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Comedy mocks Hollywood and its perceptions; Cruise among hilarious characters
By Rich Heldenfels
Beacon Journal popular culture writer
Published on Wednesday, Aug 13, 2008
Tropic Thunder is loud, tasteless and crude. It is also funny for the most part, and very knowing about the way Hollywood views the world.
Indeed, the movie's skewering of Hollywood is crucial to any assessment of its use of stereotypes.
While the movie at first raised eyebrows over white actor Robert Downey Jr.'s character — a performer who changes his skin color in order to play an African-American soldier — it has more recently come under fire from advocates for the intellectually disabled.
They have objected to the film's use of the word ''retard'' and its portrayal of a disabled man in Simple Jack, a film within the film.
A Web site devoted to Simple Jack — one of several sites about characters and movies mentioned in Tropic Thunder — has been shut down. Protesters appeared at the Hollywood premiere of the movie, and the Down Syndrome Support Network of Stark County is among the groups calling for a boycott of the film.
But Tropic Thunder is in its way sympathetic to the very people criticizing it. The whole point of Simple Jack is that an actor — in this case Tugg Speedman, the character played by Tropic Thunder director Ben Stiller — will use the most extreme stereotypes in playing a disabled person, just to win awards.
When Downey's character, prize-winning actor Kirk Lazarus, explains to Speedman the perils of going ''full retard,'' he is underscoring the cynicism of actors and moviemakers in analyzing roles. Nor should we forget that Simple Jack has proven a horrible flop at the box office.
But it's interesting to hear such an extended discussion of how part of Tropic Thunder is perceived when so much of the movie is about perception — including how filmmakers perceive their audiences, how actors perceive themselves and even how audiences perceive what they see on screen.
The broad framework is the making of a Vietnam-era movie with an all-star cast including Speedman (known mainly for a long series of redundant action films), Lazarus, dumb-comedy actor Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) and hip-hop star Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson). Production is going disastrously, and studio boss Les Grossman (a hilariously foul-mouthed Tom Cruise) threatens to pull the plug.
To save the movie, director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) decides to shoot it documentary-style, with his actors improvising in the jungle. But that idea also goes awry, and the gun-toting actors find themselves up against a drug lord and his minions' real guns.
The premise is amusing, though the actual plotting doesn't always make sense, especially when the actors have to face the real-life villains.
But it does work as the basis for meditations and mockery of the entertainment business. Indeed, the movie starts abruptly with faux trailers for other movies involving the characters, along with a commercial for a Chino-endorsed drink called Booty Sweat.
And as it goes along, the pleasure is not so much from character development as a series of set pieces, such as African-American Chino's view of Lazarus' vision of an African-American, or Grossman's attempts at crisis management.
Indeed, Cruise may be the funniest thing in the movie, although he gets competition, notably from Downey and from Jay Baruchel as Kevin Sandusky, the non-star in the acting ensemble. And movie buffs will have fun picking up on the allusions to other films, especially Apocalypse Now.
It doesn't all work. The movie doesn't do much with Jeff Portnoy, for instance, and it's really at a loss with Four Leaf Tayback (Nick Nolte), a tough old veteran who has inspired the Vietnam movie. But it worked often enough.
Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and in the HeldenFiles Online blog at http://www.ohio.com. He can be reached at 330-996-3582 and rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.
Tropic Thunder is loud, tasteless and crude. It is also funny for the most part, and very knowing about the way Hollywood views the world.
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