----------------------------Original message---------------------------- with spoilers........ to respond to dianne's question, indirectly, i think: the casting of cruise became a focus for lots of resentment abt "hollywoodization," selling out (see anne rice's retraction in the times/variety, where she reclaims her fan base as the movie's [and the sequel's] primary audience by telling us how much she loves the movie), and cruise-as-straight-boy (so what is going on in top gun, anyway?). whatever. i'm frankly less interested in all this hyperbolic posturing abt values and moral positions in relation to the evils of "hollywood" than abt what the movie ends up doing. and that's pretty interesting. it does an r-rated version of deviance, for sure. but the possibilities for various deviances (pedophilia, for one) are pretty close to the surface. the erotics between pitt and cruise are pretty much confined to violence and blood sucking (the violence as homoerotic displacement is widely available in most boy-movies, from platoon to pulp fiction, the blood sucking is a little more direct, considering the heavy breathing and eventual post- coital looks on cruise/pitts' faces). unfortunately, pitt is resolutely uninteresting in this movie, in part because cruise has all the joke-lines, and in part because cruise plays lestat with as much camp as he can muster. of course, louis is a duller, more angst-ridden character (i believe lestat calls him a killjoy, and he is). and banderas can't even get a rise out of pitt. the more interesting possibilities emerge and are repressed in claudia, played here by kirsten dunst. claudia sems to have more of an inkling of the sex at stake in vampirism than louis does. how her not-so-subtle innuendo got by the censors is a question worth asking, but unanswerable too (except that little blond girls seem less threatening, even when they have sexuality/sex, than "virile" men of all races....see here doug mchenry's battle with the MPAA over alan payne's naked butt in *jason's lyric* or the flap over *the color of night*'s images of bruce willis' penis, excised of course). cfuchs