I'm gonna call it now - he will get some kind of awards recognition for his role - I'm guessing Golden Globes. Call me crazy, but I think its gonna happen. He was just so hilarious!

It was totally worth the $9.45 just to see him in a fat suit, bald, and dancing to hip hop music. He was my favorite part about this movie (and the movie was great), but his standing just totally went up in my book.

So, what do you think about Cruise in Tropic Thunder? Any thoughts?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: bocaboy7,

Be extremely careful, my dear darling. I'm nursing my wounds at the moment. :-) Blood doesn't just wash out with Tide anymore.

quote:

Originally posted by apartment complex:
Be extremely careful, my dear darling. I'm nursing my wounds at the moment. :-) Blood doesn't just wash out with Tide anymore.

Goodness, dear! If this is how ultra-sensitive you behave over what appeared to be nothing more than a very civil and casual disagreement, then you must have been the biggest crybaby on the gradeschool playground.

I can't begin to imagine how you would handle an actual taunting. Running to mother, perhaps?

Oh, buy a sense of humor! Or are you over your limit.

Dear, anyone who didn't feel threatened and defensive by other people's opinions wouldn't have carried on the way you did and then hide behind the tired "you have no sense of humor" defense to CYA.

The perfectly lovely pacinofan asked what you were majoring in at UCLA, and you went completely batty on him. I can not fathom why you would respond that way. I believe an apology is very much in order.

Apartment Complex. Hmmm, I don't know about the 'apartment' part, but at least you got the second half of your name correct.

Now excuse me, class, but I still have over two weeks of vacation left. I must be well rested in order to inflict corporal punishment upon you all! Ta-ta, dears!

quote:

Originally posted by bocaboy7:
I'm gonna call it now - he will get some kind of awards recognition for his role - I'm guessing Golden Globes. Call me crazy, but I think its gonna happen. He was just so hilarious!

It was totally worth the $9.45 just to see him in a fat suit, bald, and dancing to hip hop music. He was my favorite part about this movie (and the movie was great), but his standing just totally went up in my book.

So, what do you think about Cruise in Tropic Thunder? Any thoughts?

Maybe, but I think his part might be too small compared to Downey Jr.'s who I think will get award attention if anyone out of the cast that gets any. Both were equally hilarious to me though, but I've just seen more reviews single out Downey Jr.

I just hope that this is the beginning of a comeback for Cruise and no more crazy antics overshadowing his film work because I do like him as an actor for the most part. He can be pretty bad sometimes, but there are times he can knock it out of the park like in Tropic Thunder. Also, I like how he's back to poking fun at himself like when he did a cameo on the MTV Movie Awards that Stiller co-hosted or his Austin Powers cameo, since I don't think Eddie Murphy or Russell Crowe, who I think the Jack Black character and Robert Downey Jr. characters were mocking in a way would have the sense of humor to do a bit part in a movie that was mocking them in a way like Stiller's Tugg Speedman does with Cruise. Not that Tugg Speedman, Jeff Portnoy, and Kirk Lazarus just represent Cruise, Murphy, and Crowe of course, but since Speedman's cooling career in a slowly dying franchise that looks very similar to Mission Impossible in the trailer for it and his failed attempt at Oscar cred as fitting Tom Cruise's career post couch gate pretty well, I thought that was an even better bonus for Cruise to do this film with some knowledge that he was being mocked in some way.

Tom Cruise is like Britney Spears when it comes to career.

Both needs reinvention ASAP.

I dont think this will be the comeback for Cruise.

Cruise was funny in Tropic Thunder, no question, but this is nowhere near a comeback for him. Had he played the Robert Downey, Jr. role in the film, then we might have something to talk about.

I'd love for him to get a nomination for this, but I'm not sure this movie can pull two nominations in one category, and it will be a darn travesty if Downey isn't nominated for this.

I thought he was absolutely hilarious. His performance and Robert Downey, Jr.'s performance made the entire film for me. I am still quoting his scenes with my friends. I don't think he will get any awards recognition (if the film gets any awards, it will be for Robert Downey, Jr. and if he gets any awards its going to be at the Golden Globes). But I think if he can do more roles like this and get back to his roots, he can totally make a comeback.

"Wow, you're an American hero and we thank you for your service for this country. Now shut the *** up and let me do my ****** job"

quote:

Originally posted by moviefan61794:


"Wow, you're an American hero and we thank you for your service for this country. Now shut the *** up and let me do my ****** job"

Dear, it's not *** and ******. It's **** and *******.

Learn to spell!

I haven't found calling someone a "retard" funny since I was five years old, so it does not sound like my kind of Kool-Aid (and just what are they putting in it, anyway?). But tell me, is it funnier than "Zoolander"? Certainly not the worst movie ever made, as has been claimed, maybe only the lamest. Does "Tropic Thunder" approach that rarified level of "razor-sharp" satire?

