Short Takes

TROPIC THUNDER Scratch the surface of Ben Stiller's satire of Hollywood cynicism and narcissism, and among some big laughs you'll find mostly deeper, more cozily embedded strains of cynicism and narcissism. The setting is the set of a mega-budget combat picture, the sort where the grimmest hell of war is an understocked craft-service table. When hand-wringing director Steve Coogan's attempt to out-head-wound Saving Private Ryan and out-napalm Apocalypse Now comes up not only short but behind schedule, he troops his pretty-boy platoon off-script into real wilderness, real action—and real danger from Golden Triangle druglords. Stiller (who directed and co-wrote the script with Justin Theroux and Evan Goldberg) again plays a Tom Cruise surrogate/wannabe, and he nails a specific brand of clueless superstar insecurity while making sure no one could possibly mistake it for his own: You get the idea he wants people to eye his frequently flashed biceps and think, "Hey, he's like Tom Cruise, only smarter." Cruise, meanwhile, who's always most comfortable behind a mask, does a hey-look-it's-Tom-Cruise-cutting-up act in a cameo as a prosthetically enhanced cutthroat mogul: it's not particularly funny (although his pudding-hipped come-to-the-dark-side come-on to Stiller's agent is something to see), but its obscene vehemence is almost too revealing—a flash of writhing id in the bowels of Pandora's box. Handsomely shot by John Toll, the movie could pass visually for a real-deal fireball-a-palooza, which doesn't make it funnier; it's also the kind of Hollywood send-up whose inside baseball consists of pretty soft pitches. (Regarding the final twist, you don't have to watch Sunday Morning Shootout to marvel at the industry acclaim for a movie shot on surveillance cameras, or to wonder what that film actually looks like.) Ironically, it's the movie's most spot-on jabs—about the casting of Anglos in minority parts and the fetishizing of the developmentally challenged—that are raising the ire of protesters. As the most potentially offensive of these gambits, a Method madman in cigar-chomping blackface who goes all Fred "The Hammer" Williamson for his art, Robert Downey Jr. takes the biggest gamble and gets the biggest laughs with his unintelligible white-Negro posturing. Don't arrive late, or you'll miss a Very Big Star leering hilariously through a fake trailer for what looks like Brokeback Monastery. —Jim Ridley (Now playing)

VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA Leave it to Woody Allen to make a romantic comedy in which all the major players end up either single, homicidal or trapped in safe, boring marriages. Talk about modern love! Yet, from those unlikely materials, Allen has crafted a wry and thoughtful film about the peculiar stirrings of the heart that is certainly his most accomplished piece of work since 2005's Match Point and arguably his funniest in the eight years since Small Time Crooks. When brainy, long-legged grad student Vicky (Rebecca Hall) arrives in Barcelona on summer vacation with her blond, impetuous girlfriend Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) in tow, it's not long before the two cross paths with the broodingly handsome painter, José Antonio (Javier Bardem), who promptly attempts to seduce them both. For a while, Vicky Cristina Barcelona seems to be shaping up as a diverting if insubstantial bedroom farce, but it's one of the unexpected pleasures of Allen's film that very little is as superficial as meets the eye. A hedonist at heart, José Antonio turns out to have his own complexities and depth, as do his two latest conquests. Then, around an hour or so in, Penélope Cruz makes her entrance as Bardem's erstwhile amor and muse, Maria Elena, and sets this heretofore perfectly enjoyable enterprise ablaze like a raging comic fireball. —Scott Foundas (Opens Friday at Green Hills; see the interview with Woody Allen to be posted Thursday on nashvillescene.com)

HENRY POOLE IS HERE Maudlin whimsy is everywhere in this earnest religious comedy-drama from director Mark Pellington, best known for high-concept, low-yield thrillers like Arlington Road and The Mothman Prophecies. Affectingly despondent in some scenes, merely mopey in others, Luke Wilson does his best Eeyore imitation as a sad sack who buys a run-down home and broadcasts his sullen Ask Me About My Deep Dark Secret misery to the neighborhood. Say, Luke, what about fixing that crumbling stucco? "Noooo," he groans portentously, "I won't be here that looong...." To his dismay, a nosy neighbor (Adriana Barraza) spies a water stain on his back wall and has an apostolic vision—and soon the local priest (George Lopez), the mute girl next door (Morgan Lily), her nurturing mom (Radha Mitchell) and even a near-blind checkout girl (Rachel Seiferth) are coming round to impress upon him that miracles are possible. It's mean to make fun of a movie that so desperately wants to believe in its own goodwill: I kept rooting for it to succeed—for Albert Torres' script to match its sincerity with complexity, and for Pellington's muted, close-up-heavy direction to produce that longed-for spiritual entertainment that engages both the head and heart. But the unbelievable characters behave like props in a Vacation Bible School skit. On the whole, the well-intentioned but irritatingly pat movie takes that deus ex machina thing a little too literally. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday at Green Hills)