Bayside resident Mark Metcalf is an actor who has worked in movies, TV and on the stage. He is best known for his work in "Animal House," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Seinfeld."

In addition to his work on screen, Metcalf is involved with Milwaukee Film, First Stage Children's Theater and a number of other projects, including comicwonder.com. He recently filmed an episode of the popular AMC series "Mad Men."

He also finds time to write about movies for OnMilwaukee.com. This week, Metcalf weighs in on "Tropic Thunder" and the HBO series "Rome."

TROPIC THUNDER (2008)

I take back everything I ever said about Tom Cruise. I will probably take that back the next time I see a Tom Cruise movie, but after watching "Tropic Thunder," I have to admit that he is brilliant. At least when he is playing a blown out version of what everyone now suspects to be his real personality.

In "Tropic Thunder," Cruise plays a character that is bald and with a hairier body than the character he plays in "Magnolia," the great film by P.T. Anderson, but it is a character that bears the same relationship to the Tom Cruise image - super macho, powerful, abundantly confident, grotesquely arrogant, intensely focused, and maximally narcissistic.

In the context of both "Magnolia" and especially "Tropic Thunder," it is hilarious. In the latter, he plays Les Grossman, the head of the movie studio that is producing a big budget Vietnam war picture starring Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., and Jack Black, as three mega-star Hollywood actors. And he has hair everywhere on his body, curly, long, wiry, thick hair; a virtual blanket of hair everywhere. Except on his head and his knuckles. It is probably a characterization of some actual person in Hollywood, but I never met them.

Ben Stiller directed the movie and wrote a good deal of it, so you know going in that it is going to make fun of almost everyone and everything. This kind of satire works best in short form, as it did for so many years on "Saturday Night Live," so when you have a two-plus hour long feature to fill it is going to sag a bit here and there. And, it definitely does.

Jack Black gives a one-note performance as a drug-addicted star of comedy movies that depend on makeup and fart jokes, like the ones that Eddie Murphy makes sometimes. Stiller plays a Stallone-like action star whose franchise as "The Scorcher" appears to have run it's course after "The Scorcher - Six" and he seriously needs a new hit or he will be opening supermarkets for the rest of his career. He brings to it the kind of pathetic narcissism that was all throughout "Zoolander," and it didn't work for long there, either.

Of the three main characters, it is Robert Downey Jr. who gives the most complicated and interesting, as well as continually funny performance. Downey plays an Australian Russell Crowe-type, five-time Academy Award winning actor, who does so much research and preparation for his parts that he actually has his skin dyed black in order to play an African- American Sergeant for a film that takes place during the Vietnam War.

He never drops character, even when he confronts and accepts the fact that there is no there there as far as his own personality goes. Downey's performance isn't brilliant, but it is complete, well thought, original and very funny, especially when trying to "out-black" the one real black man lost in the jungles of Vietnam, Alpa Chino, played by Brandon T. Jackson.

The comedy throughout is about as subtle as that character's name -- Alpa Chino, or Al Pacino -- the name taken by a black rap artist, whose reputation as a gangster and lady's man surpasses his reputation as an artist, yet he turns out to be gay when the pressure is on and the real bullets fly, and the movie they are making is taken over by the movie we are watching.

But Cruise's performance outdoes them all. He is louder, brasher, more grotesque, brutal and filled to overflowing with testosterone, yet at the same time more within the realm of possibility than any of the others. When he is finally left alone by all his minions, he puts in the ear bugs of his I-Pod and dances through the credit sequence. It is a full four, maybe five minutes of masturbatory, groping self-worship while we watch the credits roll. It alone is worth the rental price.

 Page 1 of 2 (view all on one page)

Next >>

3 comments about this article. Post a comment / write a review.

Recent Talkbacks ...

Posted by Red_5 on Aug. 4, 2009 at 4:33 p.m. (report)

Ah why exactly are you doing a review on a movie that was released on DVD last November and a four year old HBO series?

Posted by DCAR on Aug. 3, 2009 at 4:23 p.m. (report)

Note to OMC, please spoon feed Chateau Dweller.

Posted by ChateauDweller on Aug. 3, 2009 at 9:03 a.m. (report)

The title of the movie should be in the title of the article. I'd be much more likely to read it if I knew which movie Metcalf was reviewing.