This. My wife and I saw a trailer for Knight and Day directly after a trailer for The Expendables and while both Tom Cruise and Sylvester Stallone are older guys now, Cruise doesn’t look believable as an action star anymore. While Stallone looks like that guy who was super buff in his 20s and has managed to keep it up into his 50s. Sure he’s lost a step, but he’s not old.
Tom Cruise, on the other hand, looks old.
4 or 5 years, I think.
I think he looks great.
Seriously, he’s crazy and wacky and I can’t stand him for the most part, but he looks really good.
Seriously? I mean… seriously? I’m pretty indifferent to both of them, but Tom Cruise looks like a reasonably well preserved middle aged man. Sylvester Stallone looks like a melting Methuselah.
I don’t think the couch-jumping is a factor much anymore. The American Entertainment Consumer’s attention span simply isn’t that long.
I don’t know why I like the hated, but I always have. Maybe just being contrary is exciting to me or something. But I never really paid much attention to Cruise until the Oprah couch jump thing, and then all of sudden, I was loving him. When he did the interview with Matt Lauer and told him he was glib? Haa! I loved that interview so much.
I know people hate him for the scientology thing, but I don’t care about all that nonsense. And maybe I like him for more than the fact that he’s hated. Because he does seem to be making a comeback with the public, and I’m rooting for him.
I wouldn’t go see Knight and Day, less because of the couch jumping, and more because of how annoying he’s become. I guess the couch jumping is more a symptom of that. I mean, the scientology stuff is weird but doesn’t necessarily affect one’s acting ability. But Tom Cruise looks like he’s basically playing his annoying, couch jumping self in Knight and Day. And that I do not need to see.
Both, probably, because I’ve seen way better acting from him in his movies. He definitely looked like he was totally trying to oversell the idea of him being in love, to the point where he didn’t know what most [del]men[/del] humans would actually do in public, on TV, to get the point across. Who jumps on furniture while squeeing about how they’re so in love? Teenage girls, and maybe young women in romantic comedy films.
That just got a big WTF from me, though, and something of a “whoa, something’s up with that relationship” reaction. His condemnation of Brooke Shields over seeing a psychiatrist over her post-partum depression is what cranked up the hate meter for me, though. PPD was not often talked about in public (aside from in hushed/disgusted tones), and has been very misunderstood. Shields’ speaking out helped people understand more about it, helped make it less shameful, and probably helped save lives in the process. Then this idiot comes along and attacks her choices; he’s babbling about how vitamins and other stuff can help you, that there are no chemical imbalances, etc., and slams her career lately to top it off. She accepted his apology later, but man, that’s an ugly thing to do to someone, and potentially dangerous to mothers out there who are in desperate situations.
Artistically, the problem I have with his off-screen antics is that now when he’s in a movie, I don’t see the character; I see Tom Cruise, with all of his emotional baggage, playing a character. It takes me out of the movie. Same problem with Mel Gibson, albeit more extreme in Gibson’s case.
Tom can be a prick but so is my auto mechanic but I keep going to him because he is good at what he does. Tom is a decent actor who makes decent movies. I don’t give a shit about his beliefs or couch jumping.
Like Tom Tildrum, my problem with him is that I can’t watch him and think about his on-screen character, I can only see him as Tom Cruise. And the only thing I can think about Tom Cruise is ‘damn, he is crazy’. The scientology, insisting he is an expert on psychology, the way he seems to act in his relationship with Katie Holmes, the fact that in interviews after Suri was born he spoke about fatherhood without mentioning that she was his third kid - it all adds up to absolutely crazy, and an asshole to boot. Just look in his eyes - I swear he has wild serial-killer eyes.
All of his crazy attributes can be distilled into the couch fiasco. If you were trying to explain Cruise’s craziness to someone who didn’t know who he was, you could show them that 2 minute clip and it would convey it all. So for me it’s not the couch incident in and of itself, it’s everything that represents.
I won’t say for sure that that affected Knight & Day, but for me personally it is absolutely why I won’t pay to see it in the theatre. Tom Cruise sucks the enjoyment out of any movie for me because I keep looking at him and thinking about his craziness. It sucks. He sucks. In fact, he has managed to suck so badly that he retroactively sucks all the way back to Risky Business. That’s quite a feat.
I decide long ago not to hold a creative artist’s personal issues against them. A lot of rock musicians battle drug addictions. I still enjoy their music.
I’ve read some actors are pompous assholes in real life. But, they create magic on the stage or screen. With the exception of Jane Fonda, I watch their movies.
