The new publicist for Tom Cruise, that is.

You know you want to read it: How the Death Star Works. Really, it’s all about the Superlaser.

More: How the destruction of the second Death Star created a holocaust on the moon of Endor.

The cruise ship pirate attack story keeps getting better and better: It turns out that Somalia has three “well-organized pirate groups” operating off its coast and that since March 15 there have been 25 pirate attacks in Somali waters.

More: The cruise ship employed a sonic weapon against the pirates.

Just a few thoughts on Good Night, and Good Luck, which I had caught over the weekend thanks to tickets courtesy of David Cirilli of Ken Sunshine Consultants (other than the free tickets, I’ve received nothing for this blurb–not even a free bag of popcorn or Junior Mints. And those who prefer Raisinets to Goobers can go back to Russia!):

David Strathairn is a serious actor. My bet is he gets the Oscar nod. After a few scenes, you get the impression that Murrow’s opinion of himself and his crusade for truth, justice, and the American Way is as high as Joe McCarthy’s (or better yet, your modern-day network anchor). Still, Murrow’s interview of Liberace, in which he asks the pianist if he’ll ever settle down and get married is priceless. In addition, Strathairn deserves props for being a nonsmoker who, true to his character, smoked like a chimney for all 90 minutes. I don’t think there was a single scene showing him without a cigarette.

Who is the real enemy in Good Night, and Good Luck? It’s not McCarthy. Ultimately it is television and Bill Paley’s vision for CBS versus that of Murrow and Fred Friendly’s. (As CBS president, Paley sees a future not with Murrow’s preachy talk show but, rather, with the more lucrative $64,000 Question.) It’s obvious this movie is director George Clooney’s Quiz Show moment.

Look carefully at the footage from the McCarthy hearings and you will see sitting there quietly a young Bobby Kennedy. Interestingly, he isn’t quoted saying anything.

Performances across the board are stellar. But in particular is Ray Wise, a B-movie actor who I think deserves a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the role of Don Hollenbeck. A war correspondence in North Africa during the war, Hollenbeck worked at CBS until his untimely death in 1954, an apparent suicide. Wise’s Hollenbeck is sad and earnest. I asked a friend who actually knew him during his days at PM Magazine if Hollenbeck was really as sympathetic. My friend says he was indeed, “a very, very nice man.”

At the very least, you’ll leave Good Night, and Good Luck with a hankering for a smoke and a drink and maybe listen to some Cool Jazz. Not such a bad idea at the moment.

Today Andrew Sullivan commits what will certainly be the first of many fawning words about Brokeback Mountain. (Will it be this year’s Team America!?!) The only problem is that Sullivan doesn’t know much about the movie industry. In an effort to make Brokeback Mountain out to be more than it is, he gives us all sorts of hyperbole about how important this “fascinating cultural moment” is. He tells us:

But that two very hot Hollywood leading men would be prepared to take on these roles, that a director as accomplished as Ang Lee would direct the movie, and that a studio as mainstream as Universal would produce it strikes me as a significant development. A few years back, it would have been unthinkable for bankable, heterosexual stars like Ledger and Gyllenhaal to have embraced such a venture. But they are of the generation that is mercifully over the bigotries of old Hollywood. Think of the greatest actor of his generation, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Three of his most powerful, accomplished, career-making performances – in “Boogie Nights,” “Flawless,” and “Capote,” – are of gay men, each very different, each very human, each poignantly and brilliantly brought to life. In his case, taking on homosexual roles has helped Hoffman reach the career heights he now commands. Ledger and Gyllenhal take this to a new level, because, unlike Hoffman, they are handsome beyond measure, and have played macho heterosexuals for years.

Let’s start at the top and work our way down this mountain of blather:

(1) Yes, Jake Gyllenhaal is a hot property; has been for a couple years.

Heath Ledger, on the other hand, missed his shot at the big time in 2001 and has been on a downward career spiral ever since. Ledger was a Bright Young Thing in 1999 when he appeared in the very fine teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You; in 2000 he got second billing in Mel Gibson’s Revolutionary War movie The Patriot, which underperformed. Still, Hollywood executives thought Ledger might become a bankable leading man, so they gave him starring roles in a summer action movie (A Knight’s Tale) and a bit of Oscar bait (The Four Feathers); both flopped. Since then, Ledger has struggled to get leading-man work and has dipped into such fare as Ned Kelly, The Order, Lords of Dogtown, and The Brothers Grimm. For Ledger, Brokeback Mountain isn’t a risk–it’s a last, desperate grasp at the brass ring before he disappears into the abyss with Josh Hartnett and Wes Bentley. Remember them?

And what to say of Ang Lee? Lee directed one of my Top 40 movies, Sense and Sensibility. He then directed the cold and clinical Ice Storm. Both films had critical acclaim, but no serious commercial performance. Since then, he’s directed two colossal flops: Ride with the Devil and The Hulk, both of which lost money and stunk. He isn’t exactly riding a tidal wave of success into this project.

