While he’s captivating in dramas like Jerry Maguire, Eyes Wide Shut, and Vanilla Sky (a personal favorite), Tom Cruise is always at his best in action movies. That’s partially because of his personal charm. The same quirks that make him one of the weirdest celebrities also help him convincingly play cocky, gun-toting leading men. Additionally, Cruise has such a mania for doing his own stunts that he’s constantly risking his life for movies like Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning. He’s one of the richest people in the world, and he’s willing to possibly die to keep the movie business alive. In that sense, it’s hard to find a more compelling actor in all of Hollywood.
With that being said, some of Cruise’s best movies now feel almost painfully dated. Top Gun isn’t quite as thrilling with the collapse of the USSR, and Eyes Wide Shut feels downright tame after learning about the crimes of people like Jeffrey Epstein. Even the Mission: Impossible movies seem tame once you realize how much actual spycraft is less running around on top of trains and more hacking into computers half a world away. However, Cruise’s best movie was oddly prescient, and over two decades later, it’s scarier now than ever before. I’m talking about Minority Report (2002), a movie that accidentally predicted the technological panopticon of our modern world.
Can You Get Pregnant From Precrime?
The plot of Minority Report is that the police of the future are now using “precogs,” which are enhanced humans who can receive psychic visions of the future. Thanks to them, the cops can now predict future transgressions and arrest people before they have even committed the crime. The chief of this Precrime division believes in the system, hoping it can prevent crimes like the tragic abduction of his six-year-old son. However, when the precogs predict the chief will kill a man he has ever known, he must go on the run to prove his innocence. Along the way, he discovers secrets that rock his foundations to their very core.
Minority Report is filled to the brim with great character actors, including early performances from icons Jessica Capshaw and Peter Stormare. Additionally, we get a stunning performance from screen legend Max von Sydow, whose Precrime director holds all the cards in a game that only he truly understands. Arguably, the film’s best revelation is Colin Farrell, who plays a DOJ agent investigating Precrime. Thanks to Farrell’s relentless and charismatic performance, Minority Report became his breakout film, catapulting the talented actor into superstar status. He has a particularly magnetic chemistry with Tom Cruise, and their onscreen feud encapsulates the movie’s crunchy theme of balancing community safety with personal liberty.
Feral Colin
Speaking of Cruise, he is at his best in this film. He spends most of Minority Report on the run, and Cruise is predictably great in bringing this film’s frenetic action scenes to life. But what really makes this performance special is that Cruise fully animates the pathos of his character, someone whose professional success hides personal tragedy: he’s a divorcee who lost his only child, and he secretly uses drugs to mask his personal pain. Cruise presents his action hero as a man whose righteous cause is actually the ultimate coping mechanism. To prove his innocence, he must prove the fallibility of Precrime, effectively destroying the only thing that gives his life meaning.
While these actors deserve full credit for making Minority Report the most provocative sci-fi film of the early aughts, it’s also important to lavish praise on director Steven Spielberg. This film is the perfect mixture of beloved tropes from his other movies: Minority Report has a charismatic leading man as charismatic as Raiders of the Lost Ark, a dangers-of-technology plot as compelling as Jurassic Park, and the relentless, ongoing chase sequences of Catch Me If You Can. In another director’s hands, this might have felt like a lazy homage to his own work. However, Spielberg is skilled enough to effortlessly weave what worked in his other movies into something that feels startlingly fresh.
You Hate To See It
Over two decades after its release, it’s clear that Minority Report was also startlingly prescient. Obviously, the concept of humans with psychic powers snitching for the comics remains a far-off and (God willing) impossible reality. But in the decades since this film was first released, America has led the way in developing groundbreaking technology and then using it to transform the country into a bleak panopticon. This began immediately after 9/11, of course, when the government used the Patriot Act to justify spying on just about anyone while circumventing existing laws. This kick-started a national debate about the chief theme of Minority Report: whether it’s worth sacrificing our freedom in the name of security.
Obviously, we lost that debate, and the country has started to look more and more like the dystopian setting of Minority Report. The police use algorithms to predict where crimes are likeliest to occur, and they scour social media for clues that someone is likely to commit future transgressions. This works hand-in-hand with automated surveillance technology that records your face and activities in almost every public space. On paper, these collective technologies are a great way to establish law and order throughout the community. But it’s an open secret that corrupt police officers use this tech to strike fear in our hearts while providing convenient narratives for anyone they want to arrest.
