“Once More With Feeling” was one of my favourite episodes from 7 seasons of Buffy – yes, I even bought the soundtrack and often crank it up and sing along when doing “stunningly boring chores” like the dishes. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that I was excited when I heard Joss was doing another musical.

How the show came into existence is almost as interesting as the show itself. In the midst of the writer’s strike earlier in 2008, Joss got together with a few collaborators to prove that creating content for Internet distribution was a viable alternative to writing for traditional tv.

In my opinion, the experiment was a success. Dr Horrible is not the sort of show you would expect to see on tv, and definitely not one tv execs would gamble on. Firstly because it’s a musical, but also because of the episode format: 3 acts of about 15 minutes each.

One of the reasons I love Whedon’s work is because he is first and foremost a storyteller. There are no expensive special effects here, just a really tight story.

The plot is very straightforward: Dr Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris) is a wanna-be villian who is trying to impress Bad Horse and get into the Evil League of Evil. Thwarting his plans at every turn is his nemesis, Captain Hammer (the brilliantly arrogant Nathan Fillion). Caught in the middle of their struggle is Penny (Felicia Day of The Guild fame), who Dr Horrible is secretly in love with.

In anyone else’s hands, this could be a bland superhero show (recent seasons of Smallville anyone??). But what makes Whedon’s work so great is how he is able to reverse cliches and create something unexpected. In this world, the villain is shy and awkward, and hero is the arrogant and self-absorbed ladies man.

The story is driven by Dr Horrible – he has two desires: get into the Evil League of Evil, and to be with Penny. But this is Whedon at his best, and there’s no lack of complications along the way. And in the end, Dr Horrible achieves one goal at the expense of the other. How Whedon squeezed so much emotion into the final seconds is testiment to both his storytelling abilty and Harris’ acting talent.

The songs are so damn catchy that I challenge you watch it a second time without joining in. After all, the title clearly encourages it!

Rating: 9/10

But when a friend suggested going to see it, I thought it could be OK – and it was a tight-ass Tuesday anyway, so it’s not like I had to pay full price. And when I walked out of the cinema 2 hours later, some of my faith in comedy movies had been restored.

The story was pretty straightforward. A war movie set in Vietnam is behind schedule because of the male-diva stars. So the director decides that to get a real performance out of the actors, he’d drop them in the middle of the jungle and capture their emotions with hidden cameras. But things immediately go wrong and the actors soon find themselves in enemy territory and real danger. The plot doesn’t get any more complicated than that. Ben Stiller’s character Tugg Speedman eventually gets captured and the other actors attempt to rescue him.

This movie isn’t going to make you walk from the cinema with a different perspective on life. And despite being made during the middle-east conflict, there’s not even any deep messages about the futility of war or the value of human life.

What Tropic Thunder offers is some of the funniest scenes I’ve seen in a movie in a long long time. If good comedy is about delivering the unexpected, then many comedy movies fail for being far too predictable or clichéd. Looking at the plot as a whole, there’s nothing especially unpredictable about it. You know that all of the actors are bound to make it out alive.

But there are a handful of scenes that are just so unexpected and brilliant that you’ll laugh like a little kid. The scene when the director drops them off in the middle of the jungle is classic. Another favourite is when Speedman is attacked in the jungle in the middle of the night. Though I’d love to go on about these scenes, I don’t think that it’s worth risking spoiling them for someone who hasn’t seen the movie.

Stiller, Black and Downey Jr each bring their own style of comedy to the movie, and somehow it all manages to blend together well. I’ve haven’t seen Downey Jr in a comedy like this before, and even though he’s playing the “serious” actor beside Stiller’s blockbuster action star and Black’s Eddie Murphy-style comedy star, he has some of the funniest lines in the movie.

If you like a good laugh, get along to see it.

Rating: 8/10