Silence is Golden

I never understood the popularity of Whiplash, Damien Chazelle’s 2014 feature-length debut. J.K. Simmons deserved a plum role like that, and the Best Under-Appreciated Character Actor that followed—but what about his co-star, Miles Teller? The guy looks like a thumb. He could play highway rapists, although along similar lines I found him much more tolerable in this year’s Top Gun: Maverick. Teller made strange sense under Tom Cruise, unlike co-star Glen Powell, who would’ve pushed the gay subtext of the movie fully to the foreground. For novelty’s sake, I’d like to see Cruise play a gay man in a movie with a sex scene before he kicks, just as much as I enjoyed the meta-textual elements of The Whale, which as I wrote last week, was so good that it transcended the story around the movie.