The Future Is Now, Old Man
In Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s character is framed for murder by someone with intimate knowledge of how to abuse cutting-edge police technology. In the modern world, though, things are much more streamlined. Your online sh*tposting can be used to establish you as a dangerous threat, and you can end up on government watchlists without ever knowing it. Unknowingly walking through a high-crime area can make you a suspect when the cops simply need a convenient fall guy. Wherever you walk, drive, or fly, automated surveillance captures footage that can be used against you without even a shred of evidence. The future is now, and the entire justice system is one huge Precrime division.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to escape the modern police state. However, you can still escape the old-fashioned way: by watching an awesome movie in the comfort of your own home. Minority Report is streaming on Hulu, giving you a chance to watch what is arguably Tom Cruise’s best film. You also have a chance to compare Spielberg’s worst nightmares about abusive technology to the myriad real ways that bleeding-edge tech is used to make our lives worse. It’s the ultimate irony, really: in making a film about psychics, Spielberg accurately and effectively predicted the future. Here’s hoping he gets to keep making movies; otherwise, he might be drafted into becoming America’s first precog!
My biggest regret this year was not sneaking out to see Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die in theaters when it was making its rounds this past February. It has all of my favorite things in a sci-fi comedy, and having Sam Rockwell lead the charge against an AI apocalypse feels right in every conceivable way. Time travel films are always hit or miss, but there are three golden rules that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die lives by to make this one a hit: don’t overexplain, keep the pacing up, and situational humor always softens the landing.
Throw in an eccentric ensemble of supporting talent, and you’ll wish you were standing right next to this ragtag group of future-proofing miscreants who one evening decide to save the world from itself.
I’d Love To Be At That Diner
I’m a family man, but if I wasn’t, there’s no place I’d rather be than Norms Diner when Sam Rockwell’s “the man from the future” arrives looking like he came off a three-week bender, bellowing to anybody who’s willing to listen to his insane rant about how he’s from the future and tonight is the night the world needs to be saved before everything goes to hell. I’ve spent enough time in late-night diners to know that sometimes people barge in acting like this, and you just need to ignore them. But the attention to detail this man has would be enough to convince me to join him on his mission.
The man from the future, who looks like what would happen if Kyle Reese got caught dumpster diving behind a Circuit City, asserts that he has lived this same night 116 times and needs to find the right combination of people to join him before starting his 117th attempt. Following Terminator 3 logic, the man explains that the AI singularity takeover is inevitable and can only be postponed. Judgment Day will always eventually happen, but the end goal is to keep pushing that date further back on the calendar until a definitive way to stop it has been discovered.
At the diner on this fateful night are Mark (Michael Pena) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), who witnessed the start of the AI takeover when the former accidentally touched a boy’s phone in class, causing it to interface with other devices and kids, forcing them to flee the scene.
Joining in on the fun is Susan (Juno Temple), who has nothing left to lose after her son was killed in a school shooting and replaced with an AI bot that’s nothing like the boy she knew. It wouldn’t be a war against technology if one of our heroes, Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), wasn’t allergic to all forms of modern technology and just a little salty about her boyfriend leaving her to live in an AI fantasy land. There’s also Scott (Asim Chaudhry), Marie (Georgia Goodman), and Bob (Daniel Barnett), but their backstories aren’t really as juicy as the others, and we need to remember that everybody’s expendable on this mission.
Once the team is assembled, the man from the future, who is basically Sam Rockwell wearing garbage and running around like a live-action Rick Sanchez, makes the first goal escaping Norms and taking to the streets, so they could basically beat up the 9-year-old child who perfects his AI technology on this night, commencing the beginning of the end.
The Adventure Of A Lifetime That Everybody Wants To Be On
One of the biggest criticisms I have about movies is when the on-screen talent looks like they don’t want to be there. Don’t get me wrong, our protagonists are all reluctant at one point or another, with the man from the future being the most reluctant of all. But this reluctance comes from their characters’ unwillingness to believe what the crazy man is telling them. When they finally have enough compelling reasons to believe him, everybody’s all in, balls out, ready to save the day because they either have nothing better to do, nothing to lose, or neither of the things that would make any other person weigh their options before committing to the bit. Nobody’s moping here, they’re all in attack mode.
