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.

Paramount Home Entertainment is coming out with a movie called Chicago 10 on August 26th. It’s a very strange take on the famous Democratic National Convention held in Chicago in 1968, and the anti-war demonstrations at that convention that led to riots, arrests, and a really bizarre trial. Chicago 10 is basically a documentary about that trial, featuring archival footage of Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Bobby Seale, and the rest of the people involved with the trial. Interviews with them at the time, footage of Hoffman and David Dellinger at speaking engagements, and of course footage of the demonstrations, the police response, and the riots that took place. What happened after the disturbance in 1968 was that eight people were put on trial for “crossing state lines for the purposes of inciting a riot”. The trial really was a farce, and film maker Brett Morgen wants to accentuate this by creating a cartoon representation of the trial itself.

Which means that between the archival footage and the documentary pieces, we get a re-enactment of the Chicago trial by cartoon characters. They look like the people they represent, they talk like the people they represent, and Morgen has recruited some big names to help voice these characters. Jeffrey Wright, Amy Adams, Hank Azaria, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schrieber and many others participated in this film. Which is impressive, and really adds punch to the courtroom scenes, which are taken directly from the transcripts of the trial itself. A trial which saw the judge order Bobby Seale, the national leader of the Black Panther Party, to be bound and gagged right in the courtroom because of his frequent outbursts. This was an absolutely crazy time in North American history, and this trial really encapsulates what was craziest about it. And this movie provides a really interesting look into that trial.

Interesting, but not as interesting as it should be. This trial and these events in Chicago in the late sixties fascinate me, and I wanted to learn everything I could. And in watching this movie, I learned an awful lot. But the style of the movie and the “artsy” nature of the animated segments don’t really help. It’s better than one of those cheesy “courtroom re-enactment” scenes from other, worse documentaries, and I frankly don’t know what I would have preferred to see in it’s place. But the style of the movie becomes overpowering, and I found myself getting distracted from the actual story by the animation. It isn’t a major fault, because this movie is still impressive and thorough, but it prevents the film from being a great one.

The first actor we see in The Spiderwick Chronicles (out June 17th from Paramount Home Entertainment) is David Stratharin. He is writing a book about creatures in our midst, beings that exist among us always, that we can’t see because they choose to remain hidden. Through his book, we catch glimpses of drawings of these creatures, but we don’t see enough of them to know what’s coming. Strathairn, you see, is Arthur Spiderwick, the man who discovered this realm existing in tandem with our own. And he recorded all the secrets of this realm in a giant book, the Spiderwick Chronicles. We learn fairly fast that this book was never meant to be read by anyone, ever, because reading it could bring about the end of the world as we know it. Of course, someone is clearly going to come by and read it anyway.

That someone is Freddie Highmore (Charlie from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), who actually appears as twins in the film. The two have very distinct personalities, and Highmore does an excellent job making sure that we always know which twin is which. Simon is a bookish, nerdy pacifist. His twin brother Jared, however, is the trouble-maker. The bad apple. The one kid the family doesn’t understand. Right away, we know Jared will be the star of the movie, because it’s always that kid who ends up being the star. The bookish intellectual is nowhere near as interesting as the angry rebel, we suppose. Jared’s anger seems to stem from several sources, like an absentee father, a sudden move to a new town and a new house. It must be summer, because the kids don’t have a new school or anything, and are allowed to roam about the giant house alone while their mom’s off at work.

Pretty soon, of course, Jared finds this book. And he opens it and reads it and unwittingly brings forces of evil down on his house and his family. His older sister is a fencer, which comes in handy when she has to slash up some goblins. His mother is never home during the film, so she is going to be in for a big surprise when she gets there. Simon rarely leaves the house, and when he discovers this world of goblins and evil-doers that exists right outside the door, he sets his brain to work devising defenses against the bad creatures. And Jared hits things, yells at his mom, hates the world and fights with his siblings, even in the middle of the most dire circumstances. Which becomes kind of annoying. Jared, through a lot of this movie, despite being the hero, is not very likeable. Highmore does a terrific job with the character, but he’s written in such a cliche’d “where’s may father? I HATE you” sort of way that it’s a little distracting.

Also irritating is the fact that the creatures have names we have already heard. We already know about goblins. We’ve heard of elves and griffins. We may well be familiar with those things. So why include things like that, and then make up three or four creatures of your own? I think the answer to that may well lie within the books. My youngest step-son tells me that the books are FAR different. I think what he means (if I understand correctly) is that the movie leaves out a lot of what is in the books in terms of detail. But then, what kids’ movie doesn’t? Eragon, Chronicles of Narnia, even How To Eat Fried Worms. They are all forced to skip large chunks of the story because of time constraints, and the challenge is keeping the story intact and understandable while trimming it to that hour-and-a-half running time.

And for the most part, the director, Mark Waters, does a good job of this. Not only does he get a high-calibre performance out of Freddie Highmore, he manages to craft a terrific alternate universe with charming and interesting characters, and he keeps the pace moving along briskly. The only time the movie slows down is when Jared has one of his distracting temper outbursts. It’s nice to see David Strathairn in a kids movie like this, his presence adds a certain amount of credibility to the whole proceeding. Also cool is the presence of Martin Short and Seth Rogen as the voices of two of the friendly creatures, and the very brief but very bizarre cameo from Nick Nolte. The Spiderwick Chronicles is one of the better movies aimed at kids around ten years old. It’s no classic, but it’s above-average. And when it comes to kids’ movies these days, that is certainly good enough.

Neverwas is a movie in the tradition of Hook and Bridge to Terabithia, where fantasy and reality intersect in some bizarre way. It stars Aaron Eckhardt, Brittany Murphy and Ian McKellan. This film was made in 2005, never hit the theatres, and finally gets it’s first release, courtesy of Alliance Films, on DVD. It’s the story of an imagined land called Neverwas. Like Narnia or Oz or Middle Earth, Neverwas exists only in a children’s book written by Nick Nolte. The star of this book is Zachary, Nolte’s son. While writing the book, Nolte is losing his mind, and gets sent to a mental institution. For the next few years, he made life very difficult for his family before dying a strange and unpleasant death. The movie picks up about thirty years later. The book is now a worldwide classic, and Nolte’s son is a grown man (Eckhardt). He is now a psychiatrist, who takes a job at the institute that once housed his father.

There are some other big names here. Notably Vera Farminga, who starred as the psychiatrist in The Departed and has become one of the most respected actresses in the business. But then, this film was made in 2005, before she was famous. And although the credits use her name, she has one line in the movie and maybe six seconds of screen time. Which indicates something about the film. Neverwas was made three years ago, but released only now. And they put a famous name in the credits, even though that person had very little to do with the movie. Maybe they are trying to compensate for something? Hide something? Like the fact that this movie is not very good? Well, it isn’t. In fact, it would be quite terrible without one key ingredient. Ian McKellan.

I like Brittany Murphy, she has a very charming and childlike innocence about her, which works well in this film. She plays a reporter who is doing a story on the phenomenon of Neverwas and the enigma that was it’s author. I also like Aaron Eckhardt, who has the sort of cocky arrogance that works in Thank You For Smoking, but not here. The two are supposed to be some kind of meant-for-each-other couple, but does that ever feel flat, and leads to a painfully contrived oh-my-god-she’s-really-a-reporter-and-I’m-furious scene. Then there’s a maudlin, staggeringly stupid scene where Eckhardt reveals that he BLAMES himself for his father’s DEATH! But thankfully, right when each of these terrible scenes gets so obnoxious that you want to give up on the movie altogether, here comes Ian McKellan again, and things pick right back up.
McKellan plays a patient at the mental hospital who believes that he is the king of the actual land of Neverwas. He is magnificently looney, a wonderfully deranged old man but…is he maybe telling the truth? Is Neverwas…actually real? I won’t reveal the details there, but the journey to that point is terrific. Without McKellan, this movie would be incredibly awful. But whenever he’s on the screen, the film has a certain electricity which is well worth watching. McKellan is one of the greatest actors working today, and although he will likely be remembered for playing Magneto more than any other character, he has done wonderful work in many fine films. And some otherwise horrible ones, like Neverwas.

It’s clear why this didn’t get a theatrical release. It’s too old for kids and too young for adults and too cheesy for cynical teenagers. And what happens to good movies that are too old for kids and too young for everyone else? They go direct to DVD. Apparently, so too do the bad ones.