It's a Jungle
PODHORETZ, JOHN
It’s a Jungle Ben Stiller sends up Hollywood—and lives. BY JOHN PODHORETZ Tropic Thunder, the new comedy written and directed by and starring Ben Stiller, is so noisy, so busy, and so utterly...
...And so Tropic Thunder does, succeeding at this task as it succeeds in almost every other way...
...He tries to claim racial solidarity with another costar, a disbelieving rapper named Alpa Chino (sound it out), by discussing the mutual scars they bear from 400 years of slavery and discrimination...
...You can’t kill actors...
...When we encounter him, however, he has just come off two fl ops—the fi fth sequel to his mammoth hit, Scorcher, and a disastrous effort to stretch himself by playing a mentally challenged adult in Simple Jack...
...That is especially noteworthy, since it is his success as an actor that gave Stiller the power to make this movie...
...Only one of them has bothered to read the script, and so, when they fi nd themselves in the drug gang’s crosshairs, they don’t know they’re in danger...
...They trash producers, but defend directors...
...Tropic Thunder is the best send-up of the workings of show business since the original version of The Producers...
...They have good guys and bad guys, like all other Hollywood movies...
...Continuing with the comeback he began with his wonderful turn earlier this summer in Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr...
...Stiller is Tugg Speedman, once the cinema’s reigning action star...
...responds Mostel...
...Most Hollywood satires have an odd politesse about them...
...The delicious inside joke here is that the actor in question needed this movie as badly as Tugg Speedman needs his Vietnam epic to reestablish himself as a dynamic screen presence...
...It’s a Jungle Ben Stiller sends up Hollywood—and lives...
...eviscerate agents, but make nice when it comes to the people who work behind the scenes...
...In Tropic Thunder, actors are again at risk of getting killed, not by a crazed Nazi this time but, rather, by a Laotian drug gang...
...Kirk hugs Alpa and whispers the lyrics to the theme song from The Jeffersons in his ear...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ Tropic Thunder, the new comedy written and directed by and starring Ben Stiller, is so noisy, so busy, and so utterly fi lthy that it takes awhile for its satiric brilliance to assert itself...
...Its portrait of Hollywood—by far the most savage ever committed to fi lm—is what makes Tropic Thunder so memorable...
...Four of them are making a war movie, and in an effort to make the fi lm more authentic, their director has fl own them to a remote location in the jungle, has told them he’s fi lming them from hidden cameras, and then has set them loose...
...says a horrifi ed Gene Wilder in response...
...But in the movie’s fi rst scene, he fi nds himself being out-acted by Kirk Lazarus, an insanely committed fi ve-time Oscar winner who is an intentional amalgam of Russell Crowe and Daniel Day-Lewis...
...gives a towering comic performance as Kirk, a 21st century Australian who has so submerged himself in his character that he has had his skin darkened chemically— and acts on and off screen as though he were a black man from Detroit circa 1965...
...they think it’s all part of the movie they’re making...
...But it is gaspingly funny, as is the identity of the real-life superstar who plays him—all but unrecognizably, since he is buried under amounts of latex that must have rivaled Downey’s for time spent in the makeup chair...
...Of course, what he actually knows about being a black man in Detroit in 1965 isn’t all that much...
...attack directors, but spare writers...
...None of Grossman’s dialogue can be quoted, and viewers who cannot bear profanity should be warned that Tropic Thunder is not for them...
...His new Vietnam epic, called Tropic Thunder, is supposed to relaunch his career...
...There has rarely been a sight in recent years as amusing as the baffl ed expression on a Laotian jungle assassin’s face when Stiller comes tearing at him dressed like Rambo and fi ring a machine gun loaded with blanks...
...The movie benefi ts from the structure imposed on it by its plot, and gets better and richer as it goes along...
...This is a terrifi c premise, and Stiller (who cowrote the screenplay with Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen) makes the most of it...
...In that great 1968 comedy, a crazed Zero Mostel decides to kill all the actors in the Broadway play he has produced...
...who spent time in jail for repeated probation violations on drug charges...
...Back off, Kangaroo Jack,” Alpa replies...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...Oh, really...
...Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, producer Les Grossman, perhaps the most foul-mouthed character in the history of motion pictures, begins to wonder whether he might actually profi t from the deaths of his movie’s stars...
...Also along for the ride is Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), a heroin-addled comedian who is an intentional amalgam of Eddie Murphy and . . . Robert Downey Jr...
...He is more grizzly bear than man, and when he fi nds himself on the phone with one of the Laotian drug cartel, there is no question which one of them is more savage...
...The farce is what makes Tropic Thunder a good movie...
...They’re not animals, they’re human beings...
...But assert itself it does...
...Have you ever eaten with one...
...Tropic Thunder spares no one, and especially not actors...
Vol. 13 • August 2008 • No. 45
