What’s making me happy this week – week 26

A friend of mine got his PhD this week – cum laude, even! And he’s such a cool guy, he had a party at a cinema, and showed John Carpenter’s THE THING. On the big screen. So yeah, that made me pretty happy – and jump, a few times. Especially during that re-animation: I’d managed to forget about that particular scare, somehow.

And then there’s a another thing, that’s not making me happy necessarily (it’s a bit callous to be happy about a relationship you don’t have real insight in) but that’s absolutely fascinating: the TomKat divorce. It’s not even so much the relationship I’m interested in: it’s the story. I’m always surprised about how certain “truths”  tend to circulate, without any tangible evidence. Like that Tom Cruise is gay. Like that there was a contract for Katie Holmed with a iron-clad non-disclosure clause. Like that Suri might not be Cruise’s. Like how so many people are cheering Katie’s “escape”.

I have no idea how these narratives are shaped. The Cruise=gay thing, for instance, I don’t think is in gossip mags much (disclaimed: my knowledge of gossip mags comes entirely from Jezebel’s Midweek Madness round-up), and unlike with Travolta, I don’t think there are a lot of concrete cases of men accusing him of, well, anything. He also doesn’t quite ping my gaydar (not the most efficient detection device, admittedly) as much as he seems somehow a-sexual – odd, really, that a leading man who’s never all that credible in romances  was at some point one of the biggest movie stars. It doesn’t help either that their professions of love, even outside of the legendary couch-jumping, feel forced. I don’t trust the “body language experts” one bit, but something always seemed a bit off… or maybe once you think something’s not right, nothing can seem natural.

Part of this is Scientology, of course: cults encourage conspiracy theories, and Scientology is particularly alluring, what with the stories of taped “confessions” and the creepy tell-alls of ex-members (and this whole story’s great publicity for THE MASTER). But even non-scientology celebs have these unconfirmed and unconfirmable “facts” swirling about them, whether it’s a nice guy image or rumors of strange sexual escapades. It reminds me, oddly enough, of Game of Thrones, where the populace repeats lurid and strange “facts” about the royals that have a varying relationship to reality.

Then there are all the gossipy details, the “metadata”, if you will, that’s assiduously examined. That she filed for divorce, for instance. That she did it in New York, supposedly to increase her chance to get custody. Most intriguingly: that he’s nowhere to be found, suggesting that the “Tom was blind-sided” narrative might be true.Most of all, I really can’t wait to see what Anne Helen Petersen will make of it.

Oh, and I also watched THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, but charming as Garfield might be, and fun as the spider-cam is, this was as forgettable as it was unnecessary. Ok, the first kiss was cute. But even that can’t rival the upside-down-in-the-rain kiss from the Raimi version.