Saw these DVDs:-

Fury

Not to be confused with the Brian De Palma movie about ESP, this one is a Thai martial arts movie from the people who gave us "Ong Bak" and "Tom Yum Goong", and launched Tony Jaa Panom's career as an action superstar. Is it more of the same? Yes and no. The intensity is the same but the action star now is a petite 16-ish girl with SOME moves, mang. Yanin "Jija" Visnitamanda is the rising star here, as an autistic savant of sorts who learns Muay Thai from movies and neighbours practising.

Wafer-thin plot aside, it is remarkably cool to see a teenaged cutie pie roundhouse kicking booty with the ferocity shown here. I enjoyed this immensely and the acting is somehow impeccable. Only qualm I have is the slow build-up with the usual Thai-style sex scenes - lotsa male butts no female, taped nipples, no genitalia. Usual gripe about the subtitling - this time it's a literal translation from Mandarin with phrases like "huanqian" (Return the money) and "xiaopang" (little fatty) cropping up. No "da pang" (big fatty) as Big Bri' (victim of fat jokes on the message board I go to) is not in the movie. Heh!

Tropic Thunder

Just got this as I'm somewhat a fan of Jack Black, Ben Stiller and toilet jokes. The first movie to show Stiller as an auteur, it's not too bad. I guess the laughter should have been LOL all the time instead of coming in spurts. Tom Cruise completely steals the show as an overbearing producer with some slinky dance chops. Robert Downey Jr. also gives a good performance as the actor who immerses totally in a role, here playing a black man, and has some insightful gems - "You never go full retard in order to win an Oscar" and "We're all gay once in a while, this is Hollywood".

Ben Stiller is still stuck in his Mr. Furious pose. Black is completely forgettable and his snipes at drug-taking mostly dredges up fat comedians who OD'ed - John Belushi, John Candy and Chris Farley. This one mostly takes pot-shots at Apocalypse Now - the tiger scene and the encounter with Brando at the end - both parodied unconvincingly and generally not very funny. For some jokes to make sense - the miscued explosion at the start, for instance, you really need to see Hearts of Darkness, the doc on the making of AN. All in all, a bit of a pointless comedy as the subject is old news and when I first saw this, I thought they were gonna parody Rambo movies, like the Brit indie Rambow Now.