henke on 27/9/2008 at 21:54
Ye-heah! Best movie of this year so far*. Don't watch the crappy trailers just go see it ok! It is consistent and funny although not always consistently funny. Lots of great performances as well. Tom Cruise is in it but you'd never know. Ok, maybe you would. Robert Downey Jr. is great. Jack Black has one scene that delivered the loudest ROLFMAO's in the theatre and several scenes which are not quite so good. Coogan gets one great monologue in before it's bye bye. Nick Nolte is great as the old war veteran.
"What model sidearm is that?"
"I don't know the name of it... I just know the sound it makes... when it kills a man."
Uh... yeah! Go see it! :D
* although the only other 2008 movies I've seen are TDK, Wall-E, Wanted, Death Race & Indy4.
BEAR on 27/9/2008 at 22:34
I meant to post a thread about this but I was too lazy.
Yeah, that was fucking great. I don't think I'm entirely sure what happened, but it was great.
Also just saw Burn after reading - also great. Insane but great.
Last two movies I've seen were good! The world is ok again!
Scots Taffer on 28/9/2008 at 01:39
I really wanted to love this movie, but Tropic Thunder was the movie equivalent of premature ejaculation. The film opened with an onslaught of hilarity with the fake trailers making so many zingers in such short succession that I was gasping for air. That was quickly followed by the most effective parody of war movies I've ever seen. Again, while I'm trying to breathe the camera pans back to the "movie within a movie" and almost immediately the film starts to bulge at the seams. It's almost immediately unfunny in the way that most Stiller-comedy vehicles are, painful sequences with little or no point (hello panda bear).
For a 90 odd minute movie it felt pretty long and flabby, the narrative creaking the entire time. The satire surrounding Hollywood producers is never as funny as Stiller thinks it is (and Mr Mystery Guest that remained a mystery for five seconds of release, Tom Cruise, was only funny dancing to hip hop for about twenty seconds, not over a minute and then again during the credits), however the satire around the Oscars and Downey Jr's method acting were great but obviously stand out as the only really funny parts in a sea of lost opportunities. The going full retard speech is probably one of the funnier dialogues in recent memory.
Jack Black was a complete waste of a character. He exists purely for 2 jokes that I could tell: the Fatties trailer and someone being in an enough of a train wreck state to utter the "I'll swallow the gravy" line. But guess what? Withdrawal symptoms aren't funny, which is kind of a problem for a comedy. I also thought the Apocalypse Now parody was a place the movie didn't need to go. It further served its lack of humour and meant that basically the best bits were in the trailer, except for the fake trailers and the full retard speech.
PigLick on 28/9/2008 at 01:59
So it was a hilarious half hour skit turned into an hour and a half drudge? Kinda like every Stiller movie there is. (with exception of Mystery Men, which I have a soft spot for)
Scots Taffer on 28/9/2008 at 02:14
Yeah, basically.
Fafhrd on 28/9/2008 at 02:38
There's a lot of criticism that the humour might be too 'inside' for general audiences, as well. And there's at least one theory that there's another meta-level that the Oscar ceremony hints at, that the movie we see from being dropped into the jungle until the escape is the movie that Tugg Speedman gets Best Actor for, which is actually a re-enactment of the disastrous fuck up that the guerilla filmmaking turned into, and not the fuck up itself.
I really liked it, and it had more laugh out loud moments for me than Pineapple Express (I started laughing uncontrollably immediately after the land mine gag, and the rest of the audience didn't start laughing until Jack Black's 'YEAH!') and Tom Cruise's tremendously foul studio exec worked for me up until the end credits, where they apparently didn't realize that the only reason the hiphop dancing worked at all the first time was Bill Hader bouncing up and down and rapping in the background.
henke on 28/9/2008 at 07:04
Quote Posted by Scots Taffer
The going full retard speech is probably one of the funnier dialogues in recent memory.
I liked this movie for the opposite reasons you did.
Scots Taffer on 28/9/2008 at 09:02
Oh, so you liked the humourless plodding exposition through the jungle towards the "climactic finisher" and hated all the funny stuff? ;)
And yeah, I'd read that someplace too Fafhrd, and also thought that it tried a little too hard for "insider" humour - the joke with the Key Grip, for example. I got it, but it's not exactly mainstream, not that that's a criticism in its own right.
Anyway, I did actually laugh a lot when I saw it at the cinema (even at the random and crappier parts) but the day after I pretty much concluded that beyond the opening salvo and maybe four or five segments I wouldn't want to watch it again. I also think the trailer killed the punchline on some of the gags but that often happens with comedies.
jay pettitt on 28/9/2008 at 20:15
Probably more fun to make than watch. There must be a blooper reel somewhere.
Fafhrd on 29/9/2008 at 04:57
"Rain of Madness" on iTunes.
