Groverdox

In "Son of Rambow", two boys with wildly different backgrounds collaborate in making their own version of "First Blood".

Will is quiet, shy, imaginative and withdrawn, personality traits that are exacerbated by his family's membership in the Plymouth Brethren cult, which forbids him from watching TV, even when the class are shown a documentary.

Lee is regarded as a troublemaker. He is neglected at home and badly wants the acceptance of his bullying older brother, Lawrence.

The two have enormous reserves of creativity and savoir-faire which are untapped at home and at school but are brought to the forefront when they start working on the movie.

Meanwhile, their school takes in a busload of foreign exchange students from France, the one named Didier immediately getting everyone's attention. He's kind of a punk, and dresses like he fell into the bargain bin at a Jean-Paul Gaultier clearance store.

Didier wants to be part of the movie, and since all the girls follow him like he's the Pied Piper, they soon want in as well, much to Lee's annoyance.

How this turns out I'll leave for you to discover.

It's hard not to be won over by "Son of Rambow"'s winsome charm. When you see some of the crazy stunts Lee has Will do, such as catapulting him through the air to land harmlessly on a soft pile, you know nobody's really going to get hurt, so the movie loses a certain edge. You're along for the ride but not hooked.

I'm not surprised that Will Poulter became a star. The actor who plays Will is mostly winsome and naive. Poulter is a bunch of things as Lee: he can be rough, intimidating, needy, but also caring and thoughtful. It's in the face: he can appear cute as a cherub in one shot and calculating and conniving in another.

I liked "Son of Rambow" quite a bit. It's a charming movie, but I don't think I'll be thinking about it for long.

So I finally got around to watching "Tropic Thunder". I've heard it described as a comedy classic.

The movie is about a group of actors, who all represent archetypal stars that filmgoers will recognise, attempting to make a war movie in the Vietnamese jungle. After an unfortunate mishap, where an expensive pyrotechnic effect is triggered before the cast is ready, the diabolical producer Les Grossman threatens to pull the plug if the actors don't start bringing their A-game.

Inspired, the film director tries for a Herzogian approach in bringing the actors deeper into the jungle with hidden cameras watching them and leaving them there.

They discover a group of drug barons in the South-East Asian jungle, and incorrectly assume that they are actors also, and part of the movie they believe they're still making.

"Tropic Thunder" is pretty funny at first, and I hoped it would stay that way, but unfortunately I felt it got bogged down with action movie clichés towards the end, which is ironic considering those are the clichés the movie spends its first act making fun of. It tries to make fun of action movies, and then be a great action movie as well, but it only really succeeds in the first aim.

The movie is star-studded, and most people will come away from it remembering the unrecognisable Tom Cruise and Robert Downey Jr. As Les Grossman and method-actor parody, Kirk Lazarus. There's also Jack Black as Jeff Portnoy, an overweight comedic actor who also happens to be addicted to heroin. That, and his lank blonde hair, make him a dead ringer for Chris Farley, which is kind of cold since Farley OD'd.

Less successful is Ben Stiller (who also co-wrote and directed) as a faded action film star. He just doesn't look or act the part.

As top heavy as the movie is with stars, it's even more impressive that first time actor Brandon Soo Hoo steals every scene he's in as a twelve-year-old drug baron. That should have been a star-making turn.

"Tropic Thunder" starts like it could be a classic Hollywood satire, but ends more like an action movie wannabe. I still liked it quite a bit.

In my opinion, comedy is the hardest genre of film to get right. How many really funny movies can you think of, off the top of your head? How many make you laugh consistently, throughout?

"The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!" is one such movie. I hadn't seen it since I was a child. It's interesting re-watching things like this. I get a lot more of the jokes than I did back then, like the sequence at the beginning with Leslie Nielsen's Frank Drebin crashing a meeting of foreign dignitaries who are hostile to the United States. This time I recognised all of them.

"The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!" is a classic simply by virtue of being funnier than almost any other comedy you can name. It's not as good as comedies get, however. Some of the jokes don't land, and it's never side-splittingly funny.