Tropic Thunder is a biting satire on the state of Hollywood filmmaking and prima donna status if big name actors in the industry, and amid all the controversy you would expect the film to have little more edge to it. Not to sell Ben Stiller’s writing-directing-producing work short, the film is very well done, and nearly every joke hits its mark, but you wonder if more than a few punches were pulled at the last minute to guarantee all those involved would actually be able to work in the industry they were skewering again.

Stiller stars as Tugg Speedman, a lagging action star responsible for the ubiquitous Scorcher series of films now in its sixth installment as the pre-movie faux trailers tell us. Speedman took a disastrous turn as a “full retard” in Simple Jack an award-fishing expedition lambasted as one of the worst films ever made. Speedman signs on to Tropic Thunder (also the name of the movie within the movie) to rejuvenate his career alongside one-joke comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) who farts a lot and Australian method actor Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.) who dons blackface and a clichéd African-American persona. The internal film’s director, Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) receives and ultimatum from studio head Les Grossman (scene stealing Tom Cruise) leading Cockburn to drop his actors in the middle of a drug warfare zone and shoot the film guerilla style.

All of the leads bring their A-game but it’s the roles by Downey, Jr., Cruise, and supporting roles of Jay Baruchel and Danny McBride that really propel the movie to the next level. Cruise’s involvement was meant to be kept a secret to surprise the audience, and even with pictures on the net and syndicated reporting, you could still hear “That’s Tom Cruise!” exclaimed throughout the theater when he first appears litter the room with profanities. Coming off Iron Man, Robert Downey, Jr. look to continue his career high with an excellent portrayal of method actors and the extreme lengths they go through to preserve the illusion on and off camera. Baruchel, late of Knocked Up and TV’s Undeclared, plays the straight man in the ensemble and McBride, seen only last week in Pineapple Express brings the pyro-obsessed FX-master Cody to life.

The opening segments of the film are the most rewarding with the trailers highlighting the careers of each of the three leads and the in-movie filming of the big finale of Tropic Thunder complete with a $4 million dollar explosion (in which the camera wasn’t rolling) offer up the most laughs. As the film progresses and the characters become aware that they are no longer actors in a guerilla style war film, but civilians being captured by drug runners the movie loses a little bit of the spark that initially drew you in, the satire is gone as the film devolves into your basic war-time comedy.

One of the problems is the characters are never really developed beyond their eccentricities, Speedman is the classic action star looking for a serious role and recognition and respect, Lazarus is the quirky Australian who excels at acting naturally, and Portnoy is basically a combination of Belushi and Farley rolled into the flatulent stylings of Eddie Murphy. The secondary characters play one note throughout, and while these notes are funny, it only lends to the belief that so much more could have been done with this picture.

Just like the beginning the ending also brings a host of laughs as a mock Oscar ceremony finds our heroes sometime after the completion of the film and a final dancing scene presents the credits to you in one of the most disturbing manners possible.

The hype that has preceded Tropic Thunder may be its biggest enemy as its almost impossible to live up to the expectations of being a razor-sharp satire on movie making. At the core this is what Stiller and company were going for, but in reality the audience is treated to a fair amount of satire before just settling for what we get.

It’s hard to listen to the radio or go into a bar and not hear Rehab’s “Bartender Song“; playing on the jukebox as the new anthem for the bar fly scene, but the remixed and remade track, originally title “Sittin’ At A Bar“;, becomes the lead off single for the band on their newest release, Graffiti the World. Away from the scene since 2000’s Southern Discomfort and a reformation and label change later, the southern-rock influenced band presents a variety of different genres on the latest disc touching on hip-hop, rock, mellow-dramatic anthems and even delving into electronica.

The disc leads off with the Kottonmouth Kings-like “Let Em Know“; which features a slick, flowing rhythm and brings the audience into the disc with their ears open and expectations set pretty high, unfortunately the next two tracks, “Bump“; and “Chest Pain“; fail to live up the promise set forth. “Bump“; is the band’s electronic-infused experiment complete with synths and voice manipulation, and while the clean electric guitar sound coos throughout the track, it fails to really inspire. The same can be said for “Chest Pain“; the anthem for falling off the wagon which is the first real rock track on the album but its narrative, albeit somewhat lazy lyrics keep it from greatness.

