour Hoffman; in Rock of Ages: Alec Baldwin.)

And in Rock of Ages, starlet aborning Malin Akerman gets a long intimate session on screen with Cruise in which he proves his ability to play a sexy stoned rocker seduction machine with believeable aplomb(and then "newbie" Akerman gets the screen all to herself with a superstar.)

Interesting: in both films , Cruise has important scenes in which his macho male character is confronted by a female interviewer and confronted with the bad aspects of his character. But the similarity goes no further: the interviewer in Magnolia is an African-American woman with no romantic interest in Cruise ; the interviewer(Ackerman) in Rock of Ages starts out to confront this wasted Rock God and ends up having sex with him. Still..roughly the same scene, roughly the same Cruise.

Noteable: Cruise sings in both films. Just a little in Magnolia (a few bars of a song "passed along" from one character to the next). A lot in Rock of Ages -- power 80s rock -- Dead or Alive and other things.

Bottom line: maybe he's only a "Mission:Impossible" franchise moneymaker now, but Tom Cruise still is a star. And though Magnolia and Rock of Ages are back when he was a BIGGER star, they both prove what his star power was.

Also I like Cruise's relationship with his booze-serving violent bodyguard monkey in Rock of Ages, called "Hey, Man." Just the right sidekick for Tom Cruise. Smaller, for one thing.