Peggi made soup for dinner with the leftover vegetables that we had cut up for our New Year’s party and then we went right back to work. It looked like it was going to be a pretty quiet Friday night until Rick Simpson called. He wondered if we wanted to watch “Tropic Thunder” with him and Monica at about eight. When we arrived across the street they were both in the basement playing pool and they challenged Peggi and me to a game of 8-Ball. We took turns choosing records for the turntable and went from Leonard Cohen to the Minutemen to Patsy Cline while they won two out of three games.
We were getting pretty silly by the time the movie started so the fake coming attractions really threw me. Ben Stiller’s idea of the actors not knowing if they were acting or really involved in a war was a good one but they could have saved a ton of money on actor’s fees and skipped the damn special effects altogether. They didn’t need Jack Black to play a Jack Black-like character or Nick Nolte to play a Nick Nolte-like character or Tom Cruise to get so made up it didn’t even have to be his expensive self on the set in the first place. Most of the characters were just straight men for the sensational Michael Downey Jr.
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