From The New York Times

August 17, 2008

The Refined Art of Tastelessness

By DAVE ITZKOFF

Well before it arrived in theaters last week, Ben Stiller’s “Tropic Thunder,” a war-movie parody that puts the whole industry in its satirical gun sights, was a provocative project: curious filmgoers were bewildered by its casting of Robert Downey Jr. in blackface, as a white actor who undergoes “repigmentation” to play a black man, and advocacy groups protested its nonchalant use of the epithet “retard.” When the film opened, even favorable reviews criticized its depictions of severed body parts and excretory functions as vulgar, puerile and needlessly gross.

For Hollywood, this accumulation of offenses could be called progress.

Taken on its own, “Tropic Thunder” can seem a pinnacle of tastelessness: an attempt to titillate its audience (of teenage boys, and men who still think like them) by violating every boundary imaginable. Not that it’s easy to measure one movie’s shock-and-ick factor against another’s, but if this film is a peak of sorts, it’s fair to ask: how did cinema get here?

Practice, it turns out. “Tropic Thunder” was built on a mountain of increasingly irreverent R-rated cinema that takes in 30 years’ worth of broken taboos and box-office records.

For all the social conventions transgressed in the 1960s and 70s — in the standup routines of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin and Richard Pryor, for example — the granddaddies of the gross-out genre didn’t arrive in movie theaters until the late 70s. In 1977, the year of “Star Wars” and “Annie Hall,” “The Kentucky Fried Movie” was a cult hit with its obscene send-ups of news broadcasts, nonexistent exploitation movies (“Catholic High School Girls in Trouble”) and advertisements for fake charities like the United Appeal for the Dead.

“In the department of offensive and tasteless, there was nothing like it,” said the filmmaker David Zucker, who wrote “Kentucky Fried Movie” with Jerry Zucker, his brother, and Jim Abrahams. “We’re in the business of getting people out of their houses, and you have to do something that people can’t see on TV.” Made for about $700,000 and directed by John Landis, the movie earned nearly $20 million worldwide in its original release.

The next year, the college-frat comedy “Animal House” fully synthesized the sophomoric sensibility of National Lampoon magazine with the star power of TV’s “Saturday Night Live.” Though the movie’s toga parties (and John Belushi’s vivid impression of a zit) might seem tame by today’s standards, the film, also directed by Mr. Landis, was a runaway hit, opening at No. 1 in July 1978 and taking in more than $140 million in its original release.

“It made the kind of bitter, borderline humor that 14-year-old boys enjoy in private acceptable to display to a large audience,” said Marty Kaplan, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and a former film executive at Disney.

“Animal House” inspired a slew of naughtier, sex-obsessed imitators, both hits (“Porky’s” in 1982; “Revenge of the Nerds” in 1984) and misses (anyone remember the 1984 cheerleader-camp comedy “Gimme an F”?). Yet the 1980s and early ’90s were considered a fallow period for the R-rated raunch-fest: movie studios lost interest as they focused on big-budget action films.

“Hollywood is above all a commercial enterprise,” Mr. Kaplan said. “If it doesn’t think that there’s a market for being lewd and risqué and outrageous, they certainly won’t do it for the sake of art.”

True for the most part, but a single movie released in 1998 chipped away at that institutional reluctance. “There’s Something About Mary,” directed by the brothers Peter and Bobby Farrelly, combined shocking visual gags (semen used as hair gel; the protagonist’s genitals caught in the zipper of his pants) with the otherwise charming story of a hapless Romeo (played by Mr. Stiller) seeking his lost high school sweetheart.

“They did the grossest stuff,” Mr. Zucker said, “yet the movie was almost sophisticated. It seems to have had a purpose higher than just doing gross-out jokes.” On a budget of $23 million, “Mary” took in more than $176 million at the box office.

The film — and profane progeny, from 1999’s “American Pie” to last year’s “Superbad” — have proved an important counterbalance to the mega-budget tent-pole movies dominating studio schedules. Getting a $150 million movie to succeed “is akin to having 12 Bulgarian jugglers land on 12 Bulgarian jugglers,” said Peter Guber, the chief executive of Mandalay Entertainment Group and the former head of Columbia and Sony Pictures. “The execution has to be perfect.” Raunchy comedies, on the other hand, cost far less to produce. A hit like this year’s pot comedy “Pineapple Express,” Mr. Guber said, “cost $27 million. That was the catering budget for ‘Batman.’ ”

Though their R ratings would seem to brand these films adult entertainment, it is a poorly kept secret that the promise of skin and salacious jokes is a beacon to young filmgoers. “History shows that no one is more inventive about getting into a movie than a male under 18,” Mr. Kaplan said.

