Tropic Thunder (2008)

After feeling like a jackass for braying a good deal through Step Brothers, I was made to feel even more defensive by my brother when we stepped foot out of the theater and he commented on how obnoxious it all was, how it had mistaken loud for funny. I involuntarily accused him of housing a stick in his posterior, the knee-jerk response to such mirthless reactions. I fear I could receive the very same accusation concerning my reaction to Ben Stiller’s bombastic assault on already thoroughly lampooned Hollywood shortfalls in his fourth undertaking as director, Tropic Thunder.

It didn’t help that I happened to seat myself directly in front of and directly to the right of a pair of howling fellow theatergoers who saw that the film was sharply in need of a running commentary for which only they could provide. And they did so, with capacious regard for the other members of the audience, bestowing such rarefied insights as “What a dumbfuck!” and “That shit’s crazy!” as well as dutifully repeating particular lines from the film that may have been inaudible due to their prior ejaculations, crucial though they might have been. Perhaps a less busy screening might improve my opinion of Tropic Thunder, but that would require a desire to see it a second time, and be assaulted a second time. Even without the refined contributions of the gentlemen behind me, I found the obnoxiousness of Tropic Thunder to fill the glass of my patience to the brim, and then continue on pouring with another hour to go, overflowing the glass, sopping the tablecloth and drenching the floor, which was then slipped on by the film. Tropic Thunder slips on itself, big time. Tom Cruise appears as a furry, bald, gold-chain-wearing creep of a movie producer, and he is hilarious. But then the movie keeps pointing at him and saying, “Funny? Eh? Huh? Huh? Funny!? Am I right?!” Cruise’s character, Les Grossman, a vile man who threatens a woman on the phone with “I will rip your tits off” and who hurls other inventive scatological threats at various underlings, is shown advising Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller)’s agent (Matthew McConaughey? Yeah, it’s him) to embrace the future, and proceeds to lift the gold dollar sign hanging on a chain around his neck, and dangling it, gyrates like a back-up dancer in a rap video. Ben Stiller, apparently being unaware of the advice, “Leave the audience wanting more” has Grossman chain-dangle and dance again at the end of the film, over the credits for Christ’s sake, and shows it and shows it, until not only is it not funny, it’s flat-out embarrassing. But by then, I was too exhausted to be that irritated by it. Exhausting would be the most concise way to describe the feeling of seeing Tropic Thunder.

The film wants to satirize loud, insanely out of control war movies, but I have about as much faith in Stiller as a director as I do Michael Jordan playing baseball. Now using an analogy like that is dated, yes? Jordan played minor league baseball, badly, back in 1994. That’s a lame analogy on my part, but is it as lame as a comedy released in 2008 making fun of Willem Dafoe’s protracted and grandiose death scene from 1986’s Platoon? Yeah, Ben Stiller does that, and it’s probably been something he’s been planning since he was 21. Yes, that scene deserved to be poked fun at, but doing it 22 years later just makes me wonder how fresh and “daring” such a comedy is that would contain such an expired jab. The hype and the word of mouth purported that Tropic Thunder would excoriate and take-no-prisoners in its quest to hand the movie industry its ass. What it does is give the movie industry a noogie.

The movie begins with 4 faux advertisements: the first a spoof of raunchy, crass rap videos, which has been done already on The Onion, on SNL, on “The Boondocks” and various other [adult swim] cartoons, on Mad TV…; the second a trailer of a dumb action movie with 5 sequels; the third a trailer spoofing The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps (2000); the fourth spoofing self-important art-house type period pieces. Only the last one is really inspired. It features Robert Downey, Jr. and Tobey Maguire as two repressed monks casting suggestive looks at one another under a chorus of choir-techno. The title: “Satan’s Alley.” As for satirizing actors that play mentally handicapped roles in order to win Academy Awards, I direct you to the first episode of Extras: Season 1: been there, done that. If you find yourself utterly disengaged from the movie while watching it, just try thinking of where the hand-me-down jokes that are being presented as if they are cutting, razor-sharp attacks on the vanity and wastefulness of the movie industry originated from.

The rest of the movie hits easy targets and is about as funny and clever as a regularly scheduled episode of Saturday Night Live, only with a bigger budget, and more dirty talk. Most of these “inside jokes” had no teeth by the time they showed up on Entourage. I laughed here and there, and there were mitigating factors, but how this got a 72 on Metacritic leads me to believe that in the low standards of August, shooting fish in a barrel is welcomed more than just leaving them alone, even if they’ve already been shot dead.


Grade: C

Natural Born Killers (1994)

If there is one element of the film that could be called genius, then it would have to be Oliver Stone’s ability to make it appear to be so much more lurid, so much more audaciously XXX-hardcore than it really is. The film is actually quite funny and the violence is not unusually explicit. But back in 1994, when I was considerably younger, I distinctly remember browsing in Blockbuster with my Dad; I was always told to remain in the family films and kids’ section due to the horrible possibility of seeing a groped Shannon Tweed in the throes of ecstasy or the freakishly scarred face of Freddie Krueger scowling next to a close-up of shining razor blades. As I often did, I found myself losing my way in the video store and accidentally wandering into the drama section. It was just a black-and-white image of a man with a shaved head wearing those cool retro hippie/Lennon sunglasses. What is it about that image combined with the title that screamed “Violation! Obscenity!” I don’t know what it was exactly, but the film seemed oozing with unspeakable offenses against wholesomeness and decency. Of course, I was a kid, but even looking at stills from the film today, it strikes me at how much sleazier and transgressive it seems compared to how it really is when you watch it and realize it’s just a bunch of silliness.

