‘Dear leader’ snubs Oscars with his own film awards

Kim Jong-il, the ‘dear leader’ of North Korea, has surprised Hollywood with his own film awards – a grand affair said to put the cash-strapped Oscars in the shade. The ceremony is understood to be taking place in a purpose-built gold head 50,000 miles in diameter, with each gong accompanied by a 5,000-strong orchestra specialising in the work of John Williams.

The current favourite for Best Picture is Revolutionary Road, which Mr Kim claimed ‘showed the American dream for the soulless fantasy that it is’ while The Dark Knight has controversially been nominated in the Best Documentary category. The dear leader remarked that the film illustrated the depths to which American society has sunk due to the corruption and lack of leadership that was present in any democracy. He claimed that the west’s belief that this film could be fiction was self-delusion of the highest order.

‘In North Korea’, he insisted, ‘vigilantes such as this manbat would not be tolerated. The state would squash him like a bug. There would be no mercy.’

According to Betfair.com, The Dark Knight is being run a close second by Tropic Thunder – seen by many in North Korea as a searing indictment of incompetent American military adventurism.

‘I am also liking the Sean Penn in Milk‘, continued Mr Kim. ‘His is a noble portrayal of a happy man full of love who is cut down in prime. The American society is very jealous of such people and destroys them without remorse.’

Footage from the awards ceremony can be seen on North Korean state television, with commentary from Mr Kim available on its premium cable offshoot, Jong-o-vision HD.

FILM: Tropic Thunder – Fun but flabby, and eats itself

The late, late, Tropic Thunder review – possibly in time for a DVD release, and the bigger multiplexes. Much of the first third of Ben Stiller’s comedy is unnecessary, and seems to exist largely for Steve Coogan, who gets killed so early on he becomes irrelevant. Why not just dump the actors straight in their jungle nightmare and fill in the blanks with the odd bit of canny dialogue? The film opens in a jawdropping all-action style that it goes on to spoof – lightly at first, before eagerly employing so many of the genre’s trappings that it becomes what it mocks. The budget is colossal, and overshadows the conclusion – explosions, pitched battles and the machinations of a drug-farming child. Boys with toys and all too much, too big.

The middle section lives up to its promise; Robert Downey Jr in blackface is superb, and the racial sparring with his actually black co-star is underused – this is the only point at which the film tests its limits. The ‘retard’ aspect, represented by Stiller’s action hero’s failed Oscar bid (in the role of a Dr Dolittle farmhand called ‘Simple Jack‘), is a must for lovers of the politically incorrect but occasionally veers into the blunt unfunniness of such genre clonkers as Sports Movie, aka The Comebacks (a little better than Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, etc…praise so faint you need a microscope to see it).

As the jungle frenzy hits its stride with Stiller murdering an endangered animal, it is cut-off – too quick, too quick. An all too brief musing on the actor’s mask and some spectacular makeup is all that really follows. In the back of it all is Tom Cruise as a bald, evil movie mogul with enormous hands and a taste for salacious R&B. While often called a cameo, it is much more than that; a flat-out rendition of the sinister and the terrible, culminating in an extraordinary thru-credits dance sequence that mesmerises the mind. Cruise is no stranger to playing the unpleasant (see Magnolia), but that shouldn’t detract from his comedy tour-de-force here. It’s not enough to like it simply because it’s ‘bold’ for him not to play the hero; like it because he’s damn good at it. A shame that can’t be said for the rest of the movie.

Stiller oils up for middle age, flexes movie muscle

Tropic Thunder made its debut in UK cinemas this weekend, and the reviews helpfully give an indication of its appeal. The high-minded (and faintly curmudgeonly) Derek Malcolm believes it isn’t as clever as it thinks, while Metro’s Larushka Ivan-Zadeh (a fabulous name if ever there was) finds it not to her taste. London Lite’s more geezerly Paul Connolly looks up to it just as Malcolm looks down. Most seem to agree that the best bits are at the start and, that if you can willingly disengage your brain and not expect grand satire, it should be decent if flabby fun. News Hour will hopefully return a verdict later in the week.

Quite why one should expect grand satire is unclear; Zoolander was fun but its target was very soft indeed. (Stiller is no Chris Morris nor, one imagines, does he aspire to be. Incidentally, Morris’s latest bombshell – a satire on terrorists – will be shuffling into cinemas, not TV.) As with media, the fashion industry moves so fast it is quickly beyond parody, especially given the long lead times of cinema. Dodgeball had a crack at the fitness industry, again a soft target – but all three films have something more startling in common: the frequently demonstrated physical perfection of Ben Stiller.

