Movie Revie: Thunder Lumbers - Too Few Laughs in H-Wood Farce

Poor Ben Stiller. His big budget action spoof Tropic Thunder is a high-concept spoof that centers around a hollow, one-dimensional actor who is paired with a far more talented method type who seems to be stealing the movie they are starring in out from under him. As in life.

Stiller directs and stars in this loud Rambo send-up but the movie belongs firmly in the hands of the incredible Robert Downey Jr. - in blackface no less. Stiller creates the idea of a character but he rarely gets deeper than a few set beats - there's barely anything there to relate to let alone laugh at. Most of the chuckles he gets are visual rather than intrinsic character-based laughs. Most of the time he simply looks like a constipated greyhound. The difference between his performance here and the execrable Heartbreak Kid is Stiller's wide-eyed innocent boob routine.

Downey on the hand chomps on his character of an Australian uber-Method actor who dyes his skin in service of playing a Jim Brown-esque Seargeant just like he chomps on his prop cigar. His commitment to the character of an actor who's commitment to character is total is...well...total. Where Stiller expresses emotions by either scrunching or smoothing is forehead Downey is all about the eyes. There's a scene in which his entire head is covered and all you see are those orbs and he makes it funny, just with what he communicate ocularly.

Some other reliably funny folks like Jack Black as a rotund cross between Eddie Murphy and Larry the Cable Guy and Steve Coogan as a hapless first-time director have to make the best of some pretty spotty material.

There's also been a great deal of chatter about Tom Cruise in the film, who plays a vulgarian Hollywood executive of the sort that keeps moving Valkyrie around the release schedule. It's a funny, creepy character but it hardly needs the screentime. It is a nice change for Cruise who essentially plays the same asshole redeemed by his sense of community in every damn filmbut it adds little to the movie. I did mention it's creepy right?

A good microcosm of the entire film can be found at the beginning with a series of fake previews that had the elderly couple behind me fooled ("Boy there sure is a lot of crap coming out this fall") . Stiller's is kind of standard issue action sequel parody- not much more than a sight gag. Black's is chucklesome - fart humor to the nth degree with a sprinkle of condescension. Downey's is utterly brilliant, with he and Tobey Maguire as monks in a Brokeback Mountain wink.

It would have been interesting to see Downey rather than Black take a page out of the Eddie Murphy playbook. I believe he could have played all the characters in Tropic Thunder and squeezed more juice out of each role. As it stands the film is mildly amusing but little more.

Film Review: Downey Puts The Irony in Iron Man

The ingredients of Iron Man , Jon Favreau's new popcorn flick for fledgling Marvel studios, seem like standard issue superhero stew. On paper it sounds exactly like Batman Begins, or Spider-Man. Big budget film with a quirky cast of over-talented actors explore the origins of a superhero as they discover their hidden powers, learn to harness them and then take on a villain who used to be a mentor. Ho-hum. Except Iron Man proves that as Mick Jagger once warbled, "It's the singer, not the song." The movie is a delightful romp with almost every element perfectly judged, not least of which is tone.

The secret weapon is Robert Downey Jr. who brings his sardonic knowing line readings and wounded eyes to bear on every scene he's in (at least sans maak, which thankfully is a good chunk of them). After winning (CORRECTION: as a commenter pointed out Downey was nominated but did not win) an Oscar for Chaplin, the well documented substance struggles, starring in unsung films like Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang and A Scanner Darkly and being the only thing worth watching in dreck like The Shaggy Dog Downey, like his character Tony Stark, finds redemption here. He's ably joined by a surprisingly likable Gwyneth Paltrow, who brings way more than necessary to the character sketch that is Pepper Potts (!). Her chemistry with Downey is terrific and their scenes crackle with energy. Jeff Bridges shows up bald of pate and hirsute of chin. He seems to be a distant cousin of William Hurt's character in A History of Violence but where Hurt chomps on the scenery and the catering truck for good measure Bridges underplays with a glint in his eyes. Terrence Howard doesn't have a lot to do but he does it all well.

