sunday january 17

today i looked at the mission: impossible ii trivia page on imdb. there were some genuinely interesting facts on there, including, for instance, that the song metallica had written for the movie was the one to leak early on napster, directly leading to the band's court case against the music-sharing service.

interspersed with these occasionally interesting bits of trivia, however, were a series of "facts" that might as well have been added by tom cruise's pr team and seemed designed to make him sound like a real alpha at director john woo's expense. while it may very well be true that cruise insisted on doing almost all of his own stunts and woo was nervous about it, the constant reiteration of this point and the weird editorializing ("woo admired cruise's courage," reads one piece of trivia) were jarring.

another item, which insisted that - contrary to published reports at the time - cruise was actually not acting like a "high-maintenance diva" by instructing extras not to make eye contact with him, and that those "star-struck" extras were simply ruining the shot, was also extremely suspect.