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Respect the Cruise

My love for Tom Cruise only increases the more I play this video. He stopped by BET's 106 and Park a week ago to promote M:I-3, the Yung Joc video came on, and Cruise started doing Joc's rev the motorcycle dance to the amusement of black people everywhere. This isn't jumping up and down on Oprah's couch or anything, but when the camera pans to his feet, which are lifting up and down in the manner of awesomeness, Cruise comes pretty close to perfect.

To be clear, I'm not poking fun. I seriously love this guy. My fascination started in summer 1990, when I took a bunch of friends to one of those "go to the movies" birthday parties at the AMC 309. We saw Ghost Dad starring Bill Cosby, which fyi netted the following review on IMDB:

User Comments:

1 out of 3 people found the following comment useful:-
Best and Greatest, 1 August 2002
Author: SemiDtachd from Connecticut

This movie is far and away the BEST and GREATEST movie ever made. I may not know all that there is to know about cinematic technique. I hold no degree in Film or Photography. I have not studied writing, acting or directing, nor have I watched many so called "classic" films. However, I still feel that I am qualified to say that Ghost Dad is the pinnacle of achievement in the realm of motion pictures. Bill Cosby is a genius, and offers a finely tuned performance which recalls the "ghost" of all of his viewers' "dads." Wonderfully cast, superbly directed, touchingly photographed, and ably written, this film will no doubt stand the test of time to supplant "Citizen Kane" at the top of the cinematic hierarchy.

Obviously Ghost Dad was terrible. And to Matt, Andy, Donny, David, John, Joey, other Matt, maybe Chris, and whoever else I brought to Ghost Dad: Really sorry about that. I promised you Ghost and Demi Moore's titties, and all you got was "America's favorite dad in a spirited comedy" and my mom breastfeeding my baby sister.

To my credit, the previews before Ghost Dad featured Days Of Thunder, which may or may not have already been in the theaters at that point but after that goddamn there was nobody cooler in the world than Cole "Victory Lane" Trickle, a/k/a Tom Cruise. Granted my pantheon of cool hot actors was limited to Rodney Dangerfield, Eddie Murphy, Chevy Chase, and Jake and Elwood Blues, but none of these guys had made out with Nicole Kidman on stage or real life, and at 8 years old that was make or break.

Since then I've been a Cruise fanatic. I've seen Days of Thunder fifteen times and once read the memorable quotes from Top Gun and Magnolia, so I pretty much get the gist. Last year I saw 1991's If Looks Could Kill and thought Richard Grieco's performance was very Cruise-esque, if not flat-out Cruisey. I saw Cruise on Oprah and realized he doesn't play characters in movies, the characters play him: above the law, permanently awesome, on the edge, sort of short but in a permanently awesome, Joe Pesci sort of way. My mom always said I reminded her of a young Tom Cruise and now I know why--I'm like, five foot eight.

Yet last night at the weekly Mix Hut meetup, Cruise-on-BET was the butt of easily over 400 admittedly hilarious jokes. 350 of these boiled down to mimicking TC's dance ("I don't know what kind of motorcycle he's driving!") and the other 50 were just jokes about going up to different people in the restaurant and doing the dance for them. I have to say, I've gotten pretty good at this fucking dance.

Thing is, Cruise does know what he's doing--he knows exactly what kind of motorcycle he's driving. There's a chapter in Neil Strauss's The Game where Strauss hangs out with Cruise at this thing called "wheelie school." Cruise was learning how to jump over a motor home on a motorcycle for a stunt I assume he had to do for M:I-3:

"I'm training to jump a trailer," he said. He pointed to a mobile home sitting just off the track. "It'll be bigger than that one. But it's not that hard."

He squinted at the vehicle for a moment, visualizing the feat. "Well, the jumping's not that hard. It's the landing that's difficult."

He cocked his right hand and slugged me in the shoulder.

I'm sure there's more about this in the Rolling Stone piece Strauss put together on Cruise too. Either way, the fact remains that Cruise has probably jumped over more trailers than Yung Joc, the BET, the Mix Hut, Bill Cosby, and the entire blogosphere combined. Switch to missiles already.