I’m a lead farmer, muthafucka!

Posted on | 3 years, 6 months ago, in the early afternoon | No Comments

Yesterday afternoon I drove out to Bellevue, in order to visit with Caitlin after her dentist’s appointment. Together we snuck into a bar for supper — where we were lucky enough to catch Ladies Night overlapping with happy hour. We didn’t do any drinking, but we helped ourselves to the happy hour menu and gorged ourselves for a collective price of about fifteen bucks. SCORE.

The food was pretty good, but by about six o’clock we were surrounded and vastly outnumbered by scores of inebriated, overdressed women prowling the place in various states of disarray. One of them approached Caitlin’s personal pizza, sniffed so deeply that she nearly dropped her hair into the plate, and swung a set of over-long, manicured fingernails over it like she was casting a spell. Then she demanded to know if “it was good enough to eat.”

At least, I think that’s what she asked. She was brightly lit, and none too articulate. For a minute there, I seriously thought this woman was going to swoop a finger through the cheese and stuff it in her mouth, or at least do a face-plant in the waffle fries; but instead she burbled at us about what she was going to order from the happy hour menu and staggered off.

Caitlin made this face: O_o

Once we were happily stuffed with bar food, we moseyed the mall for an hour or two and noodled around in a store that was crammed with D&G fashions which we can’t seriously afford, but seriously giggled over regardless. And then, it was movie-time. That’s right. We went and saw Tropic Thunder (from whence this post’s title cometh).

In 100 words or less: Due to excessive princess-like behavior, five actors bungle a Vietnam movie based on a bestselling book. The book’s author (a comically grizzled vet, played by Nick Nolte) recommends that the director dump the actors in the jungle and film guerrilla-style. This works fine until the actors stumble into a Myanmar poppy-processing operation and fail to notice that they’ve gone off-script. Cameos abound. Tom Cruise is a gruesome, powerful, oddly compelling Hollywood big-wig; Bill Hader is a flunky; Matthew McConaughey is a pecker.

General Impressions: This one’s worth the price of admission purely for the “advertisements” and “movie previews” at the beginning, wherein we see our hapless actors playing other roles. If no one ever makes Satan’s Alley into a real film with Robert Downey Jr. and Tobey McGuire as hand-holding monks, I will make a big cry. Flashy, filthy, and honestly funny more often than not, Tropic Thunder is a fairly strong comedy — but the story becomes hit-or-miss when it tries to lend depth to the players.

Deeper Impressions: Unsurprisingly, Tropic Thunder talks primarily about artifice and reality; but surprisingly, it sometimes becomes a little complex. RDJ’s character (the fake black guy) takes the situation seriously because he stays in character, and he’s the most “successful” performer/survivor in that regard — but he walks a strange line between insisting on his role and being more aware of the real-life peril than the other guys. There’s evidence to imply that he’s the smartest member of this band of brothers, but there’s also evidence that his method acting may have taken him off the deep end.

Later in the movie, there’s a lot of back-and-forth about people with weak personalities but strong egos, and how they might tangle their identities into crippling knots of insecurity. But these scenes of quasi-depth and attempted development often drag on too long, and bog themselves down with deliberately wacky wordplay and exposition.

Recommendations: Not remotely for children. Probably best viewed in a crowded theater surrounded by people who have a semi-silly sense of humor. I laughed a lot during this one, but I was later forced to wonder if it would’ve been so funny if I’d seen it under different circumstances.

Category: misc

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