Culture

Oh, to be that cigarette.Vicky Christina Barcelona continues what seems to be Woody Allen's never-ending introspective into the long and winding road of love's labors lost and found and lost again and forever talked about. The prolific and diminutive Woodman has been regurgitating his New York City neuroses across the screen on an almost annual basis for more than 40 years.

The film begins and continues with a narrator. Other than the name Chuck Norris in the opening credits, there is nothing that makes me cringe in dreaded anticipation more than voice-over. If I had wanted a novel on tape, I would have gone to the Bend Library. I was glad that VCB didn't have Allen the actor in it. He has become a sad caricature of himself. But there he was, taking over an early scene in a restaurant. The character Vicky, played by the Brit actress Rebecca Hall, was doing Woody better than Soon-Yi ever could. She had the same lines, tensions, the facial expressions, the fears, constrained tone, and probably the same NY shrink. Ten minutes, and the movie was burdened with a monotone narrator filling in this sketchy New Yorker short story pretending to be a movie, and a tall, female version of Allen. I moved against the wall separating my theater from the one showing Mamma Mia and pressed my ear deep into the dried popcorn oil stains in the hope that Meryl Streep's wailing ABBA tunes would drown out the nonsense Allen was forcing his actors to inflict on the six of us in the auditorium. I longed to be in the next theater with the middle-aged, cat-owning women singing along with Meryl and Pierce.

I eventually overcame Hall's imitation of Allen to marvel at her perfect American accent and ability to play a short, neurotic New Yorker, even at 5'9". Patricia Clark was perfect in her limited screen time playing a woman trapped in a loveless life of quiet desperation. Scarlett Johansson, I think she was saying something but I'm sorry. Anytime she's on the screen, I have this humming in my ears, and breathing and time both stop.

Jungle boogie. In the decade since he became a household name Ben Stiller has drifted primarily towards two comfortably generic personas: the tightly-wound, put-upon Everyman (see: Meet the Parents, Night at the Museum) and the preening buffoon (see: Zoolander, Starsky & Hutch). All the world loves a clown, and Stiller has been content to be one, nuance be damned.

Tropic Thunder, however, finds Stiller as star, co-writer and director attempting a skewering of Hollywood - a genre that requires a scalpel, where he favors blunt instruments. The set-up casts Stiller in buffoon mode as Tugg Speedman, an action-film star whose box-office clout is running out of steam and whose attempt at "serious actor" respectability playing mentally-challenged in Simple Jack flopped miserably. He's leading the ensemble in a Vietnam War drama titled Tropic Thunder, along with co-stars — including multi-Oscar winner Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.), a Method maniac who had his pigment altered to play an African-American soldier; and heroin-addicted comedy actor Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) — who are causing just as much trouble for rookie director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan). So Cockburn and the movie's grizzled technical advisor (Nick Nolte) decide to drop the actors into the jungle for a more guerilla-style filming technique — where they promptly encounter real danger in the form of a well-armed drug operation.

The opening 10 minutes hold out the promise of one of the year's most hilarious comedies, including a trio of faux movie trailers introducing the preferred milieu for each of the three principal actors. Lazarus and Tobey Maguire make cow eyes at each other as closeted gay monks in Satan's Abbey; Portnoy plays multiple flatulent, fat-suited characters in a vicious swipe at Eddie Murphy. Even the early moments of over-the-top violence from the movie-within-the-movie — a bayonet-slashed private (Jay Baruchel) tries to gather his intestines, and Speedman's character goes down in a hail of Platoon-inspired gunfire — are funny in context. Give Stiller a full-length feature of cinematic parody sketches, and it'd kill.

Truth is, we ran out of waterboards. The Apatow comedy train chugs along with a new installment, Pineapple Express.

You cannot get more of a skeletal plot here. Dale Denton (Seth Rogen), a 26-year-old process server with an inexplicable high school girlfriend, witnesses a murder while on the job and exits the scene leaving a roach of Pineapple Express, the ultimate killer weed. Turns out his subpoena target is the dealer that supplies his connection, Saul (James Franco). Soon they're on the run from cops, drug crime warlords, evil Asians, and whoever else crosses their path. Almost all the dialogue seemed or was ad-libbed, reminiscent of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," but lacking Larry David's Seinfeld-esque plot twists.

I have to admit there are some redeemable qualities James Franco was excellent as the weeded-out dumber-than-dirt dope dealer. As of late, Franco seems typecast to play the guy possessed with angst and inner turmoil in most of his characters (Spiderman, Annapolis) in contrast to his slacker role on Apatow's late 1990s television gem Freaks and Geeks. It was refreshing to see him in this role of weed-soaked, dim-witted, likable, grinning idiot-it was almost like getting to know Brad Pitt's character from True Romance. And Danny McBride (Fist Foot Way) as Red, the middle-man drug connection, steals the show playing part tough guy drug dealer part wimp-ass squealer.