(2) Are Gyllenhaal and Ledger “bankable”? Is Sullivan kidding? Does he even know what the word means? Here’s Ledger’s résumé:

Despite having ridden shotgun with Gibson and Matt Damon–two actors who really are bankable–Ledger has never opened a movie with any real success. In fact, a studio executive might reach the opposite conclusion: that Ledger is box office poison. Look at those grosses for Ned Kelly, The Four Feathers, and Lords of Dogtown. These pictures should have gone direct-to-video.

And how about that Jake Gyllenhaal? Here’s his track record:

Take out The Day After Tomorrow–which was a Roland Emmerich disaster extravaganza headlined by Dennis Quaid and starring everyone from Sela Ward to Ian Holm–and Gyllenhaal has never topped $35 million in total gross and never opened a picture above $6 million–$6 million! If you go by the numbers, and not what you read in Us Weekly, you see the portrait of an untested art-house darling, not a “bankable” leading man. You see, in fact, the type of career that was built for roles like “gay cowboy.” Brokeback Mountain isn’t a risk for Gyllenhaal, it’s his wheelhouse. (Yes, Jarhead opened nicely this past weekend, but the executives at Universal didn’t know that when they cast Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain many moons ago.)

(3) Was Philip Seymour Hoffman’s career made by his “powerful, accomplished, career-making performances” in Boogie Nights, Flawless, and Capote? After all, he’s been gay on-screen three times–that must make a trend!

Except that anyone who has followed Hoffman’s career knows that to the extent any select performances “made” it, it was made by his work in The Talented Mr. Ripley, Almost Famous, and–more than anything else–Love Liza. If anything, Flawless, Hoffman’s turn as a drag queen opposite Robert De Niro, is regarded as one of his few missteps.

(Note also how Sullivan uses Capote as both cause and effect: Playing a gay man in Capote has somehow helped Hoffman reach the heights he now commands where he can get the lead in movies such as Capote.)

(4) Have Ledger and Gyllenhaal “played macho heterosexuals for years”? Hardly. Ledger has yet to play a character older than his early twenties and his career only stretches back to 1999. As for Gyllenhaal, this fall marked the first time he’s appeared in a movie as a character older than high school age and if Sullivan were familiar with the Gyllenhaal oeuvre he would know that his prototypical character is that of the sensitive, thoughtful, semi-nerd.

If only Sullivan would leave the movie industry alone. He can probably keep his gig as the resident hep cat on The Chris Matthews Show without having to pretend to be a Hollywood trend spotter.

I wish he’d just stop.

But really, can’t we all quit pretending he’s still funny? He hasn’t gotten an honest laugh since the mid-’90s. I’d rather watch Rip Taylor.

Of all the regions to undergo deer overpopulation, Washington, D.C., has got to be the unlikeliest. And yet, particularly because it’s the rut, deer have been seen roaming throughout the city. Just yesterday, a young buck entered a shopping plaza in nearby Germantown, Maryland, smashing windows and causing havoc at the Giant supermarket. It was eventually put down.

Two nights ago I was driving down a sidestreet in Georgetown when suddenly a deer crossed my path some 20 feet ahead of me. It had somehow managed to cross Wisconsin Avenue near the Holiday Inn.

And last week one buck made his way deep into Georgetown and ended up inside a Diesel store and later Ralph Lauren, before getting tranquilized.

You may recall, a few years ago, some deer actually made their way onto the White House South Lawn.

These deer must really need to get laid.

I just won a bet with a friend over what David Denby’s review of Jarhead would look like. I suspected Denby wouldn’t like it much because it isn’t antimilitary or anti-Bush. Here’s his thoroughly predictable conclusion:

“Jarhead” has an oddly amorphous and inconclusive feeling to it. We never do find out who Tony is, and his best friend, Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), who shifts back and forth between sanity and hysteria, is a mystery, too. The old war-story narrative may have run aground in the Gulf War, but since questions of courage and character are left up in the air, you wonder why the material wasn’t played differently—with a greater sense of irony, say, or as absurdist comedy, in something like the style of David O. Russell’s Gulf War movie, “Three Kings.” What’s left instead of laughter is a rather sour implication. Underneath all the roughhousing, there’s a persistent sexual menace—towel-snapping in the shower and mock rapes and insults that depend on feminizing the victim of the joke. Broyles and Mendes are saying, I think, that men who are this casually abusive of one another’s bodies could slip, without much provocation, into sexually humiliating detained prisoners. “Jarhead” is an inglorious portrait of military life which points to the next Gulf War and the degrading japes of Abu Ghraib and other prisons.

If you see Jarhead this weekend, you’ll understand how silly this is.