Showing at a local home cinema IV

Continuing my series of posts on Home Cinema.:)

Tropic Thunder (2008). We’d originally caught this movie at a late night screening last year in November. Unfortunately, Ling was right smack in the early weeks of her first trimester, and the early scenes made her nauseous, so she had to leave the theatre.

The show, however, is as good as the critics have said: it’s choked full of adult language but crazily hilarious. The story: a bunch of actors are thrown into a real war zone to film the ultimate war movie. The only problem: they don’t know it’s a real war zone and the bullets and landmines are real LOL.

There’re two standouts: Robert Downey Jr who plays an Australian actor who plays an Black American in the movie. Saying that loud alone makes me laugh! And there’s Tom Cruise in a fat suit who utters more profanity in 5 minutes of his screen time than all his movies combined.

Ling unfortunately couldn’t get most of the jokes, so I don’t think she liked the movie very much. Me, I loved it!

– easily one of the best movies I’ve seen recently.

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Body of Lies (2008). Director Ridley Scott is no stranger to filming in the Middle-East. This is like his fourth movie set in the region: there was Gladiator, then Black Hawk Down, then Kingdom of Heaven, then this. The premise this time is on CIA operations in the Iraq and Jordan with Leonardo di Caprio plays an intelligence operative on the trail of a terrorist mastermind behind a string of bombings in Europe, and Russell Crowe playing his CIA handler.

There isn’t a lot of violent action or gore in this production: the movie is right smack in the thriller rather than action genre. But the story is interesting, moves along briskly, and acting is almost uniformly good (outside this Iranian actress who plays a low-key love interest), especially Brit actor Mark Strong who plays the Jordanian head of intelligence. The latter has one of the best of the best lines in the movie: “In matters of intelligence, I am the king.”