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Ben Stiller‘s Tropic Thunder (Dreamamount, 8.13) , which I saw three months ago, is an escaped-from-Bedlam, bong-hit, National Lampoon-level (the ’70s magazine, not the movies) Hollywood satire of (a) itself and (b) various Vietnam War movies we’ve all savored, particularly Platoon and Apocalypse Now. Except it’s not as low as it sounds. The tone is informed by the filmmaker characters, all of whom are clever jerks of one kind of another. Nobody’s a complete idiot.

The laughs stem from a rollicking, toking-up-with-the-guys attitude that gets sillier, wilder and more surreal by the page. And it’s a people’s comedy in that uncouth types will love it but so will those with a little education and refinement as long as they’ve gotten high at some point in the past, or have it in them to get the drug-humor thing.
That sounds like a ceiling, doesn’t it? Conventional wisdom says that satire only travels so far, and drug-humor movies never get past $60 or $70 million. Well, Tropic Thunder has something else in the engine, a kind of manic propulsion element that really hellzapops.
On top of which acid-tinged humor is a tonally appropriate way to go for a movie about making a movie about the U.S. of A’s first and only psychedelic war. It’s basically about a self-absorbed asshole movie star (Stiller) who’s career is downspiralling, and who has taken a role in a Vietnam movie that’s being shot in…I forget precisely but somewhere in Southeast Asia. And of course, all hell breaks loose at the end of the first act.
Speedman’s costars are Jack Black‘s “Portnoy” and Robert Downey, Jr.’s “Kirk Lazarus,” among others. The director is played by crazy Steve Coogan. The technical advisor is a flipped-out Vietnam vet played by Nick Nolte. Matthew McConaughey (great casting!) plays Speedman’s slithering, soul-less agent, and Tom Cruise — best thing he’s done in years — plays a potty-mouthed pit-bull mogul who runs the studio that’s funding the film.

Robert Downey, Jr.

The story is about what happens when the cast goes out in to the wilds of the jungle in order to feel the fear and acquire the thousand-yard stare, and real life intrudes in the form of a Golden Triangle drug-dealing gang.
Two hours after I saw Tropic Thunder last April, breathless and still charged, I called it “the most psychedelically deranged Vietnam-War-movie comedy of all time.” That still sounds like an okay way to put it. I remember saying to myself as I sat in the Sherry Lansing theatre, “I feel like I’m on something….what would this movie be like if I was?” But every inspired comedy feels like you or the actors have dropped at least a half-tab of something. That’s what Some Like It Hot feels like, for sure. Ditto A Night at the Opera, The Big Lebowski, Superbad, etc.
I wish I did still turn on (I haven’t smoked anything since the mid ’70s) because I’d love to get wasted before re-seeing Downey’s performance as a talented but pretentious actor playing a “black guy,” complete with an Isaac Hayes street accent and a special pigmentation makeover.
Stiller, who’s directed and co-written the script (with Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen), has been trying to make this film for years. Here’s a salute to not just Stiller but all tenacious filmmakers — great ideas are nothing if you don’t have the balls to keep pushing. This film is Stiller’s best work since the hey-hey days of The Ben Stiller Show, and his best idea since the Al Pacino-auditions-for-Beethoven bit.

Water bufffalo, Jack Black, Jay Baruchel.

It also feels to me like an Oscar-level thing for Downey. I know — who gives a hoot about Oscar nominations when a film is this funny? But Downey is amazing in this. This plus Iron Man — what a year for the guy. The Best Supporting Actor race is already down to Downey vs. Ledger.
One of the most successful performances by Stiller’s Speedman was a retarded Jack character, and one of Tropic Thunder‘s trippiest moments is when Stiller re-performs Jack in front of the heroin-dealing gang. I love that Speedman never “wakes up” — start to finish, he’s in a movie of one kind or another.
At least Cruise has one thing he can point to this year with pride and joy, even with Valkyrie‘s myriad issues. (I wonder, by the way, how The Hardy Men — a Stiller-Cruise comedy — is progressing?)
Is there a difference between humor that you know is funny as hell but you do’;t laugh at, and the kind that you do? I suppose, but for me, Tropic Thunder was a half-and-halfer in this regard. And that’s totally fine.

Martin Scorsese‘s Shine a Light opened only three and a half months ago. I’d convinced my significant other to come see the IMAX version with me, and she had half-convinced her daughter to come with us. But it didn’t happen and the film left the IMAX theatres and now the opportunity is gone for the rest of our lives on this planet. Next Tuesday’s arrival of the Shine a Light Blu-ray disc reminded me of that.

