A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

"THE CRUISE PERSONA, LIKE A JUNK BOND, WAS NEVER MEANT TO REACH MATURITY": Stephen Metcalf on Tom Cruise, with a particular emphasis on what's been lost since Risky Business:

It is a beautiful and authentic piece of acting. To watch his performance today—and you should—is to be present again, not only at the creation of Cruise, the movie star, but at the death of Cruise, an actor bounded by normal human proportion.... The common half-memory of Risky Business conjures up Cruise in asshole eyewear, pimping out his parents' suburban Colonial. But its distinctive pathos derives from its first half, from the nocturnal weirdscape emanating out of Joel's jumbled libido. As this Joel, Cruise allowed himself to be everything the publicity team has tried to convince us, for 25 years, he isn't: insecure, sexually confused, and as Brickman's camerawork takes no pains to hide, physically small.

For more on Risky Business -- and why not? -- visit The House Next Door. As Matt Zoller Seitz notes in the comments, "It's a movie with a happy ending that's actually unhappy; the hero gets all he wanted and more, but at the cost of having the last vestiges of innocence burned right out of him. This is the story of how Ben Braddock from The Graduate turns into Mrs. Robinson's husband."