Why Do You Care That Robert Downey Jr is Back in the MCU?

It was recently announced that The Russo Brothers and Robert Downey Jr will be returning to the MCU. The Russo's are going to direct some of the new movies and RDJ is going to be playing Dr Doom. Let’s discuss.

I saw this news, thought to myself that it was a cool and smart idea and then kind of forgot about it. That was until the internet exploded with people appearing to be very upset with this news. I guess, because RDJ played Ironman, this new role of his will mess with the lore of the entire MCU. This rip in the space time continuum of these superhero movies has upset nerds and non nerds alike. They are mad and they are letting the world know how mad they are.

Again, I saw the news and kind of left it where it was. I don't go too hard on news like this. It doesn't affect my day to day, so why should I care? RDJ is a very good, very accomplished actor and the Russo Brothers have made some of the better superhero movies. On paper, this all seems like a solid idea and the best shot to make better movies and make the "Fantastic Four" finally work on screen. They are putting a lot behind this movie. They got RDJ, they cast good, solid actors in the four lead roles and they have good writers attached. That is good considering how bad the last couple of iterations of these movies turned out to be. But, to the super fans, they are up in arms.

When I think about it, I don't really care because this is all make believe. Superheroes and supervillains do not exist. This is all a fantasy world. None of this affects our day to day lives. We have way, way bigger fish to fry than who plays who in a make believe world. We live in a time, where no matter what, some group of people are going to be mad about something. We all have far too much access on the internet, and we all feel like we have to put it out there. I'm doing it right now. But my gripe is with the people acting like this news has ruined their day, or in some cases, their lives. We have far too many Comic Book Guys living among us now, and they are letting their opinion be known. They want to fuss and complain about every little thing that doesn't fit what they want out of these movies. The people who whine are the same people, sorry RD, that complain about "Star Wars". Again, I go to "The Simpsons" when airing my grievances. When Comic Book Guy complained about Poochie, Bart asked him a great question. That question, "what do they owe you after giving you years of great tv and free entertainment", or something like that. That is the exact question I want to ask everyone that is so up in arms about RDJ playing Dr Doom. Who cares? He is an actor. His job is to make the unreal come to life, and RDJ is damn good at doing just that. He seems like a great fit to play this role. I'm kind of interested to see what he does with a villain role as opposed to being a hero. I want to see his take on being the bad guy. And I could care less if it messes with the MCU time frame, or whatever. They have already messed everything up with multiple universes and bringing the dead back to life. No one was this upset when the supposed deceased Avengers returned in "Infinity War", at least I think that was the movie where they came back. No one seemed to care when Dr Strange messed with all the stuff that happened to Scarlet Witch. We all just accepted it as the MCU reality. But, for some reason this news has made the masses very mad.

Get over it. It doesn't affect us at all. Try to control the things you can control. Don't let a movie casting disrupt your whole day. Just look forward to what they are going to do with the movie and go watch it when it comes out in theaters. Then form an opinion. That is going to be my plan moving forward. 

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast.

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Let's Revisit "Tropic Thunder"

About a week ago my wife and I watched "Tropic Thunder" for the first time in years. Let’s discuss.

Right off the bat, this movie is hilarious. I loved it the first time I watched it, I remember watching it several times afterward and loving it and I laughed just as hard watching it this most recent time. It is a very funny, very well written movie. It is filled with jokes. It is like watching an episode of "30 Rock". There are jokes seemingly every thirty seconds to a minute. The cast is stellar and they all do such a good job portraying different types of actors/musicians. Jack Black is awesome, Ben Stiller is perfect, Brandon T Jackson has some of the best lines, Jay Baruchel is great as the young up and comer and Robert Downey Jr is superb. He should've been nominated for an Oscar. Even guys with smaller roles, like Steve Coogan, Bill Hader, Nick Nolte, Tom Cruise, Matthew McConaughey and Danny McBride shine. This movie is filled with great actors and they are all up to the task. The movie holds up.

