Are we ready to feel sorry for Tom Cruise yet?

Perhaps the most maladroit celebrity since ... well, if not ever, then at least since Michael Jackson, Cruise seems incapable of doing or saying anything in front of cameras and tape-recorders that doesn't come off strange and/or weird.

Take the blessed event of the birth of his daughter Suri by girlfriend Katie Holmes. Never mind the rumours about Scientology-dictated "silent birth." Here was the the birth of an innocent, and a name that, we were told, means "red rose" in Farsi and "princess" in Hebrew. Mazeltov, you two.

Except that actual Hebrew speakers reported that it in Hebrew, "Suri" actually means ... nothing. In Farsi, it just means "red" (as in Red Forman, Eric's dad on That '70s Show). In Japanese, it apparently means "pickpocket" and in the South Indian language of Todas, it means "pointy nose." In any case, Suri is said to be an actual name in India -- a boy's name.

D'oh! I'd expect that kind of screwup from Britney or Madonna, but not from an Operating Thetan Seven.

And let's address the Scientology thing first. Whatever one may or may not think of L. Ron Hubbard's "religion," it is possible for a devotee to talk about it without sounding like an overbearing nutcase. I've heard John Travolta -- an eccentric in so many other ways -- address it with ease and good humour.

No, there's something about Cruise's own tightly strung personality that is at issue. You just know that if he were a Born Again instead of a Scientologist, he'd still be publicly hectoring Brooke Shields, telling her that Christ would have cured her post-partum depression and kept Suddenly Susan on the air if she weren't such a sinner.

Of course, it could all be the media's fault, as it is with every other issue that plagues mankind. After all, a recent Parade magazine online poll found that 84% of respondents blamed the press for Cruise's flaky image.

Ah, but wait. Parade soon came out with a rebuttal to its own poll. "We at Parade found this a bit fishy, so we did some investigating," the mag's editors announced. "We found out more than 14,000 (of the 18,000-plus votes) that came in were cast from only 10 computers! One computer was responsible for nearly 8,400 votes alone, all blaming the media for Tom's troubles.' " (The real bad news, for both Parade and Tom, is that only 4,000 people in the entire 'Net were legitimately inspired to opine on Tom Cruise's image. You could start a blog tomorrow and there'd be more people interested in what you had for breakfast).

So even good news ends up bad for Tom. Damn you, media!

You just knew all this bad publicity would eventually take its toll. Hence the reports from advance screenings of Mission: Impossible III (which opens this week), that audiences have been applauding a scene where Philip Seymour Hoffman beats the living snot out of Cruise. Market polls suggest the number of people who feel they must see this latest M:I is down more than a quarter from the previous instalment. And the number who say they definitely won't see it has more than quadrupled (from 2% to 9%, says the National Research Group).

Who are these people who make up the disaffected Cruise demographic? Nicole Kidman fans? Penelope Cruz fans? Mimi Rogers fans? South Park fans? Psychiatrists? Moms?

Meanwhile, an already disaffected audience is laughing at a spoof of Cruise's infamous "jumping-the-couch" Oprah interview that closes out Scary Movie 4 (not a very funny movie, but that bit is hysterical). It's a grinning, insane portrayal that seems to channel Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

Industry watchers pinpoint Cruise's public meltdown to his firing of the famed "suppress agent" Pat Kingsley as his publicist. Kingsley was infamous for micromanaging access to her client and threatening the very career of anybody who wrote anything negative about him.

It's not as if Cruise's public image was 100% weird-free during the Kingsley years. There was that spate of superhero rescues he ostensibly performed about the time the first Mission: Impossible was released (saving a boy from a crush of paparazzi, saving a woman from a car wreck, saving a French family whose yacht exploded off the Isle of Capri). At least one of which, the yacht rescue, turned out to be false (the family was actually rescued by the Italian coast guard). But Kingsley quickly put a stop to any snark from the media.

Since Cruise fired Kingsley, he hired his sister as his publicist, and has since fired her.

What we get now is pure Tom Cruise, unadorned, psychotically arrogant -- and absolutely snakebit.