Flash forward a decade or so, and I’d now seen 3 or 4 of Mr. Stone’s films. I was not predisposed to like Natural Born Killers because he was a director I’d never been much fond of, and my suspicions were verified when I watched it, and found it loud, shrill, and messy. I hated it. That was a few years ago. I watched it again recently, and came away much more tolerant. Assuming one’s hatred for Stone’s film does not spring from fear that its irony will be misinterpreted by criminally-inclined youths, a, admittedly, valid source of worry, I believe hatred for Stone’s movie is too serious an emotion to harbor for a movie that never really takes itself seriously in the first place.

A year before NBK, Juliette Lewis played the girlfriend of Brad Pitt's cross-country mass murderer in Kalifornia. In that film she was only along for the ride, essentially a sweet innocent duped into being the traveling companion of a hillbilly psycho. Mallory Knox is also the girlfriend (and later, wife) of a cross-country mass murderer, Mickey Knox (Woody Harrelson, as game as they come), but this time, she gleefully participates in the string of murders, with relish. Stone, himself, also seems to relish the narrative anarchy as an opportunity to indulge in aesthetic anarchy. He switches between color and monochrome, seemingly indiscriminately; frightening, sometimes out of place images are projected obnoxiously onto the back wall of a motel room where Mickey and Mallory stay; the film changes tones so often and sometimes so discordantly that it appears to be suffering from schizophrenia; news reels, animation, movie clips, interviews, extreme angles, Coca-Cola commercials (y’remember – the ones with the polar bears) are all incorporated at varying intervals. But it is not as arbitrarily berserk as it seems. Upon more careful viewing (some would argue NBK merits none), one might see that the film is not completely running away with itself - there is some semblance of control over the proceedings, though it is arguable.

The film is divided into two acts: 1. On the Road, and 2. Superbowl Sunday. Even back when I despised this film, I still begrudgingly admired the second act: several tension-building moments confined to the Batongaville Maximum Security Penitentiary that feature placid inmates and a TV interview with the notorious mass murderer, a fiendish Woody Harrelson.

Everything is unfolding with relative calm, until things erupt, with a vengeance, into a prison riot of unparalleled madness.


Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Downey, Jr. both chomp down hard on the scenery, Robert Downey Jr. satirizing morbidly overzealous News Reporters as Wayne Gale (a spoof of Geraldo), and Tommy Lee Jones satirizing I don’t know what (evil prison wardens with pencil mustaches?). Jones gesticulates and spasms while Downey’s face constricts purple and his eyes bulge out of his skull, and I'm picturing Oliver Stone’s madly grinning face hanging over this heaping tray of ripe ham he has offered forth.

There is a moment where Downey and Jones get into a dispute: Downey lunges into Jones’s face commanding him to let him continue his televised prison interview with Mickey, and Jones screams right back, their faces almost touching, spittle flying, forehead veins bursting, as the two shout each other down. It was all very amusing to me. Not subtle, but Stone wasn’t aiming for subtle. In fact, he seems to have painted a target big enough to cover the broad side of a barn and then stood back to blast it with a shotgun. He’s angry at the media, television, consumer culture, American culture in general, but instead of neatly arranging a coherent outline and sifting through all the disparate items, he just throws all of it at the wall, hoping 75% of it will stick.

NBK is sort of like shotgun art on a piece of plywood: broad, scattershot, unfocused; but a fair portion of the canvas has some fantastic multi-colored splatters.


There’s a neon green snowflake shape (Drug Zone) that streaks down into a vomited configuration of hot pink, a tantalizing orange blot speckled with black drips (the I ♥ Mallory show) from a burst of paint that partially slammed into the corner. The oppressive green lighting in the Drug Zone sequence, one of my favorite in the film, carries a psychedelic nastiness that’s like a bad acid trip, the perfect feeling for a scene where two killers hopped up on murder and mayhem are finally forced to suffer the consequences of their addiction.

As satire, it could never be considered particularly incisive as the target has been punctured here and there, but certainly not with any real accuracy or precision. Basically, as satire, the film is a failure, but as a phantasmagoric cry of bewilderment and outrage, it has a forcefulness that is hard to match and a garish sense of humor that I found alternatively pleasurable and crass.

I’d be tempted to compare it to Bonnie & Clyde: Mickey and Mallory Knox are a Clinton-era Bonnie and Clyde on PCP.

But Bonnie & Clyde told a straightforward tragedy elegantly and with wit, whereas NBK is always in character, a grotesque stream-of-consciousness huffing and puffing (ironically) around a color wheel.


Grade: B-