I Really Don't Like Tom Cruise As A Nazi In Valkyrie Or Anywhere Else

Even before he made a fool of himself by jumping up and down on Oprah's couch and then spouting nonsense at Matt Lauer on the Today Show, I was not a fan of Tom Cruise.

I like celebs like Brad Pitt and his pseudo-wife, Angelina Jolie. Or George Clooney. And others, who use their celeb status to do good things.

I watched Brad Pitt in Africa, with Diane Sawyers, on Primetime Live. Brad Pitt, not playing a role, just being himself, seems like a nice, normal, caring, sincere type of guy. And very smart.

Where with Tom Cruise you get a lot of fake intellectualizing, Scientology idiocy and what seems to me to be a lot of over compensating. And he does not seem very bright.

Telling Matt Lauer that he'd studied psychiatry was bizarre. What he'd actually done was read Scientology propaganda and thought he was studying something real. During that Lauer interview Tom Cruise spouted some pretty stupid stuff. Like claiming one of the current psychotropic drugs was developed by the Nazis and called Alolfophine. That's an old urban myth.

Tom Cruise's formal education ended at high school. He had trouble reading due to dyslexia. I think he does some heavy duty over-compensating regarding his "knowledge." And his "height." It has always seemed to me Tom Cruise has a case of Little Man Syndrome.

So, what got me on this Tom Cruise subject? Well, a couple months ago his latest movie, Valkyrie, had its premiere in Seattle, due to the director, or producer, or someone else associated with getting the movie made, being from Seattle.

When he was in Seattle, for the premiere, Tom Cruise was interviewed by the Seattle P-I's movie reviewer, William Arnold, he being the author of the best seller, Frances, which later was made into the Academy Award winning movie, Frances, starring Jessica Lange.

In the interview with William Arnold, regarding Valkyrie (which tells the infamous story of the failed July 20, 1944 assassination attempt against Adolf Hitler, with Cruise playing the assassination plot's chief instigator, Claus von Stauffenberg) Tom Cruise tells William Arnold that he has always been a history buff.

Tom Cruise then told William Arnold that (due to being a history buff) he's done extensive reading on the Third Reich, but he'd not heard of the assassination plot before he read the Valkyrie script. Or, that there had been German resistance to the Nazis, was news to him.

So, Tom Cruise is a history buff who has read a lot about the Third Reich, but these extremely well-known parts of the history of World War II, the Nazis and the Third Reich, escaped his attention til he read the script for Valkyrie.

Any book that covers Hitler tells the story of the von Stauffenburg plot. Doesn't matter if it's Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich or William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or any of the other 100s of books written about Hitler, the Nazis or World War II, the von Stauffenburg plot is going to be part of the history.

So, once more Tom Cruise is being pretentious, acting like he knows something, that he's studied something, when he hasn't.

It'd be like someone saying they are a history buff and have read a lot about the Civil War, but until they got the script for the new Civil War movie they are starring in, they didn't know Lincoln had been assassinated at the end of the war.

I don't get why, if Tom Cruise feels the need to overcompensate by acting "smart," why doesn't he put in the time to actually study and learn something? Maybe he could get into a community college somewhere.

Maybe if he got some real education he'd learn how ludicrous his Scientology pseudo-religion is. I think one of the reasons his post-Oprah couch jumping movies have tanked, is movie goers figured out that part of the price of their movie ticket was going to Scientology. Tom Cruise has given Scientology millions of dollars.

That would be money better spent, by Tom, on some therapy sessions and some education classes. Like History 101.