Tropic Thunder DVD

I got to watch the Special Features on the Tropic Thunder: Director’s Cut DVD tonight, and it is filled with amazing stuff. There’s cast commentaries from the three main actors, three great featurettes, one focusing on the cast members, deleted and extended scenes, an alternate ending, long videos of the actors improvising, a make-up test with Tom Cruise, the Rain of Madness mockumentary, the fake viral video, which has been available on YouTube forever, and a lot more.

I haven’t seen all of the features yet, but I’ll go over the ones I have. I started by watching Rain of Madness, a 30-minute parody of Heart of Darkness, the documentary about Vietnam War classic Apocalypse Now, mixed with a narrator who has an uncanny resemblence to the famous German documentary director Werner Herzog. It wasn’t as funny as I had expected, but it was nice to see unseen footage with the characters, especially Kirk Lazarus, who has a serious mental breakdown.

Next I watched Full Mags, various videos of the actors improvising while shooting. The scene with Jack Black’s character tied to the tree, was amazing. Black more or less improvises everything, once in a while you can hear Stiller give him pointers off-screen, but it is truly amazing to see Black spew comedic gold nuggets for almost 10 minutes. Next scene was even better, it’s Downey Jr’s and Stiller’s identity talk when the squad tries to save Speedman. Hearing Downey Jr. switch from Lazarus’ dialect to his own is amazing, and he truly deserves his Academy Award nomination.

The make-up test with Tom Cruise shows him coming up with the dance moves, which made Stiller implement them into the movie. The deleted and extended scenes were pretty boring, and the difference to the alternate ending was Speedman’s assistent being captured by the terrorists in the end, and then watching Speedman win his award, on a small TV.

I’m still looking forward to the other featurettes, damn, I wish they put this much work into all DVDs.