Just look at this fratboy rapist

Ugh. I really didn’t want to write about this, but I guess I have to. So James Gunn, known to a cult handful as a kitschy-clever Troma-trained director of films like Super and Slither, back in 2011 wrote a kitschy-campy, tongue-in-cheek blog post called “The 50 Superheroes You Most Want to Have Sex With.” A post which, for some reason the “guide to geek girl culture” site The Mary Sue only picked up on this week, calling it a “slut-shaming, misogynist, homophobic post” (thanks to the internet, I can now spell “misogynist” without a dictionary!). From which followed the requisite online petition to get James Gunn removed from his job directing the much higher-profile Guardians of the Galaxy, which Marvel hired him to do back in August. The petition garnered a relatively paltry 3,100 signatures.

Naturally, James Gunn had to monkey dance for the self-appointed morality police in an apology posted by GLAAD:

“A couple of years ago I wrote a blog that was meant to be satirical and funny. In rereading it over the past day I don’t think it’s funny. The attempted humor in the blog does not represent my actual feelings. However, I can see where statements were poorly worded and offensive to many. I’m sorry and regret making them at all,” Gunn writes.

“People who are familiar with me as evidenced by my Facebook page and other mediums know that I’m an outspoken proponent for the rights of the gay and lesbian community, women and anyone who feels disenfranchised, and it kills me that some other outsider like myself, despite his or her gender or sexuality, might feel hurt or attacked by something I said. We’re all in the same camp, and I want to do my best to make this world a better place for all of us. I’m learning all the time.” [THR]

If you knew anything about James Gunn or had ever seen a Troma film, you’d know the “offending” post was par for course – kitschy, gleefully vulgar, and written in tongue-in-cheek vernacular. The worst you could say about it was that it was un-PC, and duh, that’s Troma’s entire mission statement. That stuff wouldn’t even exist without  humorless, content-deaf outrage merchants to clutch their pearls over it. As far as I can tell, this was the language Susana Polo of the Mary Sue had such a problem with:

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"Dear Sirs, I found your jokes both hurtful and offensive..."

The number of things you can joke about in a film is getting smaller and smaller. Pretty soon not even Three’s Company-style misunderstandings will be tolerated, AND THEN WHAT WILL WE DO, WHAT?? The latest group angry about a joke? The lepers. They’re mad at Aardman Animation for prominently featuring a leper joke in their trailer for The Pirates! Band Of Misfits. Wait, is “leper” offensive? Sorry, I meant lepro.

Aardman is modifying a scene following objections from leprosy groups including Lepra Health In Action and the International Federation of Anti-Leprosy Associations (ILEP).
In a scene in the trailer that was released in December, Hugh Grant’s Pirate Captain lands on a ship demanding gold, but is told by a crew member, “Afraid we don’t have any gold old man, this is a leper boat. See,” and with that, his arm falls off. [Deadline]

Lepra’s president Sir Christian Bonington said: “It might make you laugh but leprosy stigma not only hurts, it is still forcing people to live a life on the fringes of society.
“Not only is the dropping off of body parts a total misnomer we have to ask ourselves, as we watch it uncomfortably, is it acceptable for us to be laughing at the millions of people who are disabled by leprosy?”

Dude, just say it’s a misnomer. Don’t give us that old Polyanna YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO LAUGH AT SAD THINGS bullsh*t. We’re not? Then what’s the point of humor? …On a side note, ha, “Bonington.”

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According to some reports, the trailer for Brett Ratner’s film, Tower Heist, allegedly contained “jokes.” One such “joke” involved Eddie Murphy’s character being reunited with an old schoolmate played by Ben Stiller, saying, “Oh I remember you! You the little seizure boy! Used to have them seizures all the time!”

Actor Greg Grunberg (best known for his portrayal of Who and Never Heard of Him in The Wankening), who has an epileptic son, apparently saw the trailer and took offense. Or at least, did whatever it’s called where you ignore context to advance your own agenda. Grunberg tweeted:

“TERRIBLY OFFENSIVE TRAILER for #TowerHeist – Making fun @ people w/ seizures is NOT FUNNY & WRONG! “Seizure Boy!” REALLY? #Boycott RT.”

And clearly, this gentleman is an authority on what’s funny. OBVIOUSLY the subtext of the “joke” was “HAHA, AREN’T EPILEPTIC KIDS ASSHOLES?”, and not “Look what an insensitive prick this character is.” Luckily, Brett Ratner is a slovenly, crumb-covered bastion of integrity, and he stood behind the line one hundred per– wait, what’s that? He immediately issued an apology and offered to pull the line from the commercials?