Most of all, each new movie offers the promise that it will exceed the outrageousness of its predecessors — a challenge filmmakers are happy to rise (or sink) to. Mr. Guber pointed to a forthcoming comedy written and directed by Kevin Smith, called “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” which recently had its NC-17 rating reduced to an R. Judging from the title, Mr. Guber said: “If that’s not NC-17, it’ll be pretty close to it. They’re certainly not making ‘Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.’ ”

From The Village Voice

Tropic Thunder: A Consummate Movie-Biz Parody

Stiller's satire is way past its expiration date

By Robert Wilonsky

published: August 12, 2008

Early buzz out of Hollywood pegged Tropic Thunder, directed and co-written by star Ben Stiller, as the end-all and be-all of movie-biz parodies—a savage beast with a rough touch featuring Tom Cruise in a career-resurrecting role as bald-headed, big-gutted, foul-mouthed studio boss Les Grossman, who does the ****-you dance like nobody's risky business. Bold and brash, with the potential for boffo B.O., noted Hollywood trade and all-access websites that skewer execs with a Q-Tip on a bad day; "savvy" and "authentic" were but two of the kind words whispered by The Hollywood Reporter, among the myriad insiders who like this Thunder's roar. Apparently they've never seen an episode of Entourage, which Tropic Thunder makes look like a Robert Drew documentary.

Movies about movies date back to the birth of the movie business, and they're all more or less the same: Actors are petulant, entitled, neurotic narcissists (unless they're sweet, sincere baby-faced newbies on their way to becoming petulant, entitled, neurotic narcissists); directors are visionaries easily corrupted or imbeciles easily distracted; and studio bosses are loutish buffoons who've always looked like, sounded like, and acted like Harvey Weinstein. Hollywood's easy pickings, and making fun of it is what insiders do when they've emptied their arsenal. Tropic Thunder—which drops a bunch of actors into the wilds of Southeast Asia and shouts "Action!"—doesn't stray far from convention, save for a little added gore, firepower, and star power worthy of its nearly $100 million budget.

Stiller, who hasn't directed a feature since striking a pose as Zoolander in 2001, is back in the send-up business, nibbling gently at the soft, manicured hands that feed him and co-stars Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black (wasted here), Matthew McConaughey (doing Matthew McConaughey), and, of course, Cruise. It even opens with some short-form satire in the guise of phony movie trailers for an action franchise's latest installment (Scorcher VI: Global Meltdown, starring Stiller's Tugg Speedman), a gross-out comedy (The Fatties: Fart 2, with Black's Jeff Portnoy), and overwrought art-house erotica (Satan's Alley, featuring Downey's Kirk Lazarus and Tobey Maguire as himself). All of it resides in the land of the obvious, easy chuckle.

When it isn't tossing softballs at the studios, Tropic Thunder is the very thing it parodies: a wall of noise engulfed in flame. The actors are supposed to be making the archetypal Vietnam War movie based on the memoirs of an aging hero (played by Nick Nolte, almost as grizzled as his infamous mug shot). It's Apocalypse Now meets Platoon times The Dirty Dozen. But days into shooting, rookie director Damien ****burn (Steve Coogan) is already weeks behind, so he drops his cast, which also includes Jay Baruchel as a can-do kid and Brandon T. Jackson as a pitchman for an energy drink called Booty Juice, into the jungle in order to achieve vérité. Things go awry when Tugg's taken prisoner by armed thugs farming poppy, and life suddenly imitates art, blah, blah, blah.

Stiller, having long moved on from sitcom social commentary (Reality Bites) and grim irritainment (The Cable Guy), is back doing the affable, well-heeled snark of his short-lived 1992 Fox sketch series, and relying on the in-joke that's been out in the open since Charlie Chaplin was making short films about movie sets in 1916. This year's model, a little too eerily sculpted, is really just another action movie pretending it's not just another action movie. Hence the "parody" angle, which more or less boils down to an agent (McConaughey) with a moral dilemma (a private plane or his client's life?), Downey's Kirk Lazarus going surgical-procedure blackface as the final frontier in Method acting, and the studio boss who pays surrogates to punch directors when he can't actually be on set to lift his own meaty fists.

The film isn't without its occasional pleasures, but they're fleeting and forgettable and buried in debris and drowned out by the inevitable big bang. Kirk, who refuses to drop character till he does the DVD commentary, delivers a perfectly clever speech about how Tugg went "too retarded" in his sole stab at respectability, a movie called Simple Jack in which he stammered through crooked buck teeth. "Everybody knows you never go full retard," Kirk says, pointing to Rain Man and Forrest Gump as proof that you gotta rein it in. "Infantile, yes. Retarded, no." But even that joke about actors playing developmentally challenged in order to win Oscars made its first appearance in the Dead Sea Scrolls; thing's musty, man.

