Jack Reacher fans are pushing back hard against my mockery of their outrage at Tom Cruise playing Jack Reacher. (Their main objection: he's too short. Some also feel that he sucks as an actor and/or as a human being.) The outraged Jack Reacher fans seem not to realize, one, that there are many more of us who have never heard of Jack Reacher before this than there are of them, and that we come to the new Tom Cruise movie with none of their neuroses about it, and two, that even if we did, if a movie is being made with a hero thought of up until then as huge and hulking, and Tom Cruise expresses an interest in playing that hero, then all of a sudden, and quite rightly, the moviemakers will get much more flexible about the hero's height. Lestat de Lioncourt describes himself in Anne Rice's novel's as six feet tall, and Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was probably well over six feet tall, and Cruise played both of them and both of those movies were hits. Once again -- remember all the silly outrage back in the early 90's among Anne Rice fans when the word got out that Cruise was going to play Lestat? -- I'm betting on the huge (although short) movie star, and against the whiny readers of mass-market paperbacks.
Also, a whole bunch of dopey Buddhists are patiently lecturing me about how modern science does not stand in conflict with the doctrine of the re-incarnation of the Dalai Lama. The occasion for these lectures is the news that His Holiness is pushing science education among his exiled Tibetan followers in northern India, causing Buddhists the world over to ooh and ah as they do at His every move. (I think He's silly at best, but there's no denying that his PR machine is extraordinary.)
Now if I could just get the angry Jack Reacher fans and the earnestly lecturing Buddhists to argue with each other and leave me alone...
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