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Airplane! is another movie that "wouldn't be allowed to be made today" The line "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?" would be a scandal today. https://www.
by torcete 5y ago
Airplane! is another movie that "wouldn't be allowed to be made today"
The line "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?" would be a scandal today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfgO90yGusI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfgO90yGusI
- dimitrios1 5y agoThe best example of the "wouldn't be allowed to be made today" is Tropic Thunder.
- matthewh806 5y agoYawn, everyone always uses this film as a "prime" example. I don't even think it's true. This film (like Borat) was clearly satirical and the real targets of the jokes quite obvious... I think a better example of movies which "wouldn't be allowed today" is probably something like the Hangover, which just mines outdated stereotypes & slurs for laughs. Just a sign of society moving on really (as much as Todd Phillips likes to cry about it, I feel his inability to adapt to the comedy landscape is really just a failure of the imagination). I thought the 21 / 22 Jump Street movie addressed this issue quite well it seems the shift took place sometime between the two releases
- ghaff 5y agoI'm pretty skeptical of the "couldn't be made today" tropes. Some types of films have gone out of style. And there probably are cultural/ethnic stereotypes that would have been mostly considered funny by many audiences that would be more broadly seen as just offensive today. But I'm not sure how many things are really outright taboo. For example, I've also heard people say that Heathers couldn't be made today--can't be threatening to blow up a school--but it was actually staged as an off-Broadway musical not all that long ago.
- aaron695 5y agoThe 22 Jump Street movie kiss/fight scene could never be done today, nor could the other kissing scenes, but the kiss/fight scene was a pivotal part of the movie. Borat is racist, it's not 'satirical' and that's ok, the world's complicated. It's also ok to hide behind 'satirical' as everyone does, except when you get picky on movies you personally don't think are 'satirical' Hollywood's inability to deal with kissing is academically interesting. Currently combining sarcasm with the 'correct' actions they are told to follow. It's a dangerous path towards the religious moralism we left behind in the 60's, but perhaps I fear change. The idea nothing is happening is incorrect.
- SteveNuts 5y agoI mean, a main character is in blackface for the entire film. I'm fairly skeptical that will ever happen again.
- psychomugs 5y agoI feel like RDJ would've been cancelled into oblivion if it came out in 2021 and he weren't the posterboy for the entire comic book movie genre.
- dbt00 5y agoI mean, this already happened. Ted Danson was semi-cancelled in the early 90s for wearing blackface to a Friar's Club roast of his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg. Blackface being problematic isn't something we just figured out in the last 12 years, and people trying to do something funny with it anyway isn't new either.
- psychomugs 5y agoI don't disagree with the fact that blackface is an old phenomenon, I think RDJ's prodigal-son-returns factor and headlining a tentpole summer blockbuster helped brace the impact a bit.
- jimbokun 5y agoI don't think Tropic Thunder "would be allowed to be made" when it was made. I still don't quite get how they managed to get a movie centered around a character in black face made, even though it was obviously a parody.
- chki 5y agoMaybe they would need to cut that specific line but apart from that? As far as I recall, everything else should be fine.
- matthewh806 5y agoShock horror, society has moved on in the 40 years since Airplane was made... How do you even know it wouldn't be allowed? People love to spout this kind of stuff, but... have you even tried? Edit: A very nice example I've come across is Ricky Gervais stating that the British Office couldn't be made today. I think he's being very disingenuous saying that because while out of context it could appear to have a lot of controversial jokes touching on taboo subjects, within the show it was always clear who the real target of the jokes was (same with Borat). Masterfully done and I believe (from what I've seen in terms of comedy recently) that kind of stuff would still fly at the BBC. There's even a documentary from a couple of decades back about the success of the office and a BBC producer admits even back then they had to reign in a few of the areas Gervais wanted to go in terms of race & disability (it was also mentioned that he is quite obsessed with these topics), so its all bullshit that people like him are shouting about "THESE DAYS...!". In fact maybe he's right and the Office couldn't be made today. But that's primarily because Gervais isn't funny these days
- teddyh 5y ago> Ricky Gervais stating that the British Office couldn't be made today. I think he's being very disingenuous saying that because while out of context it could appear to have a lot of controversial jokes touching on taboo subjects, within the show it was always clear who the real target of the jokes was But that’s exactly why it could not be made today. Today, you can’t say anything which can be taken out of context. Quote mining has become a national pastime.
- matthewh806 5y agoSo, how do you explain Ricky Gervais' ongoing presence in TV, standup & social media where he routinely says objectively worse stuff than ever appeared in the Office with no real damage done to his career? His recent standup work has far more objectionable content in it than the Office ever did
- teddyh 5y agoI would guess that a TV series must be approved by more people than an individual’s standup routine.
