It’s a happy birthday to Tom Cruise, I reckon, who, despite what Oliver Stone might have you believe, was born on the 3rd of July. My gift to Cruise, who turns 45 today, is that I’ll not mention more than once his DVD review of Dawson’s Creek, and also change the site’s banner for a few days, to commemorate his upholstery dancing on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Glancing forward at Cruise’s filmography, the teaser trailer for Lions for Lambs is up, a bunch of war-on-terror speechifying driven by bizarre music (one feels like a rave might break out at any moment). And Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie — a rooted-in-truth drama about an assassination plot against Adolf Hitler during World War II — is in the news, all because German officials won’t let production use a key historical site, owing to Cruise’s beliefs as a Scientologist.

Of more dire consequence, though, is the threatened 2009 pairing of Cruise and Ben Stiller in 20th Century Fox’s comedy The Hardy Men, about grown-up versions of the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s intrepid Bayport boy investigators. Long a pet project of sorts for Stiller, this used to be a vehicle for he and Jim Carrey, and I read an awful, awful draft of it more than a half dozen years ago. That Simon Kinberg (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the last X-Men installment, the forthcoming Jumper) is apparently the latest to tackle a full-commission rewrite gives the project a flickering chance, but the choice of Shawn Levy (Cheaper by the Dozen, Night at the Museum) to direct tells me that even if Cruise eventually does commit to it (giving birth to all the stories about how he “really wanted to do a comedy for [his] kids,” blah, blah, blah), this will be a clamorous, one-note pairing, full of cheap physical mimicry and a creaky mystery plot likely driven by smuggling, land-use, corporate takeover or the like. Instead of just being intense, Cruise will try to be mock mock-intense, and Stiller will ape Cruise’s trademark laugh ad nauseam.