Tropic Thunder

Tropic Thunder

In We live in a world where movie comedies don’t shy away from being vile and downright despicable if it means bringing in a good laugh. If laughs sometimes spring from the drudgery of life its no surprise that our finest jesters get the shit kicked out of them and yet find a way to gorge through their struggles.

Our perspective was that of Charlie Chaplin, or Bill Murray during the making of the film Stripes as he tried to handle the riggers of army basic training oh so gracefully in his efforts to search for sex and triumph or the cast of the last good movie of the Farrelly brothers King Pin where the protagonists had to begrudgingly cross all sorts of shit just to survive redemption, and to this day when somebody asks about which is the best flick from this decade, I never seem to make up my mind between the grim Inland Empire and the disturbingly funny, disgustingly brave, and absurdly surreal Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, where all bets were off.

In simpler terms: Though Ben Stiller was obviously an easy target in the past, now he tries to restrain himself. His latest movie, Tropic Thunder, is simply not amusing. It seems as though Stiller and co-writer Justin Theroux’s development period was spent almost exclusively focused on this high-concept premise that centers around these egotistical actors attempting to film a war movie only to find themselves actually in the middle of a real war in Southeast Asia, so they didn’t manage to come up with anything funny.

There are other movie posters, made by the filmmakers, at the beginning of the movie that makes one feel that these characters are very much interested in making it big as Jack Black is a failed comic actor who wants to be a great without comedy; Jackson is a wannabe rapper-actor, and Robert Downey Jr. imitated a wildly successful five-time Oscar winner who ruined his skin color because he wanted to be a black person to advance the satirical role he was playing rather than even a shadow on what Daniel Day-lewis esteems acting.

It is undeniable that Stiller and Theroux came up with a reasonable explanation, but on the other hand, the movie has the same imperfections that are inherent to SNL or Mad magazine, amongst other so called sketch-cinema totems. We get the mock of the vanity and self-absorption of actors as well as the mockery hitting with actual bullets so that the client has really ‘to make use of it’.

However, here is where the machine has an idea problem because instead of making jokes screenwriters only create narratives. “Wouldn’t it be funny if Black’s character is a heroin addict and he’s jungles and can’t find heroin so has to go cold turkey?” This is not a punch line. This is a plot device. All it does is spur Black to scream, wriggle, scream, cry and whine and if what one finds funny is an actor playing an actor putting in all his efforts to be in the limelight, then maybe they would consider that the punch line.

This elaborate construct was not designed to amuse the audience, but instead to Montage a logical frame story, which appears to be the wrong way to go. If the plots of the Harold Lloyd movies appear on paper as absolutely and outlandishly ludicrous excuses to get the man from one comical situation to the next, then that guess is correct. Stiller has lost the fundamental principles and craft of making screen comedies and that always makes me ask whether he actually set out to make Tropic thunder from the word go.

Perhaps he was when his actor friends were doing Hamburger Hill and Platoon on the set of Empire of the Sun some two decades ago, and that the fact of the matter that so many of his circle were in war films gets him wondering about the life of actors during the boot camp stage, trying hard to portray soldiers and wet their eyes on cue as the bombs explode and bullets fly by. So, the basic ideas that culminated into the making of Tropic thunder commenced.

In other words, when Stiller wrote it, he imagined himself and his friends but omitted the very third party that exists in comedy, the audience. He mockingly satirical stars and sputtered about matters which we all read in People or Entertainment Weekly; he simply takes crude jokes that fall under the category of -water cooler banter that everyone’s heard, and puts a different twist to them.

There is of course something heartwarming about the fact that Stiller is cognizant of the kinds of jokes that we all do, the ones which are so bad that they make us laugh out of sheer contempt for how ridiculous they are. They are jokes that are made in the context of everyone wanting to fit in and fit into a mainstream paradigm. But do we really go to comedy to feel snugly and warm, and ensure that our preconceived thoughts remain wrapped in a blanket or do we want to look at the ‘truth’ that, oh God, if we stare at a mirror or out of the window for far too long, there is a “funniness” about the human species.

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