- porb121 5y agohave you ever seen an episode of it's always sunny in philadelphia? the show is regularly far more offensive than any line in airplane, and nobody cares.
- Aditya_Garg 5y agoIts also tv's longest running sitcom.
- atlasunshrugged 5y agoReally? I would have guessed Seinfeld or something in that vein.
- afavour 5y agoI think it's actually pretty debatable, depending on what you count "longest running" to mean. Curb Your Enthusiasm has been on since 2000 but has taken years-long breaks. Is that longest running? FWIW It's Always Sunny is, I believe, considered the longest running live action sitcom. Longest running sitcom overall is The Simpsons.
- skeeter2020 5y agoSimpsons is not considered a sitcom, but it is the longest running show, period.
- psychomugs 5y agoSitcom: a television series that involves a continuing cast of characters in a succession of comedic circumstances [Merriam-Webster]. The Simpsons is most definitely a sitcom, just one that happens to be animated.
- anotherman554 5y agoI can't see a critic taking that dictionary definition very seriously. If you had looked at Wikipedia instead, you'd see no animated show is discussed in the article on sitcom, suggesting animated shows are considered a separate genre. If you opened a textbook on mass media, it might have a definition of sitcom that is more culturally relevant.
- afavour 5y agoI think you’re confusing “would not be allowed to be made today” with “would face a ~48 hour Twitter outrage cycle then the world would move on”. I feel like we're stuck in this absurd cycle where the outrage to the outrage becomes a force multiplier. A small number of very vocal people on the left express outrage about X. Not a view shared by the vast majority of the population, left and right included. Right wing media picks up on said outrage and makes vast, sweeping statements about what it means about "the left" and "America today". The whole thing snowballs, some folks on the left end up defending people they don't agree with just because of the outrage on the right... blah blah blah it all eventually dies down until we do the same dance a couple of months later. It's all an absurd waste of everyone's time, except for the folks like Tucker Carlson that get record viewing figures and a huge pay day from it.
- Delk 5y agoI mostly agree, and you're spot on about the outrage cycle. Well put. However, I don't think the outrage cycle is really contained within Twitter, or within social media in general. It also spills over to traditional media, at least to some extent. Since it gets a lot of attention, including sometimes from influential people, it can actually affect the kinds of content that people dare make, especially if financial risks are involved. What you're "allowed" to do is a bit of an imprecise expression unless you go right down to law, but it would be a little disingenuous to pretend that social pressure doesn't affect what people expect others to find permissible. Getting outrage thrown at you can certainly make people feel something is socially forbidden. (That of course serves a pro-social role as well. But I don't think we're used to the idea that it's normal to have outrage or other strong emotional condemnation towards something we do from random people we don't know unless we've done something totally unacceptable. We're wired to think of social acceptance as important and outrage as something that requires our attention. The way social media works throws us off because of that. But I digress.)
- toomanyducks 5y agoI also think that as more high profile people leave Twitter, the extremes of canceling are going to die down. It's pretty well accepted in the leftist communities that canceling has become more than a bit too impulsive and reductionist (this latter factor, I would suggest, due in part to Twitter's tiny character limits), and I think at this point everyone wants to leave Twitter and be done with it, but it's a technical issue now. Twitter is addicting, and honestly so is the adrenaline rush from knowing some rich guy's day/week was ruined. imo, it's easier to just not think about Twitter when people you know/admire aren't on there, and if you're not thinking, you're not tweeting, and if you're not tweeting, you're not recklessly canceling. Something should replace it, though. Transparent accountability is good, and I think we'll really need to figure this one out before a tech monolopy takes advantage of it again.
- skeeter2020 5y agoHe wouldn't be allowed to visit the cockpit either, which is an enduring joy from my childhood.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Airplane! is another movie that "wouldn't be allowed to be made today" Yes, the kind of comedy it has is very tied to the immediate social context for commercial viability, both as to the what it is lampooning (late-70s disaster films) and how. The broader template of Airplane! (broad take-it-to-11 parody of recently popular film patterns) because it was itself the pattern for its own flood of films in the 2000s (Scary Movie, Date Movie, Superhero Movie, and several sequels to Scary Movie).
- bsanr2 5y agoThe, "Could not be made today," line of thinking is overblown. I predicted around 2015 that a movie in the style of "Falling Down" could never be made with a black lead. Less than 2 years later, Get Out was released. And as far as scandal-worthiness goes, I think if Sorry To Bother You got past the salacity filter, we're doing pretty good.