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
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 Yes, Tropic Thunder, a classic spin on a totally outdated genre, plays out all of these ridiculous scenarios.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
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