After watching it, my wife and I had a long talk trying to decide if this movie could be made today. "Tropic Thunder" came out in 2008, thirteen years ago. A lot has changed since then. We have gone through some shit as a country. There have been some major things that have happened, and the world is not a better place. We are currently living in a pandemic, which hasn't happened for 100 years. The former "administration" is to blame for a lot of it. The new administration is doing their best to try and get back to "normal", but they have their work cut out for them. So when looking back at this movie, and after a few weeks of thought, I do not think this movie would be able to get made today.

I have already said that Robert Downey Jr is exceptional in this movie. He takes on the role of the super committed actor to the next level. He is simply perfect. He is also in black face for most of this movie. Now, they make a very clear joke of this very early on in the movie. They point out that he is such a committed actor that he had his skin dyed for the role. And when shooting the movie, the back and forth between RDJ and Jackson is some of the funniest stuff in the whole movie. It is comedy gold. I do think "Tropic Thunder" does a good job of showing how utterly absurd and crazy some actors can be, but something like black face has been, and always will be, very, very, very wrong. It is disrespectful and not cool. There is also the whole backstory of Stiller's character doing a movie called "Simple Jack". "Simple Jack" is about a mentally handicapped man, and Stiller plays the part for laughs. And it works. Hell, the whole conversation between him and RDJ talking about the movie is one of the funniest things I have ever seen in a movie. But I cringed watching him do the "Simple Jack" stuff. I laughed, but every laugh was met with me or my wife or both of us kind of feeling bad for laughing at the scenes with "Simple Jack". Again, the role is played for laughs, it is in this movie to show how ridiculous some actors take some of their roles, but it is so very offensive. It is wrong. It is tough to watch and you feel bad for laughing after you do. Everything else in the movie is okay. Jackson's backstory of being gay is not offensive at all, and it ends very happily for him. Baruchel is funny the whole time. Jack Black is goofy and silly and awesome. All the stuff with Tom Cruise is very funny. Danny McBride has some great one liners. But if this movie was to be made today they would have to take away two of the biggest jokes in the whole thing. It cannot be done. But that may be a good thing. I am not mad at it at all in fact.

"Tropic Thunder" should stay in the early 2000's. I'm over all the remakes and reboots. "Tropic Thunder" will always be a movie I will laugh at when I watch it, but there is absolutely no way it could, nor should it be made now.

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast.

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Having More Time Makes any Book Better than the Movie

Make sure your book has charged batteries before you take the time to read

So, for all of my posts this week, I wanted to try something a bit different. My wife and I were talking the other day and she told me that I should argue a point that I don't necessarily agree with. All five posts this week will be topics given to me that I have expressed a dislike for to, either my wife or everyone who reads my blog, but I have to give the opposite view. I have to explain why these things are actually true, or that they at least have some good qualities. This is going to be a weird, but also very fun, and maybe even a bit difficult, but I'm up to the task.

My fifth, and final, topic sentence of the week from my wife, "books are always better than their TV/movie adaptation. This sounds like it should be an easy one, but I'm the type of person that will watch a show, or see the movie first, before I read the book. Case and point, I saw the movie "Friday Night Lights", then read the book, then watched the TV show. I will say, the book was the best, but I enjoyed the movie a hell of a lot more than the show, but the show was great. An example that is contrary to my wife's belief, I adore both "One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest" and "A Clockwork Orange", but I find the books almost unreadable. I also loved what Spike Jonze did with "Where the Wild Things Are". I thought that book would be nearly impossible to bring to the big screen, but he achieved that very task. But, I do see why my wife, and a lot of other people, feel that books are better than their adaptations.

Here goes with my answer to why books are better.

