Fresh from screening Ben Stiller’s new film Tropic Thunder for the August issue of Men’s Vogue, writer Adam Green declares “for me, it edges out Superbad for Funniest Movie since Borat.”
(PRWEB) July 23, 2008 -- Fresh from screening Ben Stiller’s new film Tropic Thunder for the August issue of Men’s Vogue, writer Adam Green declares “for me, it edges out Superbad for Funniest Movie since Borat.” According to reports, Tropic Thunder enjoyed a budget of as much as $100 million, a record for an R-rated comedy. The film being written, produced, directed and starred in by Stiller, is the most fully realized, self-assured achievement of his career, writes Green. Stiller's co-star, Robert Downey Jr., calls him “the closest living thing to a Chaplin that we have in this industry” but he’s “not a comedian – he’s an actor totally in control and totally fearless.” Green observes that Hollywood has done well by Stiller and the support of his costars and the industry is a testament to his talent, motivation, and the ability to inspire, attracting the likes of Tom Cruise, Matthew McConaughey, and Nick Nolte to play bit parts in the movie.
Highlights from the interview include:
At the end of filming Tropic Thunder, Stiller gave the entire cast and
crew T-shirts that read I SURVIVED BEN STILLER’S COMEDY DEATH CAMP.
According to Robert Downey Jr., he was only half kidding:
“When you’re working with Ben, there will be casualties. If you’re not
bringing your A-game, you are going to suffer. If you do not have an
A-game to bring, you are likely to be destroyed.”
But as tough as Stiller was on his cast, he pushed himself even harder. Downey attests to that:
“It’s
lunchtime and you’re wondering how the hell you’re going to shoot
another six hours of this garbage. Then you see Ben eating a tiny meal
with some peppers as a snack for later, then going to get his arms
engorged with his trainer or work out with the Pilates gal before
starting all over again, and you realize that this guy did not breathe
a sigh of relief ever. He was on a fucking vision quest – and it was
disgusting and it was amazing and it was relentless and it was
brilliant.”
Jack Black goes on to say:
“I would tease him sometimes, I’d
tell him, ‘Come on, dude, you must be in Scientology – you’re way too
motivated and aggressive.’”
The idea for Tropic Thunder came to Stiller years ago while making his major film debut in Spielberg’s 1987 WWII drama Empire of the Sun: “It seemed like all my friends – almost every actor in Hollywood but me, in fact – were going off and doing these Vietnam War films. They would go to these fake boot camps for a few weeks to prepare, and then come out talking about how grueling and intense it was, how they all bonded like a real Army platoon. I just found something hilarious about these self-involved actors seeing themselves as heroes.”
Jack Black on the script:
“There aren’t many funny scripts out there. This is hard funny — to the
point where I don’t know if it’s going to go over with the rest of the
world. I think it was Dave Chappelle who said that, in the comedy
world, only comedians laugh at this extra-funny hyper shit. So, if it
makes me laugh, it might be too funny.”
For more from the August 2008 issue of Men's Vogue visit www.mensvogue.com
TERA Patrick, star of "Struggle Pretty Captive" and "Reign of Tera," is going mainstream. The porn queen is being considered for Quentin Tarantino's remake of "Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill!" "Quentin loves her, and she's a dead ringer for original star Tura Satana," said our source. Patrick gushes over the Russ Meyer 1966 cult film about three women on a violent desert road trip. "It would be the hottest remake ever, and I'm honored to be considered," she told Page Six. "I was built for this part."
Helena Bonham Carter could soon be joining the battle between man and cyborg.
The British actress is in talks to board “Terminator Salvation,” the fourth installment in the franchise kicked off by James Cameron in 1984. Roles in the new film have been kept under wraps, but insiders described the Bonham Carter role as small but pivotal.
Principal photography on the movie, which looks at the origins of the battle between humans and Skynet, started last month in New Mexico, with the idea that most exteriors would be shot before a potential actors strike. Warner Bros. is scheduled to release the action film in May. It comes from “Charlie’s Angels” director Joseph “McG” Nichol.
The addition of Bonham Carter — who received an Oscar nomination for 1998’s “The Wings of the Dove” — would bring a prestige element to a big summer crowd-pleaser. Christian Bale, who reprises his role as Batman in “The Dark Knight” this summer, is set to star as John Connor.
“Salvation,” however, wouldn’t be the first event movie Bonham Carter has recently been in. She starred as Bellatrix Lestrange in Warners’ 2007 “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” and is set to reprise that role in the franchise’s next two films. She was in theaters last year with “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”
Although Dan Simmons' literary-allusion-packed Hyperion novels have long been loved and critically-acclaimed, they've always seemed to resist conversion into film. Episodic, cyber-spiritual, and strange, the first novel tells the intertwined stories of several characters trying to get wishes granted by an entity called the Shrike on Hyperion, a planet full of really cool monsters and scary trees. Corporate-state weirdness and singularity manufacturing technologies provide a dreamy, far-future backdrop. Its sequel, Fall of Hyperion, is a more straightforward tale of posthuman political machinations, but no less complex. How will newly-announced writer Trevor Sands turn both books into one, coherent flick?
Apparently, by simplifying the hell out of stories whose main appeal has always been their rich complexity. According to Hollywood Reporter:
Sands won over the execs by taking a selective approach to the two novels' multiple points of view in a way that managed to coherently and unconfusingly tell the story.
Sands is best-known for a short film called Inside that played at festivals. Since then, he's worked on several as-yet-unreleased scifi projects, including a "far future" action flick with Sony called Resurrection, as well as the scripts for Six Billion Dollar Man and an adaptation of David Brin's novel Startide Rising.
Sounds like Sands is all about science fiction, which is a good sign. But putting both Hyperion novels together into one film? Hard to imagine. All I can say is they'd better get some damn good designers to work on this one because Hyperion needs to look awesome. Give me good lightning trees and a cool-looking WorldWeb singularity network, and I might just pay the cost of admission.
Ummm why not use Tom Selleck? He's not looking that old yet.
Not necessarily yet. Words is he's reading a script based on the hit 80's TV show that starred Tom Selleck as the OG PI.
Entertainment
Weekly reports that Matthew McConaughey has been offered the role of
Thomas Magnum in Universal Pictures' adaptation of "Magnum P.I.," based
on the hit '80s TV series that starred Tom Selleck.
McConaughey
is reportedly reading the script from writer/director Rawson Marshall
Thurber (Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story) and will decide shortly.
When
it comes to catchphrases, "There can be only one" is about the least
appropriate statement imaginable when it comes to the HIGHLANDER
franchise. While the first movie