From the Magnum stare in Zoolander to his crotch pump in Dodgeball, to his rippled physique in both the latter and Tropic Thunder, there’s no getting away from the fact that Stiller’s hard abs steal the spotlight – all in the name of parody, of course. Biceps flex and sweat down a determined brow, cresting over muscles that mortal men simply should not have. Does Ben have that painting from Dodgeball hanging in his marital home? The comedian would not have looked out of place in Meet The Spartans, but for one thing – he has a sense of humour. So, what next? A comedy about the ridiculous extremes of athletics, weight lifting, or boxing? Arnold & Arnold: The Early Years? (A fictionalised retelling of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s struggles in Hollywood, when the actor shared an apartment with Gary Coleman – then riding high in Diff’rent Strokes. Stiller as Schwarzenegger, Robert Downey Jr as Coleman.)

Is this a midlife crisis? If so, it has been going on quite a while. Zoolander came out in 2001, when Stiller was 35 – Dodgeball three years later. Perhaps he just loves to sculpt and flaunt, starting every morning with a growl to the mirror: ‘Eye of the tiger Ben, eye of the tiger.’

It has been speculated that the motivation behind Nicolas Cage starring in the dull assassin thriller Bangkok Dangerous was a very public midlife crisis. Nicholas Barber of The Independent was left pondering just why it had been made when: “Cage strips off his motorcycle leathers to show off his tight vest and well-oiled biceps” and everything became clear.

Will Ferrell, as Two Face – he’s not fighting Batman, so is he half black?

Blackface really appears to be creeping back into acceptability. Will Ferrell has signed on for a comedy called Two Face, about a racist who ‘develops split personalities’. From a narrative point of view, this must surely involve him becoming black at some point. How else will he overcome his prejudice, but to take a walk in the shoes of that which he fears? Along with turns like Robert Downey Jr’s in the upcoming Tropic Thunder and Kevin Bishop blacking up for his new comedy series on Channel 4, has society become less sensitive to such things? It may just be a blip, like Soul Man and Short Circuit 2 in the 1980s (we’ve covered this before).

According to a recent report, white people seem to think everything is fine – whereas ethnic minorities regard themselves as being represented by stereotypes. The difficulty on both the big and small screens – but especially in the naturally melodramatic soap – is that, because of the low proportion of ethnic characters, they tend to take on all the storylines deemed ‘relevant’ to their skin colour by writers. Thus the same black woman will have several children by different fathers, suffer discrimination in the workplace and be viewed with suspicion by the police.

Handling all these race ‘issues’ under the hat of one character naturally creates a stereotype, but often through the best of intentions. The answer is just to cast people as people, and let the ‘issues’ drift over them – but the conventions of ‘addressing the audience’ on a mass market scale are such that this cannot happen without an angle. How will they understand it otherwise, reason executives. The problem is that our media doesn’t reflect real life, it only presents a slanted version of it – and perhaps if we stopped expecting to see reality in a box or on a wall, we’d all be a bit happier.

FILM: About face: Shades of grey in a black and white issue?

Is blackface becoming culturally, if not socially acceptable? Jack Black does it in Be Kind, Rewind, Robert Downey Jr is doing it in Tropic Thunder (see left, centre). Wind back to the 1980s, and Fisher Stevens pretended to be Indian in Short Circuit and its sequel, while C. Thomas Howell posed as a black student in Soul Man in the same year (1986), but there’s been a big, politically correct gap in between. (Some call it the 1990s.) Curiously no one seems to bat an eye, in the Western media, at least, about actors in ‘yellow face’ (the most hideous of which must easily be Mickey Rooney in Breakfast At Tiffany’s), or the perma-tanned George Hamilton, or Chantelle Houghton bronzing themselves to within an inch of their lives. Where is the line between tanning and masquerading as a member of another race?

One wonders if, as we now have a black man as the arguable Democrat front runner (after Dennis Haysbert paved the way in 24), and ‘white face’ is not unheard of in black cinema, is ‘blacking up’ as sensitive an issue as it was in the dying days of the Black and White Minstrel Show? Easily the most offensive thing about White Chicks, the most prolific example of whiteface, is the complete absence of humour beyond a one-trick joke in what is ostensibly, a comedy (albeit a Wayans brothers one). But then, as a white correspondent, could I be missing the point? Humour is so subjective, after all. Would black audiences look at this and find it so absurd, it was somehow funny? The image of Robert Downey Jr as a black man prompts a similar reaction with your correspondent – and as long as both sides can have a more or less even crack at the genre, we’re happy.

Some might argue that Jesus was black (Madonna did it in Like A Prayer), in which case, every actor who’s portrayed him since was part of an unwitting white face conspiracy.

Robert Powell, 1972 = white face?
William ‘Willem’ Dafoe, 1988 = white face?
James Caviezel, 2004 = white face?

Add up those three years and divide by three, and the answer is = 1988. Clearly a sign that News Hour are on to something, and that Willem Dafoe may be at the centre of it all. Here is what the Wisconsin-born actor had to say about his performance:

“To this day, I can’t believe I was so brazen to think I could pull off the Jesus role.”

Says it all, really.