'Tropic Thunder' brings back issues about cinema and race

In a role bridging decades of progress and regress on the big screen, Robert Downey Jr. is an Aussie actor obsessed with being black in Ben Stiller's studio-satirizing movie within a movie. > WHAT IS going on in the zeitgeist when an African American is poised to become president and Robert Downey Jr. is in blackface? In the new comedy " Tropic Thunder," Downey plays actor Kirk Lazarus, a Russell Crowe-ish Aussie who is cast as a black soldier in a blood-and-guts Vietnam War epic. Method Man that he is, Lazarus dyes his skin, mats his hair and revamps his voice into a guttural drawl that's equal parts plantation and blaxploitation. His flared sideburns might have been modeled on Jim Brown's in "100 Rifles." (link)