Comment on My Review of Ghostbusters (1984)

• BallsInTheShredder@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Can’t lie I still love tropic thunder sooo much today. I get that the climate has shifted and understand why but I still feel like we’ve lost something valuable in the process. Robert Downey in black face was… wrong but at the same time felt perfect. It wasn’t the black face that got me, he really could’ve been dressed as anyone and I would’ve laughed the same. What got me was his inability to break script, even when not filming. Can’t remember the full context but the scene in which someone is calling him out on not breaking character and, in iirc the only time he breaks character throughout the movie he breaks down and says “I don’t break character until after the DVD commentary!” Idk why but it broke me and I can’t help but chuckle about it today.

  That movie is full of “no-no’s”, sure, but so was Chappelle’s show, Sanford and son etc.

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  • MC_Lovecraft@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The difference is that ‘color-blind’ liberals who co-opt the language and appearance of the civil rights movement without actually understanding or living the ideals behind it were the target of the joke, it wasn’t supposed to be funny just because it was blackface. I feel that the backlash to that movie is 100% the result of a lack of media literacy. Like, it’s not Citizen Kane, but to accuse Downey Jr. of racism for taking that role is to miss the point so hard it’s hard to imagine that the people who feel that way watched the same movie that I did. You have to be coming from a place of total refusal to engage with the subtext (or really just the text, absolutely nothing about Tropic Thunder is subtle in the least) of the work, and an axiomatic understanding of certain actions as always-racist without regard for context.

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