| By Fred Topel
In Theatres Now
|
Tom Cruise jokes just never seem to get old. It’s not that people keep coming up with new ones. It’s the same jokes that still work. Scary Movie 4 climaxes with their version of Cruise (Craig Bierko) professing his love on the Oprah show, complete with acrobatic back flips and rope swinging. Bierko had no problem doing most of the stunts, but worried he was a bit late in the Cruise-mocking game.
“First of all, I knew that that was okay because Tom Cruise beat us to it,” he said. “That’s the only thing. My only issue with Tom Cruise happens to be he parodied it before we did on Jay Leno. So, I knew that in terms of insulting somebody else, unless he was mad at himself, he probably wouldn’t get litigious with us, because, to sue himself would be ridiculous. I felt okay about that.”
But even though Bierko goes to the extreme of eating the cushioning out of the couch (it was made out of cotton candy), there were some lines he would not cross. “What I wanted to make sure, because I knew that these types of things tend to get written as you go along, I wanted to go through the script to make sure that even if it wasn’t done on purpose, that there were no double-entendres that could be misread. What I don’t feel is correct, and I know [director] David [Zucker] feels the same way, if it crosses the line into personal life or someone’s spiritual beliefs, I don’t think it’s the place of a movie like this or parody or entertainment at all quite frankly to go there. But, if it’s something that happens in a public forum… I never saw Tom Cruise behave that way and I never saw anybody do that one a talk show before and it happened publicly, I saw it, that’s open for parody. The man parodied himself. But beyond that, I think it’s incorrect, personally, I think it lowers the bar for everybody.”
That means Bierko was no fan of the controversial episode of South Park that featured animated ridicule of Scientology and repeated use of the phrase “Tom Cruise won’t come out of the closet.” “I’m a big fan of South Park. It’s a matter of personal taste. I think those guys are hilarious. I’ll continue to watch the show. I actually think anything that’s speculative about a person’s life and that could be even potentially damaging to the people around him who aren’t necessarily in show business. And I also don’t go for the argument: well, you’re in show business that means that every time you walk by us, we can hit you as hard as we want in your face. No, we’re in show business because we didn’t play sports and we actually don’t like getting hit, we want to remove ourselves, we want to play people who get hit. It’s actually the exact opposite. I just don’t happen to agree with that. So yeah, that particular episode, I saw it, it wasn’t my favorite. But mainly because it’s funny, yeah, but it lowers the bar because now it’s okay for people of lesser talent—those guys are hysterical—but now people of lesser talent go, ‘Oh, it’s okay to go after somebody about something that’s pure speculation and is damaging to him consistently.’ Even on just a personal level, how would you like to hear that crap everyday?”
The bulk of Scary Movie 4 deals with War of the Worlds with Bierko playing Cruise’s absentee dad hero. “I think if they looked for a man who looked less like Tom Cruise in every single way…actually, Regina Hall looks more like Tom Cruise than I do. I just thought they didn’t hire a guy who looks like Tom Cruise, it’s the idea of hero in this situation, a guy who has all the instincts of a hero and just really doesn’t know the alphabet up to A.”
The spoof include memorable scenes like the pre-attack game of catch, the tripods vaporizing town folk and hiding in the bunker with a crazy man. Because these versions involve Bierko throwing like a girl, vaporized gangstas leaving their bling behind and singing a rap song to his frightened daughter in the bunker, Bierko felt even further removed from Cruise.
“There were things like the playing catch scene that were so absurd because he wanted me to do this thing where I threw like that and I just thought, ‘That’s not the way Tom Cruise threw. He threw it like a human being.’ The guy is so stupid he can’t manipulate the mechanics of his body properly. It would have ruined it for me if I did some sort of Tom Cruise imitation because I don’t look like him, I don’t have that kind of bearing and I don’t think there was anything to parody about it. I thought he was really good in [War of the Worlds]. He is where he is for a reason. There are certain other actors that it would be really tempting to mock. As good as the movie was it was very serious and important.”
He did have to learn the words to a Public Enemy rap song for the serenade. “That’s a real rap song. I didn’t know it. I know one rap song by Public Enemy and I was like, ‘You know what would be funny?’ and they were like, ‘No, Public Enemy is like a Beatles song to the rap people.’ And so I had to learn this song and sing it in the way that he sang ‘Little Deuce Coup’.”
Scary Movie 4 is now playing. |