The title track is a much more mellow affair with hard beats but a softer sound bring social awareness to a head at the unfathomable hypocrisy in our society as the song goes, “The terrorists are in the White House and oversees / Racists, separatists, vicious militias / The Buddhists, the Hindus, the Muslims, the Christians / Could it be our biggest barrier is language.”; It’s a weird transition from the social commentary to the anthem of a parole violator talking it over with his bartender in the aforementioned “Bartender’s Song“; but the next stretch of tracks really show off what Rehab can do. “Last Tattoo,”; easily the song with the biggest hook and more mainstream sound is Rehab’s answer to a breakup song.

“1980“; is another hip-hop infused track with a great drum backbeat that pulses through the entire song. “Bottles and Cans“; and “Lawn Chair High“; feel more like filler with decent rocks sounds but, again, some lazy lyrics that don’t make them very intriguing, especially the curious “Bottles and Cans“; which has a smooth flow to the song, but literally makes no sense. The next three tracks, “This Town“; an anthem to never really leaving home, even when you are on the road, “Red Water“; a poignant song about suicidal tendencies and the thought that just because you think someone has everything, doesn’t necessarily mean they do and “Walk Away“; the albums comic relief in the form of an adulterer getting caught finish out the disc nicely. The actually last track is “We Live“; another so-so track lost in the greatness of the tracks preceding it.

Graffiti the World is a strong album in parts, although there are a few throwaway tracks that don’t mesh well with some of the outstanding work done elsewhere. While “Bartender Song“; is sure to live on as a staple for the band it remains to be seen if they can find similar success with a bigger marketing push and a new single.

Since the unlikely success of Harold and Kumar the sub-genre of stoner-action-comedy-adventure has really taken off. Of course movies like this are nothing new in Hollywood, but getting the target audience off the couch and away from the substances that make them the target audience for two hours is sometimes harder to manage. All you need is some clever marketing, the guys who wrote Superbad, and the genre’s new “it” boy Seth Rogen to make a successful film. It doesn’t hurt Judd Apatow is along for the ride as a producer and the always excellent, although drastically underused here, Gary Cole makes an appearance.

Pineapple Express, through its thinly laced plot, excels at making you laugh more often than note, however your level of enjoyment figures on how well you “get” the culture of habitual weed smokers and what they might find funny, or if you just like to see stone people stumble around like, well, stoned idiots. Rogen and fellow Apatow-alum James Franco star as Dale and Saul, respectively, a buyer and a dealer on the run from an even bigger deal (Cole’s Ted) after Dale witnesses Ted blowing a guy’s head off.

The movie’s namesake comes from a particular strand of plant that, leads Ted back to a mid-level man, Red (Danny R. McBride), whom he sold it to, and where it went from there. Ted sends a couple of hit men after Dale and Saul and Red flip flops sides more times than a politician up until the movie’s explosive finale.

As always Rogen is excellent here, his oafishness and chubby guy persona brings a certain likeability to him, even in some of the smallest roles. Everyone remembers how he stole the show in The 40 Year old Virgin and seemingly made getting married to Katherine Heigl manageable (in real life I doubt this is possible). Franco, late of the Spider-Man franchise, grows his hair out and puts on the dumbest face possible in the role of Saul a clichéd example of why you shouldn’t do drugs and try to do any thing that requires a quarter of your brain. Most of the film’s best moments come at the expense of his limited intellect.

The cast is rounded out by the aforementioned Cole who is apt to play the bad guy but is underutilized and underdeveloped with the script, written by Rogen and partner Even Goldberg, focusing more on Dale and Saul than anything else. The chemistry between Rogen and Franco is top notch, however, and the third wheel of the scheming McBride completes the ensemble in the same way Christopher Mintz-Plasse McLovin’ augmented Superbad.

The film, however, isn’t able to stand up completely under the weight of its hook, a couple of high guys know too much and have some bad guys after them, the opening segment, featuring the hilarious Bill Hader ties in well to the ending of the film 70 years later, but without the film’s star power draw, there wouldn’t be much to it but smoke billowing out from under the door.