TalkAboutIt.org, an organization that Grunberg founded which is devoted to raising awareness about epilepsy, said in a post on its website over the weekend that Ratner had issued an apology to the actor.
“I am so sorry you are offended. … I sincerely feel bad,” Ratner wrote to Grunberg.
The organization added that Ratner has asked Universal Studios to change the movie’s marketing campaign by removing the offensive jokes from planned television spots.
After receiving the apology from Ratner, Grunberg tweeted the news with a message to the director.
“THANKS @BrettRatner for ur SINCERE APOLOGY to the Epilepsy Community! I’m lifting my personal boycott of ur hilarious film #TowerHeist RT,” he wrote. [THR]

While my blood pressure rises, let’s see if I can recap: Greg Grunberg says a joke he misunderstood is “NOT FUNNY & WRONG” and calls for a boycott. Brett Ratner says “I’m so sorry! Let’s pretend the joke isn’t in my movie even though it totally still is! Will that help?” And then Greg Grunberg is all like, “PERFECT. A token PR movie is exactly what I was after! Have I mentioned you’re hilarious?”

And people say Hollywood is full of phonies.

Last week, Universal pulled their trailer for The Dilemma after Anderson Cooper complained about the scene in which Vince Vaughn says “electric cars are gay” (even though Cooper never mentioned the name of the movie and sort of misquoted the line in question).  At the time, Universal said they’d already screened the trailer for members of GLAAD and gays in their marketing department and that no one had had a problem with it.

When the trailer debuted three weeks ago, complaints immediately came in to the studio and its marketing department. But Universal claims that’s when it called GLAAD again  to “double check” there were no objections. The studio tells me that “only then did GLAAD say, ‘This is probably questionable. It’s not a major offense at all. But it’s best not to use it in the campaign so it avoids any questions.’” [Deadline]

GLAAD denies that, but whatever the case, they started to complain about it after the Anderson Cooper appearance. Universal altered the trailer to remove the line, but now GLAAD is taking it a step further with an online petition to have the “anti-gay language” removed from the final movie altogether.  The line in the trailer was “electric cars are gay. …I mean, not homosexual gay, but but my-parents-are-chaperoning-me-to-the-dance gay.”  Meanwhile, ThePlaylist reports that that line had been altered from Allan Loeb’s original script, which said:

“Not homosexual gay… but soft gay, unmanly gay, quiet and small gay” and that “if you’re a real man… you don’t want an electronic car.”

Now, I’m tempted to point out that it’s dangerous to set a precedent wherein what a movie character says has to be screened for PC language, and that if you squint, you might imagine that the point of the line was that the Vince Vaughn character is kind of an A-hole who talks too much and his mouth gets him in trouble, not that he’s a really good guy who never says anything vaguely homophobic, even by accident. 
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Sacha Baron Cohen is a kosher Jew, so he pretty much had carte blanche to do all the Jew jokes he wanted in Borat.  Unfortunately he’s not gay, so you can imagine what that means for the Brüno movie – a lot of whining by people who know nothing about comedy.  A site called theWrap (via /Film) recently reported that Brüno was reshot in response to concerns from some of Hollywood’s gay community, notably School of Rock’s Mike White, who supposedly “found the Bruno character to be a depiction of fetishism rather than a comedic stereotype,” (whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean). Which in turn led to…

The filmmaker conducting “significant reshoots” to temper the troubled reaction of  insiders from the Hollywood gay community, according to one person involved in the Bruno production who declined to be identified.

But take the reshoot part of this story with a grain of salt, as multiple sources have called BS on some of the things TheWrap have written recently, calling them “reckless and irresponsible.”  It’s also weird they use an anonymous source and don’t even mention director Larry Charles by name.  But as you can see in the above video, some “notable” gays are “concerned.”  Which is another way to say “wanting to appear PC without taking the trouble to actually form an opinion.”  Says Queer as Folk‘s Peter Page at the 1:29 mark:

“When you see a Brüno clip in a room full of gay men, everyone laughs and it’s fun.  When you see a Brüno clip in a room full of straight men, everyone laughs and it’s a different thing.  And you start to go, ‘Hmm, I don’t know how I feel about this.’”

Wow.  Gosh.  That is… damning.  I’m seriously starting to rethink this whole thing.  Everyone knows the first rule of comedy is to find the stupidest person in the room and gear all your comedy towards him.  It’s like this one time I was listening to the Beatles, and I said to Charlie Manson, “isn’t this awesome?”  And he was like, “Yeah, man!  It’s about the coming of the race war!”  And from then on I couldn’t listen to the Beatles because the Beatles are racist.  And now Bruno.  Gosh, I think I’ll just watch Leno until everyone’s the same.