I saw Tropic Thunder the other night and damn it was funny!
the premise for the movie is fantastic, basically it’s the making of the making of a film. It really takes a good dig at Hollywood. Robert Downey Jr’s character is a bit of a take off of Russell Crow (his character is a white Australian actor with a bit of a temper and a strong emphasis on method acting…) essentially he plays a white man playing a black guy throughout the movie and it’s a crack up!
An extra brilliant feature of this film is that it starts without you really knowing it’s started… the movie begins with a (fictional) candy bar ad and some movie previews which again are a wonderful satire of the real things. When the fake previews started everyone in the cinema was like “what the hell is going on?” are they really selling that product/making that move?” and then you get the joke. Brilliant.
This movie is worth your money at the cinema. I was even still laughing on way home when I thought about some of the lines.
P.S. beware some naughty language. Although I should mention here that the movie is not a gross humour style movie… some stupidity yes, but not like the really puerile humour you get with some of the other movies of recent times - you know the ones…
Fi and I saw Get Smart at the $7.50 lounge cinema in Byron Bay.
I was expecting the same sort of silliness that the TV show had but I was surprised…
Maxwell Smart was not the same incompetent buffoon of the TV series! In fact in this movie MAx is quite competent… He’s a crack shot with a gun, he can fight, and he lateral problem solving skills. They’ve even mixed in a bit of Dr Phil with his character… This is not the TV Maxwell Smart and I’m guessing they’re trying really hard to justify this movie as different from the 80’s Get Smart movie.
The laughs aren’t too bad in this movie. There are some great lines but there are some cheap laughs as well. Don’t expect a laugh a minute and don’t pay $15.50, it’s more of a DVD movie and it’s a movie that will please the kids more than an adult but it’s a good flick - not great but good.
Whilst this could be referring to my continued efforts at fitness, it’s also the title of a movie we saw this evening.
It’s quite funny, with a number of ‘guffaws’, but I wasn’t moved to hold the seat in front of me, whilst choking with laughter, which is my mark of a ‘classic film’ (see Hot Fuzz).
It had many of the elements of the other Simon Pegg films (such as Dylan Moran), but missed a few others (Nick Frost, and “you’ve got red on you”).
Well worth a DVD viewing, but probably not worth $15. We used some movie vouchers that we’d been given last year, so it was probably well worth what we paid…
I enjoyed the preview for the new Will Ferrell film (Semi-Pro), so that could be my next venture to the city of expensive drinks and popcorn…
Filmed in 2006, released in 2007, just came on DVD this week.
It’s a movie about a rugby league football player for Newtown Jets back in the 80’s when league was transforming from the amateurish hardman’s game to the corporate marketing game of today.
It’s not so much about league than it is about the characters. The movie could’ve probably worked with any football code… In a nut shell: this is about what happens to a man who has to give away the game because his body is falling apart, the game is changing, and his family is suffering… But his whole identity and ambition is wrapped up in the game of rugby league.
It’s an interesting journey to see how he handles it.
Overall I liked this film (not just because it was filmed down the road at Henson Park). The character stories fascinated me, maybe because of my footy background and the honest portrayal of the locker room and footy culture. Some of the scenes are not as well acted as they could’ve been, but they’re good enough and maybe Matty Johns wasn’t the best cast for the coach - not because of his acting (that was pretty good) but because he didn’t really look old enough.
Fi and I hired out and watched History Boys from the DVD store last night.
We’d been wanting to see it for some time and had heard good reviews, it looked like it might be a bit like a Dead Poets Society kinda movie, but… we were wrong…
As a person who like history, there were points of this movie I liked, for example, I found it had an insightful take on what history is, how it is recorded, and how it can (should?) be handled - some of what they said about peotry reminded me of the Psalms and how they continually speak to God’s people struggling to live God’s way in a world of rebellion - i liked that…
However, what is most disturbing about the film is that it more or less trivialises inappropriate sexual behaviour between adults and minors/teachers and students! This was a very unexpected theme of the movie! A homosexual teacher (and main character) tries to rationalise fondling his students balls as kind of preparation for life and helpful teaching method…(WHAT!). The teacher is rebuked by other teachers when he’s found out, but the movie itself doesn’t seem to rebuke the practice, as the male students at the centre of the movie basically put up with it as a an acceptable part of the learning experience. I don’t know what school the writer of this film went to, but if any of this is based on his experience, then someone needs to tell him it’s not normal or acceptable…
Apart from trivialising pedaphilia, I was also not expecting the film to run a strong emphasis on casual homosexuality/bisexuality… where one student offers his teacher a blow job for helping him pass his college entrance exams, not because he’s gay, but because he thinks “hey, why not?”, and everyone seems to think that there’s nothing really wrong with that…
It could just be that I’m a bit conservative, or maybe I’ve just been sheltered from the world, but this flick has got some serious issues to work out… You can decide for yourself if you want to see it.
I saw Tropic Thunder the other night and damn it was funny!
