I saw this today and it was great from start-to-finish, starting with the ad for Alpa Chino's "Booty Sweat Energy Drink" and "Bust-a-Nut Bar" and the trailers from Tugg and Kirk's movies. I thought Downey was SUPPOSED to steal the show, but while he was great I thought Jack Black was really awesome. The whole thing was so ludicrous that it was fantastic, and I can't wait to see it again because I bet it is much funnier on the re-viewing.
Also, those two guys they never mentioned being in the movie were obviously both hilarious.
Holy fuck shit motherfucker shit. Read comics. Fuck shit shit fuck shit I sold out when I did my job. Fuck fuck fuck shit fuck. Sorry had to do it....
*snip*
Revenge of the Sith = one thumb up from me. Fuck shit. I want to tittie fuck your ass. -- The Guinness. to Cerebus
I second everything you just said. I was surprised Cruise's role was so major as I'd heard it was nothing more than a cameo. I was also a big fan of Tobey McGuire's cameo. If you blinked you might have missed it but it had me rolling.
Hell, I guess the whole movie had me rolling. I'm looking forward to seeing it again, too.
I liked it as well, although the last half of the movie was just too ludicrous for me to really enjoy (minus the little kid and Ben Stiller angle with "Twigman"). Robert Downey I thought did steal the show, although the scene with Jack Black tied to a tree was my favorite scene.
Even though I didn't like it as much as some (EW gave it an A which is just silly), it's still worth a trip to the cineplex.
Oh, and after the movie has been out for a week, I doubt spoiler tags are necessary at this point IMO.
"Put on your helmets, we'll be reaching speeds of 3!" "It was nice of you to give that dead woman another chance." "All right, look alive everybody...oh sorry Susan."- MST3K: Space Mutiny Click Here (myspace.com)
omg this movie is f'in awesome. seriously i did not stop laughing from the booty sweat commercial til the credits. the whole concept is genius. i am going to see it again(which i almost never do.) "The Pecker" is DA MAN! Weed!
The one thing that made me laugh, (other than the retard movie) was the little kid, stabbing him in the neck. For some reason, I laughed like, well a retard.
I liked Tropic Thunder a good bit. It had some black humor and some black humor. I think it was The Onion AV Club review that compared the sharpest bits of pop-culture satire in the movie to The Ben Stiller Show at its finest. I'd almost say that the movie peaks before it even starts, because the parody trailers that air before it couldn't have been more on the nose, and it was hard for anything that followed to live up to something as perfect as The Fatties: Fart 2.
At the same time, my close personal colleague Albert Ching also shamed me into admitting that the lazier, more half-assed bits of the movie tend to feel like those weakest parts of The Ben Stiller Show that no longer hold up. Along those lines, I thought two of the big three spoof actors were the weakest part of the movie: Ben Stiller doing the hypermasculine rasper (in lieu of the exasperated nebbish) is really stale at this point -- anything that was left to be mined from that bit was used up by Dodgeball -- while Jack Black barely has one note, two if being openly fat counts as a note.
But everyone else here really gives it a goddamn go. I don't know if the movie "single-handedly rehabilitated Tom Cruise in American culture," as Jon Stewart said, but he was legit remarkable, in a way that Stiller playing the same part might no longer be capable of. Jay Baruchel, doing yeoman's work, has maybe never been funnier -- I'm looking forward to seeing him square off with Michael Cera in Nick and Norah 320 Gigs On Shuffle. And most distinguished of all, Robert Downey Jr. was truly extraordinary; so much so that a blackfaced RDJ should play War Machine in Iron Man 2 instead of Terrence Howard.
The cultural ignorance jokes in shows like Arrested Development and The Office are always savvy enough to where the comedy comes from juxtaposing the characters' obliviousness with the normal world around them and makes sure that the joke is at the expense of the offending character and not the offendable party. That's definitely the intention here. Downey's character is amazing in execution and the speech about "never going full retard" history lesson is really clever as a corollary to Kate Winslet's advice about taking Holocaust roles on Extras. Still, seeing the movie in a packed theater and hearing people bowled over with laughter at a guy talking all retarded-like, you do get the feeling that their satirical point is some combination of lost and/or not made sharply enough. Final verdict: Kirk Lazarus is African-Hilarious, a brilliant, multi-layered invention. But Simple Jack fails to put the 'art' in 'retarded.'