The always energetic and outspoken veteran comic Lewis Black is back with a new CD, the aptly named Anticipation. I say aptly named because anything you hear Lewis is going to do, you immediately can’t help but anticipate experiencing it. Whether it is one of his four critically acclaimed Comedy Central stand-up specials, or any of his prior books or CD’s, Lewis never fails to deliver, and he does so with this new offering as well.

While most audiences know Black more for his topical, political material, he mellows out a bit on this album, using a lot more cheery material. Everything he talks about in this act leads back to anticipation. He gives us the sad story about failed attempts, and eventual success, of losing his virginity. Other notable material is his always funny rant about why Chanukah sucks (written out on the track list as southerner’s say it, Chanooookah) when compare to Christmas, and why Santa would make the best presidential candidate.

The only criticism I’d have is that I honestly miss the political material. A secret or bonus track with something on the ’08 election would have been nice, but I completely understand changing up material so that you aren’t pigeonholed as one thing (like Bob Saget was on Full House and Funniest Home Videos, even though his stand-up has always been blue material). Hopefully we’ll get enough of his take on the ’08 election when he does his guest spot, Back in Black, on The Daily Show, or with his show The Root of All Evil, starting it’s second season on Comedy Central. No matter what, the bottom line is Anticipation is a continuation of the long line of good stuff from Lewis Black, and we hope he keeps the hits coming.

To anyone who viewed Jurassic Park III and witnessed the battle between the once-formidable Tyrannosaurus and the newly introduced Spinosaurus and thought, “There should really be a show about just dinosaurs fighting,” History has your answer in Jurassic Fight Club. While this Fight Club is soap and Tyler Durden-less, it does feature the most primal battles outside a video game.

The standard 42 minute program takes careful steps to setup the ensuing battle, and in the premiere episode a team of researchers on Madagascar discover the bones of a male Majungasaurus seemingly attacked and eaten by a female of the species. This leads researchers to extrapolate how this carnivore would have turned to cannibalism as the information is presented via CGI models in a life-action landscape. Future episodes will delve deep into the ocean, and then return to land with the final episode of the series focusing on the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The fight itself is contained within the last 10 minutes of the program with the other 30 being divided up between the discovery of the bones and a CSI-like research extravaganza to identify the killer and piece together the story. The first 20 minutes roll along great, with lots of background information on the dinosaur itself, but the steam runs out after that. The second act of the program is basically a summary of everything we’ve heard before, including numerous mentions of the same facts after every commercial break. You grow tired of hearing “65 million years ago…” from the narrator each time you return.

It doesn’t help as well that the same CGI clips are shown nearly all the time, including a trick to mirror the image to make it look like a new clip (especially when showing a Majungasaurus baby behind a tree). This is a shame because the production values are otherwise very high throughout the program, and the repeated clips themselves, while not Stan Winston/Jurassic Park awesome, do a serviceable job for the budget allowed.

With the amount of recapping available, you’re able to leave the room and return without missing much information, and you’ll quickly be back on track for the battle at the end. While the fight itself is narrated from pure speculation extrapolated from behaviors of current animals and dinosaur theory, it still provides an entertaining closing to the program and pulls no punches.

Starz continues its original series, Starz Inside, by taking a look at the gross out comedy and its origins in Hollywood after the Production Code started to break down and John Waters got hold of some cameras.

As with all of the Starz Inside products, In The Gutter‘s format is that of critics and artists in a talking head setting talking about the films and subjects brought up as we progress from Pink Flamingos to Superbad teenagers. Problem is the biggest star that Starz was able to snag is Jason Biggs (American Pie) who just tells us some semi-funny anecdotes about having sex with pastries on the set of the film.

