Vintage

So here I am in July perusing the free HD channels looking for a flick my niece might enjoy.  I thought Jerry Maguire was a good pick in that regards.  It has a great sports element to keep me happy and Cuba Gooding, Jr. is a joy to watch.  Cruise is even pretty darn good in a role, which he wore as tightly as a linebackers jock strap.  

Jerry Maguire is a flick about a sports agent who wants to do right by his world, by himself and by a gal who stuck with him through it all.  Tom Cruise is well cast as Jerry Maguire, in what I have to say, might be my favorite role for good old couch-destroying Tom.  If you ask me, this film was right about when he went a little off the eccentric end.  

Tom Cruise being somewhat of a weirdo nowadays, he does deserve some props for his portrayal of Maguire in this film.  It is by and large the coolest movie I think he has done, except for maybe—well—maybe it is the coolest?  He is the perfect sports agent with a conscience.  Good looking, boisterous, talkative, convincing, animated and all that makes for a good sports agent in my book.  

Look for Cuba Gooding, Jr. in a great supporting actor role.  He is the one that made the whole "Show me the money" line work from this film. He comes off perfectly as a football player who is a greedy, money grubbing athlete on the field, but one who is a Hall-of-Famer when it comes to his wife and kids.  Jerry takes notice and so does the office secretary, or administrative assistant, Dorothy Boyd, another character acted to a tee by Renee Zellweger, in her break out performance.

I will say in retrospect, having seen the movie several times on cable now, it does get a bit more and more campy.  Some of the screen writing is down right brilliant, but then I felt the love exchanges were a little too, oh, I don't know - sappy.  

But sappiness, for all of it, still can be either memorable and forgettable.  There is plenty of forgettable sappiness in cinema.  I would site some examples but you see, I forgot them all.  However, Jerry Maguire is famous for the "You had me at Hello" line as well as a hand full of other quotes, which are not cool at all.  Memorable, but more chick stuff.

This movie by the way could easily fall into the chick flick category, were it not for three brief cameso: Roy Firestone, Mel Kiper and the Monday Night Football Crew circa late 1990s.   I should add that the more I happen across this flick—I could never admit to planning on watching this film—the sports scenes seem less and less.  Still, this movie is a great choice to get a little dose of the NFL, a sporting agents life, while getting the females all weepy-eyed and primed for well, I don't know, breaking sofas (wink, wink) just like the Cruises'.