herbiehancock

  Tom Cruise  Biography Actor. Born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, on July 3rd, 1962, in Syracuse, New York, to Mary and Thomas Mapother. Cruise's mother was an amateur actress and schoolteacher, and his father was an electrical engineer. His family moved around a great deal when Cruise was a child in order to accommodate his father's career. Cruise's parents divorced when he was 11, and the children moved with their mother to Louisville, Kentucky, and then to Glen Ridge, New Jersey, after her remarriage. Like his mother and three sisters, Cruise suffered from dyslexia, which made academic success difficult for him. He excelled in athletics, however, and considered pursuing a career in professional wrestling until a knee injury sidelined him during high school. At age 14, Cruise enrolled in a Franciscan seminary with thoughts of becoming a priest, but he left after a year. When he was 16, a teacher encouraged him to participate in the school's production of the...

No 455 – Top Gun Director – Tony Scott Can we just crack out some Kenny Loggins first.... Kenny Loggins – Playing With The Boys excellent.... Well... Really..... I can't take the piss out of the homoeroticism , all the obvious targets have been addressed so many times before. All I can say is that I really can't tell the difference between this film and Hot Shots! any more.... This is a ridiculous nonsense of a film. It is a film in which one requires nothing more than to sit back and watch the silliness and the pretty planes. The planes are really pretty and there is some incredible choreography up in them there sky. I don't mean to sound too dismissive – I love a big dumb action film as much as the next person. But there aren't any real character arcs amongst the flashy Jet porn and Tim Robbins in the background. This is a film that really only made it in as the top 500's guilty pleasure – and that doesn't seem right. Still its better than Superman ...

No 387 - Rain Man Director - Barry Levinson Oh Blog! I have neglected you. I have been a bad man and July has been a rubbish month for me actually having films and watching them. I promise to rectify this in the upcoming months. I find autism fascinating. I'm aware that that can make me sound a bit voyeuristic and a bit like a bastard, but what I mean is that it is genuinely a fascinating mental process - especially the Savant syndrome, which is what Raymond's condition is defined as. My knowledge and interest on this stems initially from Daniel Tammet . If you have never read Born on a Blue Day , do so - you can get it for as little as a quid on Amazon. Bargain. It is an extremely fascinating read about how Tammet's condition allows him to complete massively complex mathematical and linguistic feats. The man is a genius, and yet when discussing his condition, you can see the limitations it imposes on him. Whilst he is a very social person, he has the confusion about em...

No 281 - Interview with the Vampire Director - Neil Jordan I like the way the cinematic vampires are varied beasts. The punks of The Lost Boys are nothing compared to the monsters of From Dusk Till Dawn . There are the strange bat like Nosferatu or the incredibly human Eli . Even Dracula himself has flitted through different versions and completely different styles. There is no definitive vampire, but I find them fascinating - for me, the most fascinating is the Anne Rice vampire. I love the passion, the glamour and he danger of her vampires. It has been said time and time again that the Vampire story is a thinly veiled allegory for sex. Nowhere is that more evident than in Interview with the Vampire. The vampires in this film are beautiful creatures that bristle with a dangerous sexual lust. Their skin is white and smooth and their eyes are fierce and unnatural. Almost feline. Maybe it plays to the part of me which yearns to be a dandy, but they are just fabulous. If I were to create...