Tropic Thunder: A film that wouldn't be allowed today... or would it?
I think that this film gets legendary status not necessarily because it is a super-fantastic film - I mean, it is a good film but not like one of the best ever or anything - but because it represents a period of time that was just before everyone went super nuts with identity politics and dominate a lot of shows these days.
While it is stepping back a notch, the major streaming services really went wild with being super politically correct, being actually political, and doing programming that seemed to be attempting to program the audience rather than entertain them.
Tropic Thunder just did whatever the hell they wanted to and especially in the case of Robert Downey Jr. character, they went down a path that would have set Twitter ablaze if it had existed at the time.
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I likely don't need to explain the story to you here but in case you need a recap: A group of Hollywood types are flown out to South East Asia to do what they believe is a film only to accidentally end up stuck in the middle of a real warzone of sorts. Since they are all actors and not soldiers, they are very ill-equipped to handle this situation and at least at first, they don't even realize that what they are facing is very real, even when a producer gets his head blown up.
The actors revert to acting and feel as though the producers are going for ad-libbed footage and they act accordingly.
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One part that sticks out the most and has become a very famous meme is the "never go full retard" scene. Now I don't know when and where the word "retard" became something that some social justice warriors latched onto and started to make it so no one can ever say that even though it is a clinical word, but it happened after this film. I saw a Tweet the other day that was detailing how a project lead for a tech firm who was doing almost all the work of his department was fired by some bitchy HR lady because he said the word "retard" in a staff meeting.
Maybe I am just older than a lot of people but retard was a harmless word that we would call our friends when they did something stupid. I also had a family who were friends with my family who had a child who was genuinely retarded as in he was 16 but had the brain capacity of a 6 year old. He was a lot of fun but we had to be careful around him because he was a lot stronger than we were and he didn't realize certain things like choking someone to death during playtime was not ok.
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The presentation of "Simple Jack" would have gotten this show cancelled by a certain group of people who might have pressured the studio that this is not ok but somehow "I am Sam" was ok. Why? Well "Simple Jack" is comedy and "I am Sam" is a drama... I guess. I don't pretend to be connected with the people who make these unnecessary problems online.
The other thing was the obvious one of Downey Jr. playing in blackface.
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It isn't just that he is in blackface but the fact that he acts black and talks black. That used to be something that we could do and people were ok with it, I think that most people probably still are but I do recall where Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel both made public apologies for their portrayal of Chris Rock and Karl Malone respectively, even though both Rock and Malone thought the skits were hilarious and absolutely zero people were offended.
I am happy to see that this social justice policing is starting to disappear though because there was a while there where these PC vigilante groups seemed to be doing everything they could to ruin everything that they could.
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Tom Cruise's character got a little less attention but I guess some attention seekers on the internet got there a little to late for the retard and blackface protests and sent for antisemitism as far as Les Grossman was concerned. At no point in time is Les defined as Jewish and i thought it was kind of funny that the internet police jumped in to say that this character was an unfair and inappropriate impersonation of a Jewish studio exec. So who is at fault here? Tom, Tropic Thunder, or the people online that just assumed he was Jewish even though that is never ever stated at any point in the film?
Some people just need to get off the internet and stop looking for problems where they don't exist.
I do love that out of Ben Stiller and everyone else that was involved in Tropic Thunder absolutely ZERO of them have made any apologies for this although they were for a while there, relentlessly asked about it. They are in talks about bringing the characters back and even though I do seriously dislike sequels that are made a decade or more after the previous installment, I hope that they do this just to stick it to the internet crybabies.
We have turned a corner as far as all of this PC crap in films are concerned and hopefully it is forever. Netflix and Amazon still try to do it every now and then, but the backlash is normally quite swift in the other direction from people that are dead sick and tired of everything being written in a sterile sort of way that is designed not to offend anyone.
In order for comedy to be funny, you have to take a chance at offending some people, that is the very nature of comedy. If the PC internet police had their way, comedy would simply die and I am extremely happy in a way that the crazy PC people took that stuff too far and the "normal people" voted with their wallets and now the entertainment industry is forced to return to what they are paid to do in the first place: entertain.