Okay, let me start off by saying that Ben Stiller is NOT FUNNY. I disliked Night at the Museum, have hated the very look of every single movie trailer I saw with him in it, and pretty much try to live my life without seeing him in anything.

Except...this movie looked funny. Or not. There was a storm of controversy in the reviews when it came out that was SO vituperative that Mr. Otter and I tried to go see it in the theater to see what all the fuss was about. But of course, life being what it is, we never made it, so I put it on our Netflix list.

And it arrived about a month ago. And we were busy and not in the mood and...finally, last night, we said, well, let's order pizza and start it, if it's awful we'll turn it off and not make ourselves watch it. Because, well, it's a Ben Stiller movie. And we expected to hate it.

And boy, were we ever wrong.

Because it is HILARIOUS. Both Mr. Otter and I were laughing our butts off.

See, it's not a Vietnam war movie. It's a movie about MAKING a Vietnam War movie.

And a whole lot of it is either a parody of OTHER Vietnam war movies, or of Hollywood types.

And I have to say, those barbs hit home with deadly accuracy.

There's Ben Stiller as the bad actor desperate to live down his last movie. Robert Downey Jr who is an Australian playing a black guy who has his skin dyed so he can get into character, which he doesn't stop, even when things go very, very wrong. Steve Coogan is the stupid, no-talent director. Nick Nolte is the disabled veteran who wrote the original book. There's the kid-too-young-to-die, the drugged up actor, the rap star trying to make it big in hollywood, the crazy special-effects guy who just wants to blow stuff up, the scummy agent, the conscienceless movie executive...pretty much every Hollywood character is there.

But, you may say, where is the controversy? well, faithful fan, this is it: there are a lot of parts of this movie that are, shall we say, insensitive to various races, ethnicities and disablities. And reviewers were incensed by these. And said so in their reviews. The part they missed was that all of these things, in this movie, helped to make the point about how stupid THE CHARACTERS are, that none of them see that these things are offensive and ridiculous. And oh my god, it's funny.

By the last scene, I was screaming with laughter, gasping for air and pointing at the big-ass ol' tv. Oh, and don't miss the credits, Tom Cruise is truly amusing in those too.

Unwrap your funnybone and prepare for a really wild ride.