Ramblings about crap in my life.
Posts tagged jack black
Tropic Thunder: Special Features
Jan 29th
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.
The Jackal, how to ruin a movie
Jan 6th
This action flick was a lot worse than I remembered, the only remarkable performance is by Bruce Willis playing The Jackal, unfortunately his character goes from genious assassin to arrogant schmuck pretty fast in the end. Let's start with Richard Gere, he plays the protagonist, Declan Mulqueen, an Irish ex-IRA sniper who has been sentenced to 25 years in jail or something like that. First of all, he has got the worst Irish accent I have ever heard, it more or less ruins the movie, secondly I hate movies in which inmates are not only helping whatever amateur investagion-teams that need help, but are also more or less leading the entire investigation. The only reason he is helping them is because he knows what The Jackal looks like, so why the hell do they let him decide what strategies to use, where to attack, etc. Then they try to make him seem like a good guy by letting him say stuff like "Oy nevah used bumbs!" in an angry way.
Back to Willis, I'm just gonna skip to the end, because the character is pretty cool until the last 20 minutes, I was actually rooting for him, the scene where he shoots the arm off Jack Black is priceless. So, he's got his Gatling-gun in his Van, he's found a nice spot, got his Gatling-gun controlling laptop ready and is more or less seconds away from being able to blow the first lady, his target, to smitherens. What I don't understand is why it takes him atleast 20 fucking minutes to open the laptop, aim the gun and press the god damn firing button. As you may guess Declan saves the day by shooting the Gatling-gun's scope (with a sniper-rifle, don't ask me why the marksman from the SWAT team wasn't allowed to fire, and don't even get me started on the fact that they just freely gave a convicted IRA-terrorist a rifle) a few seconds before The Jackal opens fire.
What follows is a chasescene in the Metro, Willis being all cool and mental, Gere being annoying. Finally Willis takes a girl hostage, makes Gere drop his gun, is about to shoot him, and boom, Willis is shot in the neck by some chick who was Gere's girlfriend back in Ireland or something. "How the hell did she know exactly what station they were at?" you may ask, well I have no fucking clue, she was supposed to be hiding somewhere so it doesn't really make sense. This movie could easily have been a lot better, a few stupid choices just ruined it.
To summon it all up, 101 on how to ruin a movie:
Let an American play an Irish guy.
Lower the IQ of the villain steadily through the movie, so it'll hit ~20 in the end. That way the lead character'll win no matter how dumb he is. (as seen in most b-class movies, remember the villain kicking ass and more or less being indestructable until he meets the protagonist in the end?)
End the movie with the most improbable thing you can imagine.
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