Sam Rockwell is so fun in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die because he brings not giving a crap to a whole new level. The man, if we’re to believe every single word he says, must be exhausted from all the time travel and botched missions, and you see him trying so hard to connect with his new group of heroes without going full-blown fatalist because he needs them to succeed in order to break the never-ending time loop he’s trapped in. It’s basically Edge of Tomorrow set in LA, except our hero is wearing old computer parts.
By the time we get to the third act, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die goes full ridiculous with creature-feature glitter farts, a monolithic mountain of wasted technology and AI ideations, and the man from the future gasping at the revelation that he’s never actually made it this far before. And just when you think things can’t get any crazier, they absolutely do.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die wastes zero time escalating, and then it never stops. It’s yet another cautionary tale about the upcoming war between man and machine, but it’s one of the versions I’d willingly participate in if it ends up being nearly as fun as it looks on screen.
New York’s Time Square is a tourist attraction today, playing host to millions of visitors to enjoy the mecca of American consumerism. It wasn’t always that way. HBO’s hit series The Deuce, all about the rise and fall of the adult industry in New York City, which happens to coincide with the fall of the Mafia, and a massive, citywide crackdown on crime. It was put together by David Simon and George Pelecanos, both of whom know a little about award-winning street-level crime dramas since they were the creator, and writer, of The Wire.
The Time Period New York City Wants To Forget
The Deuce Season 1 Is Clearly The 70s
The Deuce is only three seasons long. Each season covers a different time period, starting with 1971, jumping to 1977 for Season 2, and then a big leap to 1984. The actual plotlines are fictional, including James Franco’s dual role as twin brothers Vincent the bartender and Frankie the degenerate gambler. Vincent and Frankie is the way into the Mob’s expansion into the adult industry as both soon find themselves wrapped up running Mafia fronts. It’s a bit of a Trojan Horse as the real star turns out to be Candy, a former streetwalker turned director played by Maggie Gyllenhaal in what could be the best performance of her career.
The Deuce digs deep into the lives of characters operating on the fringe of society making it a great companion piece to The Wire. One scene will have you agreeing with a pimp, the very next will make you think that same character is the worst man on the planet. David Simon knows that people are neither truly good or bad, and when even the third-tier background character you took for granted decides that enough has been enough, you’ll appreciate all the time spent getting to know every nook and cranny of 42nd Street.
The Deuce Was The Last Of A Dying Breed Of Television
The Deuce Season 3 Is Right In The Middle Of The 80s
Characters age and change between seasons with each season premiere serving as an explainer of what happened in the years we didn’t get to see. It’s rare that a series aims to tell a short story, and is given the runway by the network to do everything it wants. HBO was happy to be working with David Simon, and it shows, with every episode bringing you back to the gritty, yet bright and lively streets of New York before the tourists arrived.
The Deuce doesn’t shy away from its dark subject matter. Vincent and Frankie’s involvement with the Mob spirals out of control and impacts their family, especially their brother-in-law, Bobby (The Wire veteran Chris Bauer),and runs afoul of their father, played by Armand Assante. Candy’s attempts at going legit often fail to raise up and empower the women around her. The only series that this mix of human emotion and violence can be compared to is, of course, The Wire.
The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, Magic City, all came before The Deuce, and since the end of HBO’s look back at New York City, no one’s tried to tackle a show like it. Like the time period it covers, The Deuce is now a relic of a culture that’s been left behind by the mainstream.
When I was 18, I used all my babysitting money and pizza-restaurant earnings to buy a prom dress at Nordstrom. It was long and black and silky, and I got a manicure for the first time ever. The dream!
Then, a couple years ago, a Cup of Jo reader told us she had significantly different sized feet — 6.5 and 10. “After decades of buying two pairs of shoes only to pitch the ‘off’ sized ones,” she said, “Nordstrom stole my heart when I learned they would sell me the mismatched pair I needed. They remain the only store I’ve ever found who did this, and I’m thrilled to give them all my shoe money.” How incredible is that?
There aren’t many stores you love for decades, but Nordstrom keeps getting better. They have incredible customer service, and shipping and returns are always free. Today, we’re sharing our favorite pieces from their big anniversary sale, which is happening right now…