And that's the thing about satire: It doesn't play past its expiration date. And everything about Tropic Thunder already feels antiquated. It's just another so-so Ben Stiller movie, this time with Robert Downey Jr. in blackface, which you'd think would be enough, but it's not.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: A. DeWitt,

Although perhaps mean-spirited, the Village Voice review is accurate IMHO. Re: Tom Cruise getting any awards, no, because you shouldn't get awards for simply not embarrassing yourself. He was wise and courageous to take the part and his performance is very good, but I think the character was there on the page, and all he did was do his job. Sometimes that is enough for an award, but MM and NN also did good work, as did the other soldiers. RDJ is the one who hit a home run. Cruise helped his career but he will have to carry a movie before he gets a comeback and/or a comeback award. I know this is a long post, but to wrap things up, I see RDJ as a possible Oscar nominee in Heatho's category.

quote:

Originally posted by A. DeWitt:
I haven't found calling someone a "retard" funny since I was five years old, so it does not sound like my kind of Kool-Aid (and just what are they putting in it, anyway?). But tell me, is it funnier than "Zoolander"? Certainly not the worst movie ever made, as has been claimed, maybe only the lamest. Does "Tropic Thunder" approach that rarified level of "razor-sharp" satire?

First, about the retard thing, I think the controversy over it is totally overblown. Personally I found Sean Penn's performance in I Am Sam offensive for going full retard in such a bad movie, imo, and still getting recognized for it while a movie like The Ringer which I thought was a million times better in portraying the mentally retarded was seen as the insensitive movie. Anyhow, I think Tropic Thunder takes the latter approach. It pokes fun at actors who go handicap but only to a certain extent never full retard like Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump or Dustin Hoffman in Rainman who were rewarded with Oscars.

As for it being funnier than Zoolander, I don't know. I loved both movies when watching them in the theater, and Zoolander is one of those movies, I can watch over and over again whenever TBS or whatever cable station happens to be rerunning it. I think I could do the same with Tropic Thunder except much of the movie would probably have to be edited much more than Zoolander I would guess because of the gore especially at the beginning and the language.

If you don't like Ben Stiller that much or his wife, then Tropic Thunder is probably the better movie of the two because there's only one brief scene with Christine Taylor, and she only has one line I believe. Also, while Stiller is one the main stars of TT, he didn't have the chance to get on my nerves because of the movie switching to either back to Robert Downey Jr. or someone else. So I thought that was good that just as soon as I felt that Stiller was starting to wear out his welcome, it would quickly switch back to something funnier. If he had done Zoolander now, it probably would have been less funny because of how old his schtick has gotten since that time, but I felt that there was just the right amount of him in TT.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Mrs. Daryl Zero,

quote:

Originally posted by Mrs. Daryl Zero:

quote:

Originally posted by A. DeWitt:
I haven't found calling someone a "retard" funny since I was five years old, so it does not sound like my kind of Kool-Aid (and just what are they putting in it, anyway?). But tell me, is it funnier than "Zoolander"? Certainly not the worst movie ever made, as has been claimed, maybe only the lamest. Does "Tropic Thunder" approach that rarified level of "razor-sharp" satire?

First, about the retard thing, I think the controversy over it is totally overblown. Personally I found Sean Penn's performance in I Am Sam offensive for going full retard in such a bad movie, imo, and still getting recognized for it while a movie like The Ringer which I thought was a million times better in portraying the mentally retarded was seen as the insensitive movie. Anyhow, I think Tropic Thunder takes the latter approach. It pokes fun at actors who go handicap but only to a certain extent never full retard like Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump or Dustin Hoffman in Rainman who were rewarded with Oscars.

As for it being funnier than Zoolander, I don't know. I loved both movies when watching them in the theater, and Zoolander is one of those movies, I can watch over and over again whenever TBS or whatever cable station happens to be rerunning it. I think I could do the same with Tropic Thunder except much of the movie would probably have to be edited much more than Zoolander I would guess because of the gore especially at the beginning and the language.

If you don't like Ben Stiller that much or his wife, then Tropic Thunder is probably the better movie of the two because there's only one brief scene with Christine Taylor, and she only has one line I believe. Also, while Stiller is one the main stars of TT, he didn't have the chance to get on my nerves because of the movie switching to either back to Robert Downey Jr. or someone else. So I thought that was good that just as soon as I felt that Stiller was starting to wear out his welcome, it would quickly switch back to something funnier. If he had done Zoolander now, it probably would have been less funny because of how old his schtick has gotten since that time, but I felt that there was just the right amount of him in TT.

Thank you for answering my query, and how kind of you to overlook my calling Zoolander perhaps the lamest movie ever made.