Results tagged “robertdowneyjr”

Let's just get one thing out of the way before launching into the proper review: I am in love with Robert Downey, Jr. Not since seeing Michael J. Fox whip through time in that DeLorean have I been so smitten with an actor. I typically don't get into the whole swooning over celebrities thing, but I can't help myself with this one. My love is unavoidable, uncontrollable, and unrelenting. Okay, I feel better now having disclosed that. On with the review.

Just in case there was any doubt left, yes, Robert Downey is in blackface for almost the entirety of Tropic Thunder. And no, I didn't feel guilty about laughing at him. That's because Downey, who plays the Russel Crowe-like Kirk Lazarus, is laughing at himself. It's a ridiculous premise: a multi-time Oscar winner, Lazarus undergoes controversial (you don't say!) skin pigmentation-altering surgery to play the African-American sergeant of the American platoon featured in the Vietnam War-era film-within-a-film, also dubbed Tropic Thunder, that he is filming alongside action star Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller), comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), hip-hop artist Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson), and up-and-comer Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel). So "Method" is his acting that Lazarus refuses to drop character, vacillating between truly stubborn and genuinely confused, often putting him at odds with the African-American Chino, who is upset that "they had one good part in there for a black man, and they gave it to "Crocodile Dundee!" (Lazarus's rebuttal is one of the best lines in the movie, thanks in no small part to Downey's delivery.)

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Director David Fincher's latest film, Zodiac, is, like a number of his other films, another crime thriller examining tortured, obsessed, and violent human beings. But this time it's based on a true story: that of the serial killer who called himself Zodiac, and who was active in the area around San Francisco in Northern California for a number of years during the late '60s and early '70s. But really the film is less about the killer and more about the men looking for him, and how their passionate desire to find and catch him, and their agonizing inability to actually do so, tears apart their lives.

What's new and/or interesing in Philly theaters this weekend.

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