Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Risky Business Indeed!
Well, Mr. Cruise has officially gotten the boot from the Viacom family!
See ya, wouldn't want to be ya!
Ragged Thots readers, of course, knew that this day was coming more than a year ago:
And sure enough, in telling Cruise to hit the road, Sumner Redstone minced no words in explaining why:
No word yet on whether any studios want to hire Cruise, given his increasing cartoon existence.
Technorati Tags: Tom Cruise, Sumner Redstone, Paramount, scientology
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See ya, wouldn't want to be ya!
Ragged Thots readers, of course, knew that this day was coming more than a year ago:
The thing that Cruise has always had going for him, from his earliest days in Losing It, Taps & Risky Business, through his superstar middle period of Top Gun, Cocktail & A Few Good Men to his more recent fare like Minority Report (which was, as my buddy Dan said, is a seriously underrated movie) is an audience acceptance that he's essentially a good guy -- the cliched "man who men want to be and women want to be with." Even through a couple of divorces (and the Scientology and sexuality stuff in the background), his public persona was still that of a rather stable everyday guy, who guarded his privacy.WOTW, while not a total "bomb", certainly underperformed Cruise's previous blocbusters -- as did this year's Mission Impossible 3.
That's not the man on display now. He is allowing his public life to become so outsized that it's crowding the image of the man on screen.
This comes at a rather precarious time in his career. Recall that his good performance in Collateral was still completely eclipsed by Jamie Foxx's. There have been other times when Cruise has played across great actors. Hey, he had to watch both Paul Newman and Dustin Hoffman pick up Best Actor Oscars playing opposite him -- while he wasn't even nominated for supporting performances. But, in both of those movies, it was never the case that people
forgot that he was in the film. He became almost an afterthought in Collateral.
And that was before Cruise decided that the entire world had to know all about his personal life -- or at least his version of his personal life.
Viewers may well decide that TMI is just that -- too much information. Can Spielberg save War of the Worlds? Perhaps.
But, Cruise alone may not be enough this time. His loud, ubiquitous, spring romance may well have set him up for a precipitous summer fall.
And sure enough, in telling Cruise to hit the road, Sumner Redstone minced no words in explaining why:
"His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount," the media mogul said.On the other hand, Cruise should be happy that the South Park "Trapped In The Closet"/scientology episode lost out in the Emmys to The Simpsons for the prime-time animation prize.
Redstone believes that the sometimes maniac megastar of such Paramount flicks as "Mission: Impossible" and "Top Gun" actually hurt box-office receipts for his latest "Mission" installment, whose take was considerably below expectations, the paper said.
A poll released in May, around the same time as the movie, showed that half of those surveyed had an "unfavorable" opinion of the star.
No word yet on whether any studios want to hire Cruise, given his increasing cartoon existence.
Technorati Tags: Tom Cruise, Sumner Redstone, Paramount, scientology
