Step Brothers, Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder

Three Comedies. Which one takes the cake?

Judd Apatow must never sleep. He is producing more comedies than any other filmmaker. His results are all over the place. This year alone he’s got another classic under his belt with Forgetting Sarah Marshall and a box office failure with Drillbit Taylor. Now he’s got two films coming out back-to-back. Step Brothers is his worst film and Pineapple Express is a stoner-classic. Sure Apatow is being diverse with comedic genres, but I think someone needs to remind him of the difference between quantitative and qualitative.

Will Ferrell is a very funny man. He has given audiences some great classic characters including Ron Burgundy, Ricky Bobby, and Harold Crick. Now it seems Ferrell has taken lazy turns of improvisation for his last two flicks. Semi-Pro and Brothers have him squandering around telling us that we have to laugh even when we didn’t ask to laugh. Now is the time to wonder if Ferrell is running out of ideas. Maybe that’s why an Anchorman sequel has been announced.

The film we should be talking about here is definitely Tropic Thunder. Ben Stiller returns to directing after Zoolander seven years prior. Sure both that film and Thunder are filled with extreme inside jokes of Hollywood, but Stiller not only delivers the funniest movie of the year, he also resurrects the criminally-abused power star Tom Cruise. His supporting role as a fat and bald studio executive is Cruise at his comedic best.

But what makes the film so satiric and memorable is its ability to thwart its execution from falling below the lines of staleness and mediocrity. Stiller must have told his actors some good advice, by saying: Guys, let’s just go for it. Let’s make something no one has ever seen before. Let’s put Robert Downey in a black form, Cruise in a fat suit, and make Jack Black a drug addict. Then let’s combine the theme of war, movie trailers with a Tobey Maguire cameo, and a spoof on how every actor tries to win an Oscar by playing a mentally challenged person, in this case named Simple Jack. Yes, Tropic Thunder, a classic spin on a totally outdated genre, plays out all of these ridiculous scenarios.

The more and more I think about Thunder, the less and less I want to think about Brothers and Pineapple Express. Express did have some good laughs and I’ll recommend it to people to see it maybe once, but I think it suffered from the movie trailer disease. The trailer was something more than funny. It was comedic heaven. It’s very hard to match something like that. The film is indeed a minor stoner classic, but just think of the possibilities of what it could have been.

About three or four months ago when I first heard and saw the trailers for these three movies, I thought Step Brothers would be stupidly funny. It was turned out to be just stupid. I thought Pineapple Express would be the comedy of the year, ranking with last year’s hit Superbad. It turned out to be just stupidly funny. And finally, I thought Tropic Thunder would be Stiller’s best movie to date. It turned out to best just that. Who takes the cake? August belongs to Tropic Thunder.

Step Brothers: ** Stars
Pinapple Express: *** Stars
Tropic Thunder: **** Stars

Quick Reviews for the Impatient

Will you Definitely, believe in this love story told with a solid heart by Ryan Reynolds and starring three of the most beautiful women (Isla Fisher, Elizabeth Banks, and Rachel Weisz) in the entire industry? Maybe. *** Stars

With some explosive laughs, a great spoof at a brilliant documentary (Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me), and some important historical references about protesting and trying to legalize weed, Doug Benson and company have created a perfect movie for your 4/20 fixes. I liked what I saw, but I wanted more. *** Stars

Lovely music and solid performances can’t save this melodrama from forgetting its tone. What starts off promising does end with a fitting finale, but too bad there is all that stuff in between. **1/2 Stars

While Transformers let the world know that Shia Lebeouf could dominate the box-office, this was his sleeper hit that solidified him as an up and coming movie star. This is a solid twist of a remake of the brilliant Rear Window. *** Stars

Remember Channing Tatum from Step Up? He was terrible in that. Remember Channing Tatum in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints? He was a wonder in that. First impressions can be the equivalent of incest. They can be just plain wrong. With a cast of dreams including Robert Downey Jr, Shia Lebeouf, Rosario Dawson, Chazz Palminteri, and Tatum, this is a powerful reminder to audiences just how important independent cinema can be. **** Stars

Establishes itself as a sequel so terrible, so mind-numbingly disgusting, and so accidentally hilarious, that you almost start rooting for the mutants to make sure they have their way with the humans as fast as possible. 88-minutes go by like being lost in the desert. Oh the irony. 0 Stars

Remember 1968? Nah, nothing happened that year except Oliver! winning Best Picture and some war that was on this thing call a television.

Kidding.

1968 is one of the most important American years to study. Bobby is an account of R.F.K’s final day of life, one that truly does live in infamy. On the level with Robert Altman, director Emilio Estevez (Yes, also known as Gordon Bombay) and his stellar cast of some of the biggest names in Hollywood (From Anthony Hopkins, to Shia Lebeouf, to Christian Slater) give us a piece of history we as a nation should embrace as both tragic and inspiring. **** Stars