The timeline presented begins with the Waters films and evolves through National Lampoon and MAD Magazine‘s rises in print, and eventual movie makings of the former with Animal House, slowly making its way through Porky’s, American Pie, Van Wilder, and the like. Strangely a big amount of time is spent on both Porky’s and American Pie, yet South Park gets two lines of dialog saying how they raised the bar. This shows one of the biggest shortcomings of the special in that the producers couldn’t (or wouldn’t) get the rights to show anything more than the film’s poster. This seems inconsistent throughout as clips from There’s Something About Mary make it into the film, but we’re left with only a single screen grab from Superbad.

The hour is packed with enough gross out jokes, jabs, and humor to clear a room, even the 20 second clip of the infamous Van Wilder donuts scene caused both my girlfriend and I to cover our faces, but that’s exactly what the filmmaker’s were going for when they shot that scene.

As with previous specials in the series it is disappointing that more named talent couldn’t be brought on board, including some writers or directors famous for launching this subgenre of comedy beyond the bounds of good-taste. There isn’t a lot of information here that is new, but you do get probably the world’s easiest compilations of scenes from gross out films to make a entire Scene It! game

The idea of gaming in 3D is a novel one, and on paper it seems like a no-brainer. The bullets of a first person shooter flying towards you, the eerie atmosphere of Rapture seeping into you, the expansive land of Azeroth all around you, and the possibilities are endless. However, after a few hours of play you realize that 3D gaming is just like virtual reality, its neat, but it gets old fast and it won’t be long before you’re aiming to go back to a traditional setup with crisper graphics and less headaches.

The iZ3D 22” Widescreen LCD 3D Monitor is basically two monitors in one, utilizing dual DVI or one DVI and one VGA port the display presents two images slightly out of phase with one another. You, the user, use a set of polarized lenses to bring the images together and make them pop out of the screen. Subtle adjustments can be made to the “phase” of the images so you can line them up in your favorite games using hotkeys on the keyboard.

Setup of the monitor was okay, but not as intuitive as you’d expect. The screen ships with two dual-link DVI cables and a standard VGA cables. Your video card must have dual outputs for the monitor to work. The first problem here is with the connectors, the second DVI connector is placed directly in front of the stand, making plugging in the cable difficult for those with bigger hands, we actually had to remove the base and lay the monitor on its face to connect everything.

From a non-functional standpoint the monitor is much larger than your average LCD, this is because of the dual panel technology used to simulate the 3D images, the monitor is also heavier than a standard 22” (in this case a Gateway 22” Widescreen). Five buttons are located under the screen with a blue power light to the right of those. The monitor is able to be mounted to a bracket with four standoff holes on the rear and the entire stand can be removed. Only a vertical angle adjustment is available, no swivel and no turn into portrait mode from landscape.

Performance is where things really count and the iZ3D manages, but doesn’t astound. The first game we tried was the supposedly supported World of Warcraft, after booting into the game we activated the “stereo mode” by hitting the * key on the Num Pad, from here holding shift and tapping (-) or (+) on the Num Pad will adjust the offset of the two images. Assuming you keep your camera distance steady your character would seem in phase, however NPCs, icons, even trees and the road we were standing on in Thunder Bluff seemed out of phase. A slight adjustment of the camera distance meant we had to recalibrate the offset once again. The 3D images didn’t seem to pop as much as we’d like, and what we were left with was a slightly blurry experience.

The next test was to boot up Steam and try out Portal and Audiosurf, the former being supported, the latter not on iZ3D’s official game list. Portal wouldn’t even boot as it crashed out each and every time we tried to run it with the iZ3D drivers and monitor installed, the game ran fine without the monitor present. Audiosurf initially crashed when we attempted to put it into full screen but eventually worked. On the menus we were able to make the center of the screen stay in phase, however the top bar and bottom of the screen showed up as ghostly images akin to a TV signal over bad rabbit ears. Audiosurf itself was unplayable as the colored bars came at you in separate pieces, sometimes not being able to tell what color they were until just before your craft hit them, sometimes not until afterwards.

The iZ3D can be used as a standard monitor for office applications, although it isn’t a great one with colors being muddy and images being less crisp than competing monitors running DVI cables as well. For the price the lack of multiple inputs like component or composite is also disappointing. The novelty of the monitor will have you eventually going back to just a regular old flat panel, but you may keep the glasses around to look stylish while playing.