Word: downey
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Others agreed that mock debates are often designed to be exactly like the real thing, with stand-ins even playing moderators. "We debated right at 9 o'clock. Same temperature setting, same distance, same format," says former New York Rep. Tom Downey, who spent four days playing Jack Kemp before Al Gore's Vice Presidential debate in 1996. "I tried to be as good at Jack Kemp as Jack Kemp would...
...second tier of summer's heroes included some surprises, too. Iron Man, a new franchise built around a lesser-known Marvel Comics character and a lead actor, Robert Downey Jr., whose indie-heavy resume didn't suggest he'd lure the masses, managed to take in $317.5 million. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the film most prognosticators expected to whip into first place, came in third with a respectable though not earth-shattering $315 million. Another summer sure thing - Will Smith in the superhero movie Hancock - made $226 million, a hit by most actors' standards...
...family, yet the actor under all that latex could well be Jack Black. Finally, a preview for the art-house drama Satan's Alley, about medieval monks coping with their big gay love for each other, is supposed to star superserioso actor Kirk Lazarus ... but no, it's Robert Downey...
...shoot a war film called Tropic Thunder, based on a book by a fabled Vietnam vet (Nick Nolte). Each star is in a career rut: Tugg Speedman (Stiller) needs the sweet nectar of acclaim, Jeff Portnoy (Black) wants to shift from farce to drama, and Method man Lazarus (Downey) so hopes to hear critics' cheers for his role as an African-American sergeant that he has undergone a surgical procedure to darken his skin. With the film a month behind schedule after five days of shooting, the director (Steve Coogan) decides to go for that verismo vibe: they'll finish...
Problem is, the Tropic Thunder stars seem rich at first, but they don't grow; they grow repetitious. Lazarus is a mix of Russell Crowe, Daniel Day-Lewis and Robert De Niro in his body-punishing Raging Bull days, and Downey brings a nice pomposity to his blackface posturing and righteous-pimp drawl. (The joke, by the way, is clearly not on African Americans; it's on the actor's belief that he can play anyone.) But Lazarus and the others out there in the jungle don't evolve or devolve; they are figures from an SNL skit...