Favraeu imports some political commentary into the genre though it's jumbled by the needs of plot and action. Will the idea that the United States armed the very same Afghans who we are fighting sink in for Americans who have tuned out the string of po-faced Iraq and Afghanistan flicks that have come out over the past two years? Does it matter? When Downey's water-boarded by the Afghan bad guys, are we supposed to connect to our own actions in the so-called War on Terror?

Who cares when Iron Man shows up to show us what a peacekeeping mission is supposed to look like. Save the villagers from the warlords! It's a flashback to when some of us thought that using NATO to quell the fighting and genocide in Bosnia was a blueprint to responsible superpowerdom in the 21st century. But enough politics, I've already given them more thought then the movie does. It hardly matters when you see Downey's chiseled goatee and delightfully louche delivery, or the suited up Iron Man going up against a couple of fighter jets.

The effects are very good and believable for the most part. I had a nice contrast with Marvel's other big film this summer when we were treated to a preview for Ed Norton in The Incredible Hulk. Everything went swimmingly and looked intriguing until the big green guy shows up and he looks just as phony and computer generated (if not more so) as he did in Ang Lee's try at the franchise. Possible mitigating factor: Tim Roth's in it.

Back to Iron Man, it's a hoot to watch Downey live out every man's mid-life crisis fantasy -- car porn galore, supermodel arm candy, a high-tech modern bachelor pad, Gwynyth Paltrow pining for you, and a neat suit that lets you kick ass while doing good. It's a grown-up's regressive playpen and boy, is it fun.

Film Review: Killer Zodiac Mesmerizes

Downey in Zodiac

I finally caught up with David Fincher's Zodiac on DVD and boy am I sorry I missed this in the theatre. Here's hoping that Warner Bros. and Paramount re-releases this for a late year Oscar push, (though its unlikely considering the crush of prestige films this fall). This is quite simply one of the most stunningly shot films of the last few years. The great cinematographer Harris Savides creates a San Francisco that goes from a spooky, gauzy dreaminess at the films start to a hard-edged bright dystopia as we head into the seventies. He is ably abetted by top-notch production design by Donald Graham Burt that brings the period to life. Check out the stunning opening sequence:



What puts this up with Fight Club as one of Fincher's masterpieces is the fusing of this meticulous attention to detail with a stellar cast and a mature, ruminative screenplay. Robert Downey Jr. is sardonic hard-living San Francisco Chronicle Reporter Paul Avery, Jake Gyllenhaal is quirky straight-laced Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith, Mark Ruffalo is superstar San Francisco cop David Toschi and Anthony Edwards plays Toschi's levelheaded partner. All four of these actors are at the top of their game, and all portray characters drawn into the web of the Zodiac killer, with life altering results.

As befits a director who has clearly sweated every last period detail, this is not a procedural, a cat and mouse film, or a slasher pic. Rather it is a story about obsession. Late in the film, a character tells Gyllenhall that he has "the look." He doesn't know what she means but we d. It's the look of a man who is driven, the look that Downey has as he trades one addiction for another, the look Ruffalo has as he sees his case moldering, the look Edwards has as he lets go of the same case. Obsession spreads like a virus, from the Zodiacs letters seemingly to characters like Gyllenhaal's who are initially tangential to the hunt for the killer. As the trail goes colder and the paint on the pillers in the Chronicle's newsroom goes from hot red to cool blue, Gyllenhaal puts his marriage to Chloe Sevigny and his family aside in his quest. Eventually the Zodiac could be anyone or no-one, the heavy phone breather or the dedicated cop, just as Downey wonders at the beginning of the story whether Gyllenhall could be the killer. In the end Fincher seems to feel that they have a good idea who did it, but as with his characters there is enough ambiguity to leave a smidgen of doubt. That little bit of darkness is the shadow that cinematographer Savides spends the film chasing into the corner -- but he can never eliminate it.
Zodiac gets five out of five Golden Gates: