Cynical Cinema

“That’s a cool sidearm you got there?  What is it?”
“I don’t know what it’s called.  I only know the sound it makes when it takes a man’s life.” 

Tropic Thunder comes out today courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment, and it is absolutely hilarious.  Doc and Woody and I were just talking this morning about music in movies.  And how the most commonly used songs in movies are ones that we would not expect.  Like, “Walking On Sunshine”, or Pete Townshend’s “Let My Love Open the Door”.  Inevitably, our discussion led into Vietnam movies, and the songs that have become standard in Platoon, Forrest Gump, Born On The Fourth of July, Apocalypse Now, and the like.  We ended up playing “For What It’s Worth”, perhaps the greatest Vietnam song of them all.  Just hearing the opening note of that tune can send a chill down your spine when it’s well used in a movie.

Then I come home to watch Tropic Thunder on Blu-Ray with my stereo cranked way up, and in the middle of this over-the-top comedy, I hear the opening note to “For What It’s Worth”.  And once again, as the song plays, chills run up and down my spine.  This is a movie where Robert Downey Jr. is playing in blackface, Ben Stiller is playing one of the dumbest actors alive, and Jack Black is playing a big fat actor who stars in movies where he farts a lot.  And yet, I hear “For What It’s Worth”, and I have that Vietnam foreboding feeling.  I had a similar reaction to the scene where Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher” was playing.  This Vietnam-era music is stuck into the movie with a sort of wink to the movie-within-a-movie stuff, but it’s a testament to the direction of Ben Stiller that some of these war scenes really work, even in a non-comedic way.

But of course, the name of the game is comedy.  Stiller plays Tugg Speedman, a musclebound action movie star who plays in a series of films called Scorcher, Scorcher II, Scorcher III, well, you get the picture.  Jack Black plays Jeff Portnoy (nice touch with the Portnoy, by the way), a comedic actor who stars in a series of movies called Fatties, Fatties Fart II, and…so forth.  Brandon T. Jackson plays Alpa Chino, a rapper who is focused more on marketing his energy bars (Bust-A-Nut bars) and energy drinks than he is on his rapping.  And then there’s Robert Downey Jr.  He absolutely steals the entire show as 5-time Best Actor Oscar winner Kirk Lazarus, an Aussie actor who is attempting to take on a new acting challenge by undergoing a pigment-change operation so he can play a black guy.

Downey is absolutely side-splittingly funny in this incredibly offensive role.  Not content to simply be an offensive character, he is also given the most offensive lines.  His scene with Stiller in the jungle, where they discuss the pros and cons of “going full retard” in order to get an Oscar is absolutely priceless.  (Stiller’s character has just made an Oscar attempt by playing a mentally handicapped man in a movie called Simple Jack.  Downey’s character explains to him that you can never win an Oscar by playing someone who is actually handicapped.  You can only go halfway, like Forrest Gump, or autistic, like Rain Man.)  It is an absolutely hilarious scene.

The funniest thing about Downey, however, is his stubborn refusal to break character under any circumstance.  Jack Black is a heroin addict, Ben Stiller is a lonely maniac, and Brandon Jackson is a self-involved prima donna with sexuality issues.  The only normal character is played by Jay Baruchel, who is great as the centre of the storm with these lunatics doing their thing all around him.  But again, it’s Downey’s show.

The basic premise is that these five prima donna actors are dropped in the middle of the Vietnam jungle.  They are clueless enough to believe that they are still filming the movie, when in fact they have run afoul of a drug cutting operation in the forest.  This is a premise that plays itself out fairly fast, but thankfully Stiller doesn’t drag it out forever.  There are a few bizarre and unnecessary touches that I didn’t understand, like the leader of the drug gang who is an angry, violent, nine-year-old.  But as long as Downey is on the screen, we don’t care.  Even when he realizes that they are no longer shooting a movie, and that they are really in a firefight with a small army, he is incapable of dropping his character.  He continues to “talk black”, and to “disappear into his role”, which causes some very justifiable (and hilarious) friction between him and Jackson, who actually is black.

In addition to the star-studded cast of main characters, there are some fantastic actors playing secondary characters as well.  While most of these roles amount to little more than extended cameos, they are almost all hilarious.  Nick Nolte, as a grizzled, crazed Vietnam war vet who authored the book upon which the movie “Tropic Thunder” is based, is great.  Matthew McConaughey, in his first non-shirtless role in recent memory, is pretty good as Tugg Speedman’s unbalanced agent.  But it’s Tom Cruise, almost unrecognizable in his old-bald-guy makeup, who delivers the best comedy.  He is the financier behind the picture, and his bile-spewing insanity makes even the raving lunatic actors look tame.

Also showing up, albeit briefly, is Tobey Maguire, playing himself.  At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to each of the main characters through their movie trailers.  Jackson is shown in a very funny commercial for his energy drink, Booty Sweat.  Or maybe it’s the name of his song.  Ah, who cares.  It’s funny.  Then we see the Tugg Speedman trailer for Scorcher VI, which is also very funny, and Jack Black riffs on Eddie Murphy’s Nutty Professor performance when he plays every single character in the trailer for the movie Fatties…Fart II.

