Movie Make-out

The official website for Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder has added a 30-second teaser to the film. There’s not much to comment on in it, but the tagline ("Shit Blows Up") is pretty damn funny.

Tropic Thunder revolves around a trio of supposed big-name actors hired to star in the biggest war movie ever made, but become entangled in a real-life conflict — sort of like The Three Amigos, but in Southeast Asia.

Earlier this week, the film made a few idiots happy when Entertainment Weekly released the first picture of the film, featuring Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey, Jr., and shit-starters like The Daily Mail, Just Jared, and other sites had a field day with the fact that Robert Downey Jr. plays an overzealous (and apparently less-than-bright) actor Kirk Lazarus, who was cast in the film’s movie-within-a-movie conceit, in a role originally written for a black man; convinced that the only way to play the role, then, is as a black man, he dons make-up to fully inhabit the role. Most of these shit-starters eventually explain this fact, yet first opt to stoke the flames of a non-existent controversy by leading their articles with sentences like "Robert Downey Jr. plays a black man in the new movie Tropic Thunder" (Just Jared).

A quick scan of the comments over at Just Jared shows that the only people who had problems with this were illiterate morons (much like the writing staff of The Daily Mail and Just Jared) who said things like "i dont see why they couldn’t just get an african american actor to play that part" or "I’m not black and I find it offensive; are there not any talented enough black actors out in the world that they feel the need to hire a white guy to do a black guy?" — both (like the article) completely ignoring the fact that Robert Downey Jr. is not playing a black man. He’s playing a vapid, white actor who plays a black man in the film they’re making. The former would be offensive; the second is satire. They are making fun of the very thing these people claim to be offended by.

The film is scripted by Etan Cohen (Idiocracy) and Justin Theroux (Dedication) and also stars Nick Nolte, Brandon T. Jackson (as the hilariously named hip hop star "Alpa Chino"), Danny McBride (All the Real Girls), and Jay Baruchel (Undeclared, Knocked Up). The film is due on August 15, 2008.

Danny McBride also stars in the upcoming film from Jody Hill, The Foot Fist Way, made back in 2006 and finally due in theaters on May 30, 2008, thanks to Paramount Vantage. Hill and McBride also made a very funny short for Sundance called Learning to Skateboard. Hill’s next feature is the Seth Rogen starrer, Observe and Report, in which Rogen plays a mall cop. (There’s also a Kevin James film tentatively called Mall Cop, in which Kevin James plays a… uh… mall cop. It’s like Mission to Mars and Red Planet all over again, but with fat mall security guards instead of astronauts. Both films start shooting net month.)