First off, movies and TV shows have a time limit, unless you are Richard Linklater or Judd Apatow, and you make your movies a million hours long. The directors and writers usually get 2, sometimes 2 and a half hours to tell a story. When the writer writes their book, they can use as many pages as they want. They can make their book 100 to 1,000 pages, if they choose. My first example is "The Hobbit". I believe that there is one book and three movies. The book is about 200 to 250 pages long, but it is filled with some of the best imagery in writing. That book took my mind to a world that I did not think was possible. I never thought of trolls, giants, any of the stuff in "The Hobbit", but after reading it, I had this whole world dreamed up in my head. Then, Peter Jackson, who I think is a very capable director, made three of the most boring, over long movies ever when he adapted "The Hobbit". He made three movies, each well over 2 hours, and that just did not have to happen. He could have done one 3 hour long movie that encompassed the entire book, but he chose to divide the short story into three  2 plus hour movies and they were not very good, in my opinion. The world I dreamed in my head was not Peter Jackson's vision for the movie. And that is okay, everyone has different ideas. But, why did each movie have to be so damn long? That was unnecessary. J R R Tolkien created a much better world in one short book. Peter Jackson got a little too big for his britches after the "Lord of the Rings" success and made the "Hobbit" movies entirely too long. This is one case where I completely agree that the book is so much better than the movie.

Now, my second example is going to make me sound pretentious, but this topic is pretentious, and where else can I be pretentious than on the internet, but every Bret Easton Ellis book is so, so much better than their movie adaptation. For those that don't know, Ellis wrote, among things, "American Psycho", "The Rules of Attraction" and "Less Than Zero". Let's first look at "American Psycho". That book is about as disturbing and violent as it gets. The imagery in that book is frighteningly real. I could not read that book before bed for fear of having nightmares. The description of the heinous acts still haunts me, and I haven't read that book in well over a year. But, the movie left a lot to be desired. I get that they couldn't make the movie nearly as brutal as the book, but therein lies the problem with adapting a book. The book has more time and can paint a realistic picture. Movies, 2 hours and out. While the book "American Psycho" terrified me, the movie was kind of blah. Then, I read "Less Than Zero". That book is a brutal look into the life of wealthy Californian kids that suffer with real problems, like drug addiction, divorce and having too much wealth way too young. The way Ellis described this stuff in the book made it seem real to me. I could picture these kids. Hell, I knew some of these kids. But, the movie, save for Robert Downey Jr, almost played like an after school special. The movie didn't take the chances that the book did. But, I'm sure that the agents of the young actors didn't want their clients to do some of the stuff in the book because it could have tarnished their image. That's a bummer because that movie could have been great. And, "The Rules of Attraction" book was so much better than the garbage movie they made. The book focused, again, on rich, white college students with problems. But, the book had a little humor to it that made it very enjoyable. I would read some stuff and laugh out loud, but then I'd be brought back down immediately by something heart breaking. The movie, on the other hand, was trash. The director and casting agents picked young "stars" like James Van Der Beek and Jessica Biel, and tried to make them look angsty and tough. Well, no matter how much fake cocaine Jessica Biel does, or how many fights Van Der Beek got in, I couldn't help but laugh, and not in a good way, at the performances in the movie. It was terrible. Ellis himself proved to be a bad movie writer himself when he made that god awful movie with Lindsay Lohan and a porn star, but he is a novelist, not a movie writer.

One final example I have is "James and the Giant Peach". I loved this book as a kid. This was one of the first chapter books I read in elementary school. Roald Dahl was, and still is, a genius in my opinion. The book is so imaginative and so beautifully written. Again, the imagery in my mind is wonderous. But, the movie just couldn't compare. They even tried with an animated movie, but it was not the same. This time, at least, the movie was halfway decent, but it was nowhere near as cool as the book.

I'm sure there are thousands of other examples, but these are the ones that came to my mind immediately. Tell me and my wife about some other ones in the comment section. But, I do have to agree, once again, with my wife. Books are usually much, much better than their adaptations.

Ty with a little help from his wife

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast. He is already upset the movie version of his life will leave out the part where he spun the world backwards and saved Lois Lane. Movies need to run on time. You should follow Ty on twitter @tykulik.