I’ve been beating the political horse pretty hard for a while now and the Net Neutrality thing is done to death. I guess it’s time to pay attention to the third leg of my blog tripod – the lunacy that is the entertainment industry.

Speaking of lunacy, Tom Cruise opened a new movie this weekend. It fell well short of projections. They must have known that was going to happen. Given all the ads that featured “soft, romantic Tom” and played up the romance angle, it was apparent they were losing female movie-goers. It’s also apparent, given the ads all featured the same five or six action sequences, that the third installment was going to be much like the first two, and all the good stuff is in the trailers.

Several reviews of “Mission: Impossible 3″ pointed out that Mr. Cruise’s public persona had become a distraction when watching him on the big screen. “It’s impossible to watch ‘M:I-3′ without asking: Do we still, you know, like Tom Cruise?” the critic Owen Gleiberman wrote in Entertainment Weekly, while Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times: “It would be a stretch to say that Tom Cruise needs a hit. What this guy needs is an intervention.”

Hollywood spends so much time trying to promote the actors and make America identify with them, that it becomes dangerous for the movies they are affiliated with when their public image is a cultural joke.