I didn’t see that one at all.

I’ve got nothing on the above noted controversy, though.

Carry on.

They are not making fun of disabled people. They are satirizing Hollywood.

The studio made a mistake in removing Simple Jack from that context.

If Tom is so upset about the portrayal of the mentally disabled in films, you’d think he’d welcome a movie that savagely mocks Hollywood’s manipulative and cynical use of such characters. But apparently not.

Well, yeah, but that would be true even if the movie was actually making fun of the handicapped, which it clearly isn’t. (No, I haven’t seen it, but I feel pretty comfortable making this claim since it’s based on the examples given by the guy claiming that the movie makes fun of the handicapped)

It’s one thing to get all worked up just because it’s YOUR ox being gored; it’s another thing to not understand that the butt of the joke is ox-gorers.

Yeah, then out come the Zhdanovian hacks.

Just because we have better, more reasonable things to get our feely-feelies all butthurt about doesn’t mean that anyone — especially an artist — should be censored or practice self-censorship in response.

What the fuck, people?

As far as I can tell, one of us has seen the movie, so the only question that we can all talk about is, “Does Tim Shriver make a good case that Tropic Thunder is offensive?”

And I have to agree with Brad that he does not. He cites two quotes, one of which is ambiguous, and one of which seems to be making exactly the same point that he is.

Maybe Tropic Thunder is incredibly fucking offensive to the mentally disabled. Maybe in context those quotes are terrible; it wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

But right now Tim’s column makes him sound like those guys who accused the Dead Kennedys of hating poor people.

Oh wait, that one’s for real.

If “they” means the behavior and actions of people around them, I’d agree.

I have a cousin who is mentally handicapped. Oxygen deprived at birth.
He was always the strange “other” when I was a child. Indecipherable behavior and scary siezures. But he was never an object of ridicule. As I child, however, I never knew quite what to do. I didn’t know how to react to him or know if I was really communicating to him at all. Then I watched his siblings. No big deal to them.

Fortunately, he had a mother who fought very hard to force the state to acknowlege them as deserving members of the educational system. One of his sisters went on to manage group homes for mentally disabled kids, quite successfully I should add.

When you see all the movies that have exploited these people for “ahhhh look…how cute!” (“Rain Man”, “Flowers for Algernon”, “Forrest Gump”, “Radio”, “My Other Sister”, “I Am Sam”, “Being There”), I can only think how conveniently wrong they’ve show it.

So there’s that.

I’m afraid it’s the age-old thing: pushing someone else’s hot buttons is fine (K-Lo is an unfulfilled spinster, so-and-so is a lonely virgin, such-and-such is mentally unbalanced due to improper potty training, etc.). But let it be your personal hot buttons, and suddenly it ain’t so funny anymore.

Personally, there have been any number of occasions when somebody on these threads wrote something where I could have, if I were so motivated, gone nuclear on their asses, complete with righteous sob-stories designed to highlight their horrible insensitivity. But fuck that. I come here to laugh.

I was in the stupid science class in grade 10, a result of having done nothing in grade 9.

We got Mickey Mouse comics.

The stutter got so bad I was taken out of my grade and put in a special class held in the boiler room. My only other classmate was named “Gilly”. He had fallen through the ice as a child and was technically dead for 57 minutes. They taught us to sweep sawdust so we’d find work at a mill.