Movie Review: Tropic Thunder
Best comedy of the summer for me, hands down. I’m not a Ben Stiller fan at all, but his writing effort and acting left me laughing long after I left the theatre. It earned my respect and the R rating.
Before the film starts, the audience is treated to fake trailers and a commercial for the principal characters. It completely gets people in the mood for what’s about to take place. You have the fading action star in Ben Stiller, the award winning Australian method actor Robert Downey Jr., the Rap star Brandon T. Jackson, and the crazy comedian Jack Black. Of course those are just the characters they play in the movie.
If you’ve seen the previews, you know what’s going on. A bunch of prima donna actors are dropped off in the jungle to get a more realistic war movie. Like most comedies, things go horribly wrong and they are thrown in the middle of a real life battle. Hilarity ensues as they try to figure out what’s part of the movie and what’s not. That’s pretty much it for the plot. It’s there as a vehicle for the actors to say ridiculous things and get out of hilarious situations. The real comedy comes from the dialogue. The conversations the characters have provide the core of the laughs. Robert Downey Jr. steals almost every scene he’s in. Each and every character gets at least one big laugh, even the smaller roles and cameos. Speaking of cameos, if you haven’t heard yet, there’s a pretty spectacular one with Tom Cruise. I’m not one to speak kindly of Cruise lately, but this role makes me want to forgive all previous blunders and bizarre antics. Seriously, he’s the only other person snatching scenes when he’s there.
About the boycotts and negative comments about its offensive nature: they just don’t know what they’re talking about. The movie is about Hollywood, the Academy, actors, and big budget movies. In fact, the only negative thing I can say about the movie is sometimes it’s too direct in it’s bashing of Hollywood. There were a few jokes that were over my head, and I spend a lot time watching movies. But they still manage to do enough with the physical comedy, sight gags, and other jokes to keep even those not familiar with the Hollywood system rolling in the isles.
If you’re at all a fan of movies and need a good laugh, I really recommend this one. Jack Black needs to do more rated R comedies and Robert Downey just needs to be in more movies, period. I even found myself wishing for more Tom Cruise, which is miraculous, all things considered. So what are you waiting for? Go laugh!
Tag Cloud Issue with Delicious Update
I’ve been using Delicious.com for about 2 months now. It was my first social bookmarking experience, and I’ve enjoyed using the site. It does what it’s supposed to do for me, and I’ve even found it useful in keeping an online location for all my links, as well as a way to share what I’m surfing.
The new design was just released a few days ago, and I think it was a good update. Most of the major changes aren’t visible, which is good, because I think the layout of del.icio.us was fine the way it was. Everythin. Even the name change is welcome. I personally found the separation of the word “delicious” with periods to be annoying, even if it was a clever domain name.
There was a little problem that I ran into while bookmarking some pages today. When I used the old bookmarking shortcut I had on Safari, it would leave out the recommended tags or popular tags that I’d enjoyed from before the update. Not only were there no recommended tags, but even my own tag cloud was missing. The only thing that would come up was an autofill feature for tags that I’ve used previously. Handy, but not enough when I can’t remember exactly what tags I’ve used before.
I had thought that they might have left it out in the update, but when I used the “Create New Bookmark” feature, it revealed the old glorious cloud of tags to choose from. It was a small scare, but a scare nonetheless. I don’t know what causes everything else to work fine except that, but I was able to fix the issue simply by using the new supplied posting shortcut. So be sure you update your “post to Delicious” button so you don’t lose the features.
Delicious Gets an Update
Popular social bookmarking site delicious just updated their site. You can read about the improvements at the delicious.blog. The changes are subtle, but they look great.
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Sara Bareilles - Between the Lines
Sara Bareilles' "Between the Lines" is the Song of the Week for April 20 to 26.