Wel, Tom gets a thumbs down at www.fametracker.com .

"Tom Cruise

Now the American Psychiatric Association has basically told him to quit talking out his ass about mental illness. Isn't there some way they could find to arrest him for that? So he'll go away and shut up for a while?"

Also from fametracker, this gem.

enjoy,

biscuit

http://www.fametracker.com/blue_moons/mediator_2005_06_14.shtml

The Mediator for June 14, 2005 Someone Please Shut Tom Cruise Up, Seriously

Three and a half years ago, we had occasion to audit Tom Cruise's fame, in the course of which assessment we observed of our subject that he was weird. We just mention it now, on June 14 in the year 2005, to point out just how prescient we actually were on the topic -- now under discussion everywhere from the mainstream press to the patio of your local pub -- of what a goddamn freak Tom Cruise has turned out to be.

We're not going to recap all the details of Cruise's activities over the past six weeks, because we don't need to: they've been covered so assiduously that your ability to plot Cruise's courtship of Katie Holmes on a timeline has probably filled up the part of your brain that might one day have hatched a cure for AIDS. (Or herpes.) But what Cruise's people probably didn't anticipate when they contracted Holmes to be the love of his life was how quickly the backlash would begin. The tabloids were dubious (the first Star cover asked if they were faking it), and even CNN -- which, you'd think, would have more newsworthy fish to fry -- expressed, through Bill Hemmer, the view that Holmes and Cruise weren't fooling anyone. The "happy" "couple" was supposed to have entered into this opportunistically implausible partnership jointly to promote their summer blockbusters -- her Batman Begins, his War Of The Worlds -- but now that those movies are about to be released and the entertainment press is doing its regularly scheduled stories on them, the resultant articles have, instead, become a forum for the relationship principals to defend themselves. It's just too bad for Cruise that he is constitutionally incapable of undoing any of the damage he's done to his image in the past month -- and that his decision to let go his longtime pit-bull publicist Pat Kingsley and hire his fellow Scientologist sister, Lee Anne De Vette, in her place has crippled his public persona probably beyond rehabilitation.

In the case of this month's Details cover profile, it's clear that the interview took place and the story was probably almost all written before the news of Cruise's new lady friend hit, so that a couple of lines about it had to be hurriedly added to bookend the story and explain why the reporter, Holly Millea, could have neglected to ask him about her. However, just because Holmes is not featured doesn't mean the story doesn't still depict Cruise in an unfortunate light, because as we all know by now, Cruise is only able to converse about two things, so if he wasn't yet able to talk about Katie Holmes, he must have talked about Scientology because, hey, did you know he's actually a Scientologist himself? It's true! And as such, he regards it as his mission to spread whatever the Scientologist equivalent of a gospel is throughout the land, starting with the journalists charged with covering him. Cruise's faith is so plainly the subject toward which he keeps directing his discussion with Millea that he proselytizes about it to her for six hours; takes her to the Scientology Celebrity Center; and bestows upon her "'a gift from Tom' -- a pricey black nylon computer bag with a card embossed with TOM CRUISE on one side and [Millea's] name on the other. Inside are various Scientology materials and DVDs, including This is Scientology and How to Use Dianetics, plus a bright-orange pamphlet titled The Way to Happiness, whose cover features in large letters the sentiment YOUR HAPPINESS MEANS THE WORLD TO ME, with Cruise's name printed beneath it." Millea puts this hard sell in perspective: "Would Mel Gibson's publicist take you through the Vatican? Would Madonna invite you to a bris?" The unstated reason why they wouldn't is that Gibson and Madonna presumably employ qualified publicists who have no purpose other than to craft the audience's perception of their clients in the best possible light; their mission isn't complicated by a mandate to try to draw every person who crosses their paths into a crackpot cult.

The Details profile also smoothly reveals a few of the people Cruise has personally converted to his faith -- Collateral co-star Jada Pinkett Smith, "who now home-schools her kids with [Scientology founder L. Ron] Hubbard's Study Technology," and Cruise's mother, formerly a devout Catholic who became a Scientologist two years ago. It makes you wonder whether everyone who's part of Team Cruise in any capacity -- up to and including the post of Mom -- must at least display some openness to the faith if they're going to stay in the organization.

(The link above, by the way, quotes De Vette as making a claim regarding people's curiosity about Scientology that Cruise echoes to Millea: "'There's so much interest,' Cruise explains when asked why he invites not only journalists but also studio executives and co-stars to go on tours. 'People want to know -- how did I do what I've done? I don't believe in hiding things. A lot of people want to hide things and not let people know the truth becaue they fel that there's a kind of control or power in that. See, I believe the opposite.'" Well, sure -- what is Tom Cruise the gay porn star suer known for if not complete candor? But more to the point -- are people really asking about Scientology? Or are they getting multi-part testimony against their will?)

