Movie about movies is Stiller at his best

In “Tropic Thunder,” writer-director-star Ben Stiller rounded up a cast of A-listers, took them to Hawaii, blew up $90 million worth of stuff and made a movie about making a movie that should never be made. And it’s a riot.

Stiller stars as a dim-witted action star, Robert Downey Jr. is the Beyond Method Aussie actor who has undergone “pigment augmentation” (blackface), and Jack Black is the drug-addicted funny man.

Their in-over-his-head director (Steve Coogan), egged on by a deranged ’Nam vet (Nick Nolte), dumps his cast in the jungles of Vietnam to get “the real deep (bleep)” of the Vietnam War.

This part of Southeast Asia, though, still has armed men fighting wars over opium. They end up facing real Hollywood phonies, armed with blanks, who don’t realize they’re not in a movie.

This is Stiller’s magnum opus, a brilliantly broad farce that should do what Sylvester Stallone never could – end the Vietnam War, the Hollywood version anyway.

– By Roger Moore, The Orlando Sentinel

“Vicky Cristina Barcelona”

“The heart wants what it wants”: Whether you accept that as simple philosophy or blind self-justification, it provides the subtext for Woody Allen’s sexy and serious new film, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”

Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is a sober young American about to wed her ridiculously wealthy fiancé. Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) is a would-be artist who sees every meeting as the start to an adventure. Barcelona, the summer vacation spot, may change them both.

The catalyst is Jose (Javier Bardem), a sexy Spanish painter with an even sexier (and quite mad) ex-wife (Penelope Cruz). Vicky and Cristina both fall for him, and each has to puzzle out what this means.

Johansson is perfect as Cristina – young and effortlessly sexy (yet, when the animalistic Cruz arrives on the scene, pathetically gauche and childish). And Bardem is perhaps the only actor who could keep his painter from turning into a cartoon.

The lovely backdrops to this bittersweet romance never quite become the fifth character they deserve to be. But the setting is striking. And so are the scenes of these people – two naive Americans, one conflicted artist and a fiery force of nature – colliding in the midst of them.

– By Stephen Whitty, Newhouse News

“The Wacknness”

It’s the summer of 1994 in Manhattan, and recent high school graduate and weed man Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) is approaching the season with anxiety. His constantly fighting parents are teetering on the brink of financial ruin; Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby), the girl he’s crushing on, barely knows he exists; and his only confidant is drug-addled psychiatrist Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), who happens to be Stephanie’s stepfather – and Luke’s best client.

The dopest thing about “The Wackness” is Thirlby, who, after supporting turns in “Juno” and “Snow Angels,” is quickly becoming reason enough to see any film she’s in.

– By Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post

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