Amy's Robot

Robert Downey Jr., action hero

I was at the movie theater the other day, and next to the standard Prince Caspian and Kung Fu Panda posters, I saw this crazy bullshit.

Robert Downey, Jr. as a demented action hero who I think is also black.

Between this and Iron Man, which mostly looks like it's meant to be a straight comic-book action movie even though RDJ smirks through the entire trailer, I guess he's on a whole new career path as a funny-ironic tough-guy.

This movie is called Tropic Thunder. Here's a few things about it:

• It's written and directed by Ben Stiller, so it's a joke.
• It's the first movie he's written and directed since Zoolander, so it should be funny in a broad, hammy kind of way. Especially since it stars both Stiller and Jack Black.
• Yep, that's Robert Downey, Jr. in blackface.
• The use of blackface as a joke has set off a firestorm on the IMDb discussion board, where arguments mostly consist of "This movie is really offensive and racist" or "What are you talking about, it's funny and it's using blackface to make fun of racism," and go on from there without making many interesting points, and eventually descend into name-calling and actual racism. And you can bet that White Chicks and Soul Man are brought up a lot.
• While this movie is probably not intentionally racist, any movie that uses blackface as comedy is going to cause some commotion. RDJ says about it, "If it's done right, it could be the type of role you called Peter Sellers to do 35 years ago. If you don't do it right, we're going to hell."
• Parts of the trailer are really funny.
• The movie is about the wild mishaps that occur during the filming of a big-budget Vietnam movie. Steve Coogan plays the director, Nick Nolte is the writer, and they decide to drop their coddled cast into an actual war zone to get more authentic performances.

I hope this movie is funny enough to justify every terrible movie Ben Stiller has starred in since Dodgeball.

categories:
posted by amy at 2:28 PM | #