Word: stiller
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...movies and a pinprick in the helium balloon of Hollywood egos, Tropic Thunder caps a hectic summer of action films and star-driven comedies and is designed as a blend and a semiloving critique of both genres. The picture is savvy to the max, maybe to excess; but Stiller, who also directed and co-wrote the movie, surely figures that in the blogosphere age, no film can be too inside--it's where everyone is. He's been there all his life, as the son of (Jerry) Stiller and (Anne) Meara, a comedy duo of over a half-century...
...conceit this time is that three stars have come to Vietnam to 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...
...early effusion of blood (which geysers out of a hole in a soldier's helmet) and guts (a wound in Speedman's stomach spills a sausage factory's worth of entrails) cues you to the objects of Stiller's burlesque: jungle war movies from Apocalypse Now to Apocalypto, from Platoon to a raft of Rambos. A key inspiration had to be Hearts of Darkness, the documentary on the catastrophic filming of Apocalypse...
Make-Believe war is hell, stiller suggests, but Hollywood is hell on the Pacific, and the enemy is just as dangerous as the drug lords Speedman's squad runs into. The actor's agent, Rick Peck (Matthew McConaughey, who nearly ambles away with the picture), worries mainly that his client hasn't been perked with TiVo. But Peck is a baby seal next to studio boss Les Grossman (deliciously played by Tom Cruise as a bald, grotesquely hairy Moloch), whose obscene phone calls usually include the threat to put something big of his into something small of the other fellow...
...Three Amigos!). It speaks to the bluster and resilience of show people; when in mortal peril, they do improv and survive. The difference in Tropic Thunder is that the main characters are more eccentric than likable. That's just what you'd expect in a Stiller movie...