“Everything Is Cinema is important because it is an honest, intelligent and often eloquent treatment of a major motion picture artist [i.e., Jean-Luc Godard]. Sometimes reading it is a bit like riding a train that is chugging dutifully up a hill; at other times it’s a roller coaster of exciting ideas. Either way, like a Godard film, the journey turns out to be worth it.” — from Jeanine Basinger‘s 7.23 N.Y. Times review. Wait…the book came out two months ago (on 5.13)?

Vandamm: Let me go, Professor, and I’ll tell you a secret you’ll really want to know.
Professor: Talk first, Vandamm, and we’ll see.
Vandamm: (whispering) Leonard gave better head than Miss Kendall.
Professor: Oh, that I already knew. Take him away, boys! And don’t spare the rubber hoses!
(copied from 7.7.08 IMDB posting by Bilwick1.)

The best documentary of the year so far, hands down. One of the best of the century, no lie. Plays like a suspense thriller and a poem at the same time.

A Robocop-era outtake of Gene Siskel and Rogert Ebert, to wit: “He asked the McDonald’s girls if he could have apple pie with his order before they asked him! Wants some salad with your apple pie? They worked through the whole fucking menu! He ordered every fucking thing they have!” (YouTube clip stolen/copied from Patrick Goldstein‘s bloggy-blog…I think. I still can’t tell the difference between the blog and the weekly dead-tree “Big Picture” column because those lazy-ass Times designer guys can’t be bothered to create a real stylistic distinction.)

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An unnamed major film critic recently asked a journalist friend about “that Kevin Costner baseball movie.” Baseball movie? “Yeah,” the critic said. “It’s Costner doing the usual jowly working-class schlub thing…what, it’s not a baseball movie?” No, he was told. My friend then said to the critic, “You know, if someone like you — a film critic who ostensibly keeps up — isn’t getting what this movie is about, the marketing for Swing State is doing something wrong.” I’m sorry — Swing Vote!

Wilshire Blvd. near Gayley, heading east — 7.22.08, 10:55 pm.

Santa Monica’s Montana Avenue near 16th Street — 7.22.08, 8:45 pm.

Hours-old comment by Time‘s Joe Klein that McCain’s remark yesterday about Obama being willing to lose a war in order to win a campaign is the “most scurrilous” he’s ever heard in all his years of covering campaigns.

After months of shadowing, it would appear that those tenacious big-game hunters from Lantana, Florida, finally cornered their prized North Carolinian leopard in the Beverly Hills hotel this morning and threw a net over him. Or so it would seem. This is the scenario that some (like Slate‘s Mickey Kaus, having heard the stories) predicted would happen sooner or later. The running-up-and-down-the-stairs and into-the-cellar part sounds so humiliating. We live in a diseased and predatory culture.

It turns out that Dark Knight star Christian Bale has been charged by London police only with “verbal assault” in last Sunday night’s incident between himself, his mother Jenny and his sister Sharon. In London verbal assault can be classified as a Class 4 or 5, with Class 4 being aggravated with “an intent to cause alarm.”
In other words, Bale was popped for the domestic American custom known as “arguing,” possibly with a loud and/or threatening tone of voice. By this curious standard Jeremy Piven‘s “Ari” character would be doing 10 years without parole, easy, if he lived in London.

I for one would love to read James Vanderbilt‘s forthcoming screen adaptation of “Truth And Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power,” the 2005 book by former CBS News producer Mary Mapes about the big 60 Minutes II brouhaha that hurt CBS news anchor Dan Rather when he and Mapes produced a story four years ago about President George W. Bush‘s…er, activities in the Texas Air National Guard. It eventually led to Mapes getting bounced from the network and Rather taking an early retirement.
“This was a corporate, political, and public relations operation,” Mapes has been quoted saying by the N.Y. Observer, “designed to take the heat off and allow Viacom to walk away unscathed, unencumbered by lingering anger from the White House or the various Republican-dominated committees that the corporation lobbied constantly.”

The price of drinks over the last ten or so years has risen to obscene levels at almost all nightspots. At many places you can easily drop $40 or $50 bucks on three or four glasses of wine, with tip and all. Even beer is ridiculous. Forget mixed drinks. So imagine my shock when I happened to wander into Barney’s Beanery last night and ordered a Miller Chill and the bartender held two fingers up. “Two dollars?,” I said. “Two,” she said. Astonishing.

Main dining room at Barney’s Beanery — Monday, 7.21.08, 10:05 pm