But the best of the trailers is for a movie called Satan’s Alley, a film that stars Kirk Lazarus (Downey) as a repressed yet defiant hoosexual priest in a period piece.  This trailer is absolutely spot-on, and that’s what makes it so hilarious.  You can almost picture this movie being made for real, with a serious actor and organ music and a gigantic period setting.  And it’s Tobey Maguire who makes it so funny.  In the trailer, he is protrayed as another priest, Downey’s love interest, but of course it’s a “movie trailer”, and he is announced by the big-voice trailer guy as himself.  I would love to watch Satan’s Alley, starring Tobey Maguire and five-time Oscar winner Kirk Lazarus.  Or Tobey Maguire and Robert Downey Jr.  Either way.

In fact, I think everyone needs to see, if not this movie, then this trailer-for-a-movie-within-the-movie.  Here it is on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7imoiUCCWY&feature=related

What’s great about Tropic Thunder, though, is that it works as both a spoof of action films and also, genuinely, as an action film.  Kind of like Hot Fuzz, only in Vietnam.  References to Platoon, Apocalypse Now, and many other Vietnam movies are plentiful, but they never seem forced or stupid.  The use of the music adds impact to the jungle scenes the way it really would in a real Vietnam movie.  And you’re never conscious of a switch midway through the movie from action to comedy and back, it is a seamless blend. 

Tropic Thunder is truly hilarious, and works on many levels.  It loses steam toward the end, with some obvious action pieces and jokes, but it’s built up so much goodwill by that point that we really don’t care.  We just want to see more Kirk Lazarus, as Robert Downey plays the funniest character played by a movie character in a movie inside another movie that I have ever seen.

Romantic comedies are one of those genres that make me cringe just thinking about them.  They often involve Hugh Grant or Meg Ryan and some crying.  There is always some major event or misunderstanding that takes place twenty-one minutes before the end of the film that shakes the foundation of the relationship we’re watching, and of course it gets resolved within that 21 minutes and everyone lives happily ever after.  And girls laugh, and then cry, and then laugh again as they watch.  And I usually curl up in a ball and try to suppress my rage.  This time, however, this was not the case. 

With Forgetting Sarah Marshall, my girlfriend did indeed laugh and cry.  But that was because she laughed until she cried.  And her sides hurt.  And mine too.  This movie is absolutely hilarious.  Judd Apatow (of Knocked Up and 40-Year-Old Virgin fame) produced this film, directed by Nick Stoller.  It stars Jason Segal as Peter, a guy who does the music for one of those CSI-type crime shows.  You know, the guy who plays the intense, moody music when David Caruso takes off his sunglasses?  He is dating Sarah Marshall, the star of that crime scene show.  Until, two minutes into the movie, she breaks up with him, leading to perhaps the funniest nude scene I have ever seen in a movie.  You see, he figures she can’t really break up with him until he puts clothes on to have a conversation.  So he just won’t put clothes on.  (Yes, it IS full-frontal male nudity, the best kind of comedic nudity!)

Then, with help from his not-terribly-helpful step-brother, Peter decides to go on vacation in order to get his mind off Sarah, and of course manages to end up at the exact same resort she does.  Sarah is there with her brand new boyfriend Elvis Snow, a huge international rock star played to perfection by the absolutely hilarious Russell Brand.  While Elvis is now Peter’s biggest rival for the affections of Sarah, and Peter should by all reasonable logic feel some resentment toward him, he ends up kind of liking him.  And so do we.  Brand plays Snow as such an un-self-conscious doofus of a rock star, that it is impossible to make him into the villain of the piece.  In fact, there really isn’t much of a villain at all, unless it’s Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) herself.

The supporting cast is amazing too, including Paul Rudd as a perma-stoned surfing instructor, John Hill as a waiter with a rather unhealthy obsession with Elvis Snow, and several gigantic men who serve as comedic relief in dozens of scenes.  The one scene here that I think perfectly exemplifies the reason this movie is so great is the scene where one of these gigantic Hawaiiam men recruits Peter to help him prepare the pig for dinner.  And Peter has to actually kill the pig.  In so many other movies, this scene would have lasted nine minutes.  And it would have squeezed every bit of comedy it possibly could out of the “he has to stab the pig and he hates it” joke.  But in this movie, the scene lasts maybe twenty seconds.  There is probably only twenty seconds of real, true hilarity to be derived from a scene such as this one, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall makes absolutely sure that those twenty seconds are the only ones we see.  It’s a remarkable demonstration of restraint in a 2008 R-rated romantic comedy.

And then there’s Mila Kunis.  Jackie from That 70s Show is a revelation in her role as the desk clerk at the Hawaiian hotel where Peter and Sarah and Elvis are staying.  And it’s pretty clear early on that she will become the catalyst for Peter to either get over his ex-girlfriend or break down completely.  The chemistry between Kunis and Segel is magnificent, and she is incredibly charming.  To the point that we, the audience, immediately root for her, no matter what her role will be in this movie.  Watching her face while Peter performs a song he wrote for a Dracula-themed puppet-show musical is just awesome.  Hilarious and charming and brilliant.  Just like this movie.