Deconstructing Tom Cruise

Today, we all got the news that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are getting busy, if by getting busy you mean he closes his eyes and pretends she's Brad Pitt while he tries a sneak attack on the back door. If you're like me, you threw up a little in your mouth when you heard this news.

The World's Greatest Copyeditor and I discussed this at length over IM, and I came to a startling conclusion: I actually really kind of liked Tom Cruise for a considerable length of time. I had to figure out just how long, though, so I turned to my trusty friends at IMDB.

I first saw Tom Cruise in The Outsiders, the film that would shape my taste in boys for years to come. It was like cute guy overload, really. Then of course, there was Risky Business.

I liked him through Top Gun, The Color of Money and Cocktail. Then 1988 came, and with it came Rain Man. I started to have my doubts about Tommy Boy.

How do you bounce back from something like Rain Man? Why, you star in Born on the Fourth of July, of course! I dismissed Rain Man as a minor transgression and my doubts just melted away.

I started to grow bored with him around the Days of Thunder and A Few Good Men days, but then? 1994! Lestat! Freaking awesome! Like an unreliable but charming ex-boyfriend, my Tom Cruise was back. And the motherfucker had fangs.

1996 was a hard year for me. I really liked Jerry Maguire. Shut up, dude had me at hello. But something else happened that year: Mission Impossible. I figured they pretty much cancelled each other out. The same happened in 1999, when he gave a stellar performance in Magnolia and ruined it by also starring the craptastic Eyes Wide Shut. It was official: Tom Cruise was no longer someone I generally liked. He was now hit or miss. And this, my friends, is where the downward spiral began.

Another Mission Impossible (and a third in the works). Vanilla Sky and Minority Report, both of which I HATED. And then a whole lot of other crap I didn't even bother to pay attention to.

Tom and I, we've taken a long journey together. To recap: Loved him from '83 to '88. Liked him from '88 to '90. Was indifferent from '90 to '96. Starting to hate him from '96 to '99. Fully made the transition to loathing in '99, and have remained there ever since. Which brings us to today, where he's inducing small amounts of vomit in mouths across America. Way to go, Tom!