Thanks to a rabbit hole I don’t recall, I ended up watching Meatballs last night. I know I saw parts of it as a child back when they played post-theatrical run movies on The Big Three networks, but I don’t remember if I ever saw the full thing before. There is a certain “funny” scene in there that completely made me cringe because it was pretty much a lengthy portrayal of attempted rape. (Also a counciler spending a large amount of time alone with one child would get the side-eye today.)
Stone Cold Dead in the Market by the legendary Ella Fitzgerald. Its a light-hearted tale of a woman who kills her abusive husband set to a breezy hipswaying Jamaican rhythm from 1946.
According to the “Protection of the Innocent” training I just went through, they would get fired.
I got the same training as a Sunday School teacher. You NEVER spend time with a kid one-on-one. It makes heart-to-heart talks harder, but it’s safer to ask another leader to join you.
I dunno; that’s the same subject matter as “Goodbye Earl”, which wasn’t all that long ago.
Maybe Im wrong but I found the tone more shocking than the content. Its basically a light-hearted fun song about spousal abuse and murder. As dark satire this could be an excellent take. But it seems to be played as a dance song. It now its made its way onto the Mafia 2 soundtrack and onto a Fallout 4 radio mod.
Three movies that were favorites of mine when I was a teen in the 80’s have content that wouldn’t fly today.
In Sixteen Candles, Samantha’s (Molly Ringwald’s) grandmother feels up her boobs while saying “they’re so perky!” Farmer Ted shows her underwear to a group of ogling nerds. There’s a scene that broadly hints at FT having non-consensual sex with a passed-out drunk girl. And let’s not even begin to deconstruct Long Duk Dong.
In The Breakfast Club, Bender catches a peek at Claire’s undies and shoves his head towards her vag; borderline sexual assault.
And in Revenge of the Nerds, there’s an actual, unambiguous act of sexual assault that’s played for laughs; there’s a hidden camera via which men ogle nude women without their consent. And, again, with the gross Asian (and gay, and Black) stereotypes.
Along the same lines–
If you REALLY want to shock somebody these days, show them pretty much any of the child actor skits that Shirley Temple starred in.
There was a similar scene in 1990s The Rookie but I can’t remember if it was Clint Eastwood or Charlie Sheen’s character who was in the chair.
There’s a scene in Swordfish in which Hugh Jackman’s character’s hacking skills are tested by John Travolta by forcing him to crack a DoD site on a laptop while he is receiving a blowjob with a gun to his head. Not exactly consensual sex.
Huh. I would have expected this scene to be the one you would link.
They both have a lot of sexual innuendo, but the Speakeasy scene is more general. The Tallulah number is explicitly about a prostitute.
Whatever your views about child actors, there are a lot of good songs in the movie.
A couple more:
Has no one mentioned Blazing Saddles yet, or did I just miss it?
actually, there was a john Lithgow/Denzel Washington movie called ricochet where Denzel makes a career out of the silly way he arrests Lithgow’s serial killer because it was caught on tv
Lithgow escapes from prison and spends the rest of the movie enacting elaborate revenge schemes and one of them was to drug Denzel’s character tie him to a chair and hireS a hooker to bounce on him while Lithgow tapes it the “most guys” comment was because Denzel was so drugged up he was basically unconscious … come to find out the call girl also had an unidentified std which he caught … which leads to an amusing scene with his wife who has no idea what’s going on
In 1984’s Johnny Dangerously, Danny Vermin (Joe Piscopo) is displaying his new .88 Magnum revolver:
“It shoots through schools.”
It looks like no one had mentioned it before yourself. It’s on TCM tonight, unedited!
I don’t know when you could really get away with most of that movie, with some audiences. I was assistant manager of a video store in the mid 90s. Another assistant manager decided it would be a good idea to put Blazing Saddles on one Thursday night (our busiest night). Did I mention this was in a part of Dallas that had primarily people of color as the clientele?
No amount of my saying “Well, Richard Pryor co-wrote that movie” on Friday was going to save his job.
Also the character playing the dude in blackface was playing the character earnestly, oblivious to how offensive it was to those around him.
It was actually the portrayal of “full retard” Simple Jack that kind of got Tropic Thunder in trouble.
Eddie Murphy reprised his Mister Robinson role relatively recently when he was the host on SNL.
Also, no one ever seems to remember the brief scene in Trading Places where Dan Aykroyd appears in blackface.
Also “contentious” doesn’t mean “couldn’t get away with it”. A lot of comedy has always been “contentious”.
I think following it up with Implied Gorilla Anal Sex kind of made everyone forget the earlier scene.
Sure. Let’s put it this way. Not every comedian could get away with what Eddie Murphy can get away with.
What, specifically, got him into trouble? The whole film is a criticism of racial prejudice. I’m not seeing why people of color would object.