You hear a lot of stories about Tom Cruise.  He makes weird jokes about “gays in there”, he showed up to watch football at Jimmy Kimmel’s house toting both his mom and a box of cupcakes, etc., etc.  The common thread seems to be that he’s nice, but borderline-autism level weird.  But since Scientologists don’t believe in autism and Tom Cruise is really rich, they elected him Dalai Space Llama or something.  Anyway, there’s an excerpt from Rob Lowe’s autobiography in Vanity Fair talking about meeting Cruise while shooting The Outsiders back in 1983, in which he implies that Tom Cruise is a robot, but in the nicest way possible.

During the first round of auditions in Los Angeles, Lowe writes of meeting Tom Cruise, then a houseguest of the Sheens: “He’s open, friendly, funny, and has an almost robotic, bloodless focus and an intensity that I’ve never encountered before.” In New York for the second round of auditions, Lowe finds that Cruise is “already showing traits that will make him famous; he’s zeroed in like a laser.” “We check into the Plaza Hotel. I am taken aback at the luxury and spectacle of the lobby…. The front desk tells us we will be sharing rooms,” Lowe writes of the actors’ arrival in the Big Apple. “In a flash, Cruise is on the phone to his agent, Paula Wagner. ‘Paula, they are making us share,’ he says…. The rest of us are staggering around like happy goofs….. ‘O.K., then. Thank you very much,’ he says like a 50-year-old businessman getting off the phone with his stockbroker. ‘Paula says it’s fine.’ ”

“She assured me that there won’t be any gays in there.”

Lowe remembers hanging out with Cruise and the other actors in a gymnasium on set, when Patrick Swayze—who, Lowe writes, “makes Tom Cruise look lobotomized”—“begins to teach us a standing backflip…. When it comes to flips, I’m a pussy. I don’t flip. I don’t even dive into a pool—straight cannonball for me…. No, thanks. Cruise, not surprisingly, is all over it. ‘How about this!’ he says, almost pulling it off without even being spotted. He wipes out, but tries it again immediately.”

Benicio Del Toro later said of working with Swayze, “He flip you.”

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Here’s a clip from Patrick Swayze’s first movie, Skatetown U.S.A., a roller-disco movie, in which he plays the awesomely porny-sounding “Ace Johnson.”  This was back when roller disco was still cool, mind you.  I mean, I assume it was.  It looks pretty queer to me.  *tucks in sequined shirt*

YOUR DAILY CIRCLE JERK LINKS

• Vitor Belfort is pumped for his comeback and says he’s going to eat babies and drink your pee.  I think.  I dunno, I couldn’t really understand him, to be honest. |Recall|
• Dungeons and Dragons has soda flavors.  And no, none of them are “nerd”.  |ToplessRobot|
• Check out Vice Magazine’s new Film Issue. Or don’t.  Whatever man, it’s your funeral.  |Vice|
• The 23 greatest Michael Jordan commercials of all time. Get it?  Because he was number 23?  Whatever, bro.  What do you know. |HailMaryJane|
• New Black Dynamite promo from Fight Smack in the Orphanage.  |SmokingSection|
• The 12 Geekiest eBay sales. |ScreenJunkies|
• Does Kanye West have Asperger’s?  Probably, I hear he likes eating ass burgers.  And putting fishsticks in his mouth.  |HolyTaco|
• Review of a video game with Eliza Dushku in it.  |G4|

Thanks to Mason for the tip

Courtesy of a tip from JessicaD, today’s forgotten classic is the 1987 film Steel Dawn.  Patrick Swayze plays the lead, “a desert warrior, carving the future with his sword.”  Come on, dude, you have to admit that’s a pretty awesome tagline.  Basically, it’s exactly like Mad Max, and the very first shot of the trailer is a closeup of Swayze’s crotch.  I don’t know what else you’d need to know about it besides that, but I did find a synopsis that begins with this:

Getting the film off to a quick start, the sandpeople, who live under the sand, decide to attack Swayze while he’s doing his daily headstands.

Okay, okay, I’m sold.  You had me at “crotch closeup.”  Additionally, this guy has awesome hair:

That is all.

Two obit posts in a row??!?  Welcome to 2009, the year Death acted like a total butthole.  Anyway, it appears earlier reports that Patrick Swayze might be recovering thanks to an experimental procedure (after being diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer in January ’08) were just false hope.  Swayze died yesterday in LA at the age of 57, which is pretty much the lamest thing ever.  Gawdammit, the only time you’re allowed to declare Patrick Swayze a dead man is after he tells you there’s always barber college.

He was Dalton, he was Bodhi, he saved Baby from the corner, where she surely would’ve been aborted by parents who didn’t understand the dance.  Has anyone else ever been in so many bad movies that everyone loves?  Not to mention, he was the best part of Donnie Darko and co-starred in arguably the most memorable SNL sketch of the 90s.  I don’t normally like to gush about dead people, because when an a-hole dies he doesn’t magically become not an a-hole, no matter what anyone says about him.  You have to honor an a-hole’s memory by remembering him for the a-hole that he was (see: Hunter S. Thompson on the passing of Richard Nixon).  But in all honesty, anyone who doesn’t have at least two or three glowy, pop-culture nostalgia memories involving Patrick Swayze is a two-bit liar and a charlatan, and I wouldn’t sit next to him if it was the last seat on an escape pod.  Maybe if you doctors spent half the time you spend giving people who shouldn’t be boning anyway boners you’d have this cancer crap licked by now.  So stop playing grabass back there in the lab and get going on some serious research, the kind that involves stethoscopes and bunsen burners and all that sh’t.  You already lost us Dalton, but I’ve got some important contributions to humanity that I’m maybe probably going to start working on tomorrow after I cook some food and put on my pants and maybe watch a little TV. And you wouldn’t want to miss out on it over a retarded thing like cancer.

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I hesitate to post this for fear of jinxing it, but the Daily Mail reports, based largely on these side-by-side pictures, the left from back in April, the right a recent shot of him looking healthier, that Patrick Swayze may be winning his battle with pancreatic cancer.

The Dirty Dancing star, 56, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer early last year, appeared to have gained a little weight and grown some of his hair back. He had even added a goatee. Tubes thought to be catheters for his chemotherapy could be seen hanging in front of his shirt but Swayze was smiling and even indulging in a couple of cigarette breaks.

It is thought he had an advanced form of radiotherapy which is offering new hope to sufferers.  The CyberKnife technique shoots hundreds of beams of radiation at hard-to-reach tumours.  Last week cancer patient Robert Ferrant, 62, became one of the first in the UK to have the procedure. Mr Ferrant, from Jersey, said the treatment meant he ‘actually had hope of a cure’ [Ed. note - not sure the patient is the best person to ask in cases such as these...].  The machine, which was reportedly also used by Swayze, shoots hundreds of beams of radiation at difficult-to-reach tumours.  It moves with the patient’s breathing, meaning it can target tumours deemed inoperable due to their proximity to major blood vessels.

I don’t go in for a lot of this science crap, so allow me to explain this for the layperson.  Imagine the CyberKnife standing outside your cells wearing a tight black t-shirt.  Cancer walks into your body and the CyberKnife stands in front of it with its arms folded across its chest and says, “Sorry, body’s closed.”  Then the cancer will be like, “Yeah? Well then what are those cells doing?”  And the CyberKnife will say, all calm like, “Dancing and having a good time.”  Then if the cancer still tries to come in, the CyberKnife beats the crap out of it with karate and tells it to go back to barber college.

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