This week's EW cover story primarily focuses on War Of The Worlds, but smack in the middle of it (and teased on the cover) is a separate Q&A with Cruise where he basically has an opportunity to speak for himself and explain what the hell he's been on about the past few weeks. Whereas the Details profile kicks off with a description of Cruise's physical exuberance -- "Tom Cruise sits splay-legged in an overstuffed chair smiling at the ceiling....'You're bad!' the actor says, suddenly springing like a jack-in-the-box from his chair onto mine, bouncing my shoulders against the cushy back" -- EW makes a point of saying that, unlike recent displays, Cruise manages to submit to his interview without scampering around like a chimp: "Tom Cruise doesn't jump up on the sofa. He doesn't fall to his knees and pound his fists on the floor. He doesn't even try to wrestle anyone out of a chair. [He] stays put for a full hour. Mostly put."

Put, and apparently unmuzzled: the unnamed EW interviewer starts by joking that Cruise may wish to announce his engagement to Holmes (and why not, given that the life cycle of their relationship has been accelerated to a child-on-a-soap-opera degree), and Cruise replies that "[t]hat's something Kate and I have to talk about," like, way to kick things off on a creepy note, Blabby McOvershare. As to the aggressiveness with which he's been celebrating his new love, Cruise says, "I'm just happy. I can't contain myself. And I'm not going to try. I refuse." He then speculates that the reason there's been so much doubt as to the legitimacy of the pairing by dusting off an internet classic, the "jus' jellus" rejoinder:

...[Y]ou sit back and realize how sad it is that there are people who can't even imagine feeling like this....Who cares what other people say? There are some people who just don't like to see other people happy. They try to actively stop it. They find that sort of happiness ugly. They're in the minority, but they squawk pretty loud. They're like the bullies you grow up with in school. But you know what? If they don't like it, f--- them. If people don't like it, f--- off."

But then, God bless EW, which has turned the sidebar into a referendum on the Cruise/Holmes merger. Turns out the people who just don't like to see other people happy actually aren't in the minority: a poll on EW.com asked, "Has all this attention to his private life changed the way you feel about Tom Cruise?" and 61% responded, "Yes, I like him less now." Not that Cruise is likely to read that result and connect it to the fact that most normal people are capable of being happy in their own personal relationships without behaving manically or talking about them non-stop; maybe getting that sex coach for Eyes Wide Shut was rather putting the cart before the horse if what Cruise really needs is a lesson in how to act believably like a boyfriend.

Discussion then turns, naturally, to the S-word, with Cruise once again lamely defending his attack on Brooke Shields ("It's not a matter of making it personal") and claiming he's received "over 154,000 responses from people thanking" him for sharing his thoughts on postpartum depression, which...is he taking that number from how many emails he got in his inbox? Because, for one thing, I doubt he actually read that many to confirm that they were actually backing him up, and for another, I bet at least a few of those were just spam. Defamer has already helpfully blogged Cruise's most egregiously inaccurate claims with regard to psychiatry, so I can skip commenting on those, but when EW gently tries to hint that the anti-psychiatry rampage he's been on of late may have a specific catalyst (like, for instance, his firing Pat Kingsley last year), Cruise insists, "The only change that's occurred since the early 1990s has been the increase in the amount of drugs being used." But most chilling of all: when EW asks whether anyone in Hollywood has asked Cruise to back off this topic already for God's sake, Cruise says to the contrary, "I've had a lot of encouragement and a lot of thanks, that's what I've had." What you've "had," or what you've "heard"? Because I imagine there's kind of a lot of negative feedback that just never makes its way to him, and never will.

Finally, the interview returns to the subject of Holmes:

EW Let me try this again -- will any of [Holmes's] decisions [with regard to her career] involve a ring? CRUISE [Whispering, with a grin] It's gonna happen, man. It'll happen.

What happened to talking to Kate about it first? What happened to knowing someone longer than a couple of months before telling a national magazine you were going to propose? What happened to Pat Kingsley?!

And, I mean, this is not to say that I think publicists are any better than fame parasites, or that I don't realize that they lie for a living. I get that. And when they get in the way of me and my right to know whether Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are actually fucking, I'm just like you: pissed off that direct access to important facts is being denied me. Nor am I such a fan of Cruise's that I think he deserves better than to have his reputation besmirched just because he happens to be really, really enthusiastic about such things as the much-younger girlfriend he hooked up with under very mysterious circumstances or his belief in a doctrine that says our souls are half clam or some shit. (Dude.) The reason I wish Cruise were getting better advice is the same reason I wish Whitney Houston would just stay in rehab or that Courtney Love would stop showing up on red carpets: watching actually insane people losing their shit in public is uncomfortable.

I already feel as though Cruise has gone completely bazoo and I've seen it from every angle; I'm scared to contemplate what even crazier thing he could think of to top the way he's been acting for the past six weeks. I really, honestly, am starting to feel that he has a chemical imbalance -- he's so anti-drug that I believe his constant extremely high level of energy is entirely organic as opposed to a by-product of cocaine use -- that he literally suffers some kind of mania that's never going to get treated properly because he thinks, as he told Details, that "[a]ny drug you put in your system is a poison. It's not a matter of morality. It's a matter of scientific fact." And I realize that, if this is the case, it doesn't make Cruise much different than anyone else in Hollywood, but at least they all have the decency to have their mental breakdowns in private, behind closed doors and camouflaged by publicists' tasteful yet vague denials. Whereas the unravelling of Tom Cruise is happening right in front of me, which makes me feel like I have some responsibility to make it stop. And since there's no chance the press is just going to stop covering him, I want someone near him to shut him up.

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