Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief **

Director: Chris Columbus
Cast: Logan Lerman, Alexandra Daddario, Brandon T. Jackson
Sean Bean, Kevin McKidd, Steve Coogan, Melina Kanakaredes
Rosario Dawson, Pierce Brosnan, Catherine Keener, Uma Thurman
Joe Pantoliano, Dylan Neal, Jake Abel

With the end of the Harry Potter movies in a couple of years, the vacant spot for teenager magical hero is up for grabs.
One of the first entries we get is Percy Jackson (Lerman) the demigod, son of Poseidon (McKidd) and Sally Jackson (a misused Keener) who discovers his origin when a fury tries to kill him.
He also learns that his best friend Grover (Jackson) is a satyr working as his caretaker and his teacher Mr. Brunner (Brosnan) is a centaur who also works as trainer and counselor in a demigods training camp.
When his mother is kidnapped by a minotaur, Percy learns that the gods of Olympus are in a hassle over his alleged theft of Zeus' (Bean) thunder-don't ask-and war will erupt if he doesn't return it in time.
Of course the movie never cares to explain why Percy is accused of such a crime or how the gods could think he did it if he was ignorant of his ancestry. What the movie is interested in is setting in motion a plot to update Greek myths and have Percy become a Homeric hero who shields himself from Medusa's (a deliciously slimy Thurman) stare with his iPod and escapes the evil lotus-eaters from a Las Vegas casino where Lady GaGa is the musical artist of choice.
The fact that it's easy to see how the whole movie worries on ways to introduce possible situations for a sequel is not half as annoying as Columbus' aesthetic choices and direction.
You can practically hum Potter's musical theme from the notes Percy's composer Christophe Beck chooses for this movie.
The whole thing is more preoccupied with becoming the next Harry Potter than to carve out its own identity or take advantage of the richness within Greek mythology and its repercussions on our daily life (which happen to be more than anything crafted in Hogwarts...).
If to that you add the inane nature with which Columbus orchestrates the action sequences and the visual effects which seem to have been made circa 2001 and you will realize there's nothing much that sounds too appealing about this hero.
If it weren't for the rather impressive supporting cast (Bean and McKidd quarrel with such authority that you won't dare to laugh at their cheesy dialogues) which turns into a "who's next?" sort of guessing game, there would be little to enjoy in this film.
The younger leads seem to have been told to act as if they lacked any charm and were playing action figures while the somewhat dark humor (that must come from the novel it's based on) is killed by Columbus' need to chew, digest and throw up everything for us.
When we learn that Hades is located in Hollywood, our chuckles are killed by the awful Columbus who decides to set the road trip there to a certain AC/DC track.
At least he's faithful to the movie's mythical spirit, for every time the film is about to do something good, Columbus pulls off a Sisyphus, dragging us down with him.

Tropic Thunder **

Director: Ben Stiller
Cast: Ben Stiller,
Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr.
Nick Nolte, Steve Coogan
Jay Baruchel, Tom Cruise
Brandon T. Jackson
Matthew McCounaghey

There's only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, or so goes the adage which perfectly helps describe this film.
What begins as a satire of the most cynical, rarely seen, kind, slowly descends into a film you no longer laugh with, but at (or sometimes just cringe), as it proves that Hollywood has mastered the art of blockbusters, creating stars and draining a clever idea until its just left stale.
The plot centers around the shooting of a Vietnam war film called "Tropic Thunder" that has brought together three of the brightest male stars available.
Action superstar Tugg Speedman (Stiller), scatological comedian Jeff Portnoy (Black) and five time Academy Award winning, method actor, the Australian Kirk Lazarus (Downey Jr.) who is playing an African American by going blackface.
Their very different screen personas are established in the absolutely brilliant prologue (to which the rest of the movie sadly never lives up) in which things as seemingly inocuous as trailers deliver some hilarious, cleverly conceived critiques on the roles of actors, audience perception and studios in the ultimate concept of cinema.
Later we see director Damien Cockburn (Coogan) as he struggles to capture the action while the actors' egos are the only ones in full battle.
When he is threatened by a studio executive (Cruise in "look at me being funny and showy in a fatsuit" mode) he decides to follow the advice of the mysterious John Tayback (Nolte), who wrote the book the film is based upon, who suggests that the only way his cast will get the work done is if they go to real war.
They take the cast to the middle of a jungle infested with members of a drug gang who assume the actors are DEA agents, while the actors think of them as really good stuntmen.
When things start getting out of control Speedman decides this will be the role of his career and goes forward with the guerrilla shoot, while Lazarus tries to convince the others that they are no longer in a movie.
Stiller (who wrote the script with Etan Cohen and the amazing Justin Theroux) makes an intriguing first impression with his "war as a game" take on how the media has made us perceive violence.
When one of the actors spills his fake guts after being shot, the scene makes for an uncomfortable moment where some audience members will laugh out loud at the silliness of it all, while others will wonder when did it become normal to laugh at guts being spilled.
Perhaps Stiller was trying to point out how people react to different genre stimuli and go "this is a Ben Stiller film, so this is supposed to be funny", leading us to examine carefully the way in which we process information regarding the channel and medium.
But the problem is that most of the film suffers because of this, you wonder if it's trying to be bitter, morbid, smart or just going with the flow.
It offers some funny observations on various industry types (and the film is probably enjoyed more by those who know about the trade) but it never lets us forget the fact that these very people greenlit this and allowed it to be made.
The Academy Awards are a major source of gags in the film and while the writers honestly think they are one step ahead of the organization by revealing how it chooses to award people, truth is you can almost touch the fact that in this blasé take, they are also demanding the Academy takes notice of them and it is so with almost every other thing in it.
Except Downey Jr. who aptly owns the film with a performance that is always a step ahead of the others. Playing "a dude playing another dude who's playing a dude" he brings a certain dignity to something that could've resulted highly offensive and obscene.
Lazarus' love for the craft (he never leaves character even as the others endure personal hell) highlights what is both great and wrong about film, giving Downey the distinction of being the rare kind of figure who can be box office draw while preserving artistry.
That we never think of his "blackface" as his character or as Downey Jr. as Lazarus is a testimony to an actor at his very best.
"Tropic Thunder" is sometimes too clever for its own good, like the popular kid at school who hides his geekiness to preserve his coolness, it knows it can do better, but chooses to settle. It encompasses itself perfectly with Kevin Sandusky (a scene stealing Baruchel), a young actor who ends up becoming the leader in the background because he knows how to balance different parts of his personality. During a key scene he confesses to Lazarus that he became an actor because of him, while acknowledging to Speedman that he also watched his action movies repeated times. Sandusky, like the film, is both its attack and its salvation, its most fervent admirer and fiercest enemy and as war itself the results are rarely a laughing matter.