Pun Salad

Written, directed, and starring Ben Stiller, Tropic Thunder follows the travails of a big Hollywood war movie, filmed on location in Vietnam, based on a best-selling memoir. The production is troubled: a novice director can't control his actors, cameras, or special effects. So the director gets the bright idea to dump the actors in the remote jungle, filming them surreptitiously as they make their way back to civilization. Things go very wrong.

There's a lot of star power in the movie: Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Tom Cruise, Matthew McConaughey, and a host of cameos. Each is a wicked satirization of Hollywood vanity, vapidity, venality, and vulgarity. It's pretty funny.

True fact: this movie satirizes insensitive attitudes of aforesaid Hollywood types toward the mentally retarded. But some people kind of short-circuited that to "this movie makes fun of the mentally retarded." Honest.

As a result, the DVD includes a tail-end public service announcement, and so does this post: