So, right, I'm the A's / Lakers / 49ers (in that order) fan. I like tennis, too, but more peripherally -- I didn't grow up as a U.S. Open ballboy, sadly. I briefly played ultimate frisbee in college and would absolutely watch it on TV, but we're not there yet. As Migs mentioned, we kind of have a first-team / second-team thing going on. On my end, I adopted the Mets in New York, partly because they were there (and they weren't the Yankees) and partly out of loyalty to my fiancee. (I'm still getting used to that word. I've been engaged for less than a month.) (You'll note already that I do love parentheses. Sometimes nested, sometimes sequential, always awesome.) The Giants earned lifelong second-team status at the moment of the David Tyree helmet catch. I was at a friend's apartment in Riverdale (he's an older friend -- we taught together; I only mention this because if someone my age told me they were in Riverdale, I'd wonder why) watching that game, and when Tyree made that catch, we jumped and yelled and shouted as if we were actually fans of the Giants (he's a Broncos fan). It was borderline magical. There's also an "enemy of my enemy" thing going on because I grew up hating the Dallas Cowboys. The Michael Irvin - Deion Sanders slap-boxing match was one of the most thrilling moments of my childhood.
On to the movies. I saw Tropic Thunder later than a lot of people -- it was at my uncle's house over a Christmas, as I recall. He has an enormous television, and I think we watched it on Blu-Ray, not that high-def does a lot for a movie like that. I'm no Jack Black fan, and I usually find Ben Stiller's particular brand of humor insufferable (though he did have a solid episode of Extras), but Robert Downey, Jr. won me over. "That's the theme song to The Jeffersons!" is still a great line.
Tom Cruise, though -- what a fascinating topic. I'm not going into any sort of in-depth discussion of his "marriage", his "religion", or anything else except to say that it's not clear whether he's human, alien, evolved, insane, or something utterly beyond comprehension. He's a tabloid joke. He's a tiny, short little man. He's been around for years and has to have had work done at this point.
And yet! I don't remember which movie it was in front of, but I saw a trailer for Knight & Day, his sort of Mr. and Mrs. Smith-esque action comedy with Cameron Diaz. I really want to see it. And believe me, it's not for Cameron Diaz, who, after perusing IMDB for a minute, I don't think I've ever liked in a movie. No, it's for Tom Cruise. He's charismatic, he can pull off the action star moves, he's funny. He can completely get inside a character (like in Tropic Thunder, although the fat suit and bald head make saying something like "he got inside the character" sound sort of trite) or he can be all "I'm Tom Cruise and this is my movie" and he's utterly watchable either way. Think about Tropic Thunder versus War of the Worlds (for all that Tom Cruise was the star as a blue-collar dad, was it a Tom Cruise movie or a Steven Spielberg movie? To me, it was very much the latter) versus the Mission: Impossible franchise versus Michael Mann's Collateral. For someone who projects so little sexuality (compare him to George Clooney, for instance), he has an undeniable presence despite his off-screen "issues" in a way that I think is unprecedented.
Partially, it's not fair to make that comparison with Gregory Peck and Jimmy Stewart and Paul Newman because we just didn't know about those guys off the screen. The explosion of the tabloid industry, whatever it means for the culture at large, means that we've never been faced with watching people we "know" so much about before. So is Tom Cruise special, or is Tom Cruise just the ur-star, the model for the greats to come?
(Quick aside: Knight & Day is directed by James Mangold, who, prior to this movie, had a little bit of that indie/auteur pixie dust on him: he wrote and directed Cop Land, Girl, Interrupted, and Walk the Line, and directed 3:10 to Yuma. Of course, Walk the Line and 3:10 were pretty big Hollywood pictures, but you can feel a distinction between those and Knight & Day, can't you? Anyway, none of this is the most important part of his background. The important part is that he's a Columbia Film alumnus. More of that residual pride.)
(Meanwhile, what you're missing on the Aussie is your favorite person in the world, Pam Shriver. (Who, wait a minute, was married to 70-year-old former Bond George Lazenby until like six months ago? Really? Why didn't anyone tell me this?) Just now she was bitching about how she couldn't see the court through all the umbrellas and chairs and cameras between her and the court. To be fair, in the wide shot, it looks legitimately cluttered down there. Chris Fowler hilariously had to cut her off with "I'm sorry I asked," because she was about to go into a full-on rant about how she couldn't see.)
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