This week, I was surprisingly entertained by Ben Stiller’s latest comedy, “Tropic Thunder”, a movie about the making of a movie that goes native in the jungles of Vietnam.
Quite obviously, the movie parodies “Apocalypse Now”, with its tale of madness in the Heart of Darkness. While “Tropic Thunder” makes a few jabs at Francis Ford Coppola’s infamous film, there’s nothing that digs too deep.
Instead, a short mockumentary about the film has been shot, with a sharper tongue and a more satirical knife it’s called “Rain of Madness”, and there’s only a trailer up on YouTube:
“Tropic Thunder”, like Stiller’s “Zoolander”, aims to skewer the entertainment industry, mocking actors who unwittingly fall into stereotyped roles, and then try to break out of the mold. In the August 2008 issue of Playboy, Stiller was interviewed about the film:
Of course, Stiller’s film about a film being made, so his actors are actors pretending to be actors. Did they have to take their own little boot camp to prepare for the roles they were pretending to prepare for?
While “Tropic Thunder” lights the fire under the industry, the movie flails along in the second half, as most comedies do, struggling to come to terms with 2 dimensional characters in a very real world. Where “Zoolander” addressed this issue by becoming increasingly outlandish as the movie progressed, “Tropic Thunder” stalls and resorts to more slapstick.
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