Tropic Thunder

Although they feel the dampness of the Vietnamese jungle on their own skin and firmly grip rifles in their hands, terms like "horror" and "sacrifice" are, for them, known only from the pages of the script of this caricatured version of a war film. But Ben Stiller, here both on and behind the camera, knows exactly what he’s doing: the best parodies are the ones that closely follow the classics they mock. Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola, taken as the starting point, becomes in the hands of the screenwriters both something for the body and something for the soul – simultaneously fuel for ongoing gags and the engine behind surprising character transformations. The genre-typical motif of boys becoming men takes on, in Stiller’s film, the dimension of industry self-therapy. Tropic Thunder is loud, crude, and unfiltered from start to finish—and that’s exactly why it stands out as a brilliant satire of Hollywood’s obsession with money and the massive egos of its stars. Oh, and as a bonus, you get Tom Cruise in one of the wildest performances of his career.

BEWARE: We’ll screen the shockingly funny director’s cut.

before the screenings intro by Jan Lubaczewski and Maciej Satora