"If I'm a black person on that set, I'm offended. And honestly, I think a white person should step up and say they feel uncomfortable and it's not appropriate."

"Black and white people gotta stand up when they see some bulls**t going on."

Said the rapper/actor Common, about a stunt double — a child stunt double — whose skin was darkened to make him look like the actor he was supposed to look like — The Daily Mail reports. Common said that it is "never appropriate" to darken a face. "'C'mon man, it's 2018, when is that acceptable? I ain't with it."

I don't know anything about Common, so that puts me at a disadvantage trying to interpret him, and of course, I haven't lived a life enough like a black person's to be great at imagining what he means, but I notice he's asking white people to step up, so I'm going to say that he's agitating anxiety about race and trying to make it so that you'll be more uncomfortable if you try to relax and get comfortable. You ought to have to think: Is this right? Is this decent? Is this helping?

Here you have Seth Rogen (a very successful white actor), making a movie called "Good Boys," in which he is using a chubby 11-year-old black child, Keith L. Williams. I don't know what the story is — other than that "four 12-year-old boys... skip school to embark on a day-long adventure fraught with comedic peril" — but apparently the visual jokes are such that a stunt double is needed.

Somehow, half-conscious Americans are going to be nudged into laughter, sometime in the near future, by scenes of the black kid getting knocked around. And these Hollywood white guys couldn't break their stride long enough to find a stunt double who looks like Williams.

ADDED: In the comments, the question is raised whether this child performed stunts or merely stood in for the actor when technicians adjusted the equipment. If the latter, it would have been much easier to find a similar boy who would not need to have his skin darkened. If it's a stunt boy, as I read it (the word "stunt" appears at least twice), then it's more understandable that they made up the stunt boy they had. But it must be a stunt boy to support my comments about Hollywood extracting idle amusement from knocking a black child about.

By the way, the whole idea of a child doing stunt work seems wrong. I'm sure there are laws applicable at the location (here, Vancouver). But obviously, there are many different kinds of stunts, and surely there are some things that the actor-child can't or won't do that would be okay to allow a stunt child to do — for example, things that are more or less gymnastics.

Hillary Clinton calls the movie about Kim Jong-un "disgusting and reprehensible."

"The United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this movie. We absolutely reject its content and message. To us — to me personally — this movie is disgusting and reprehensible. It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose — to denigrate a revered world leader and to provoke rage..."



Oh... wait... that was that "Innocence of Muslims" movie about Muhammad that some sleazy guy made. Is he still in jail? This Kim Jong-un movie is a different matter. Free speech! Free speech! How dare the North Koreans object to "the fiery, slow-motion assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, to the tune of Katy Perry's 'Firework'"!

“We will make it less gory," the [director Seth Rogen responded to Sony Pictures' Amy Pascal who had some concerns]. "There are currently four burn marks on his face. We will take out three of them, leaving only one. We reduce the flaming hair by 50%." In October, Rogen sent Pascal a follow-up message with the subject line "Kim Face Fix," noting that "the entire secondary wave of head chunks" had been removed. A special-effects technician later weighed in with an update: "the goop from the head pop is darker, specifically to make it less flesh-like and more surreal."

I'm all for free speech, myself. Even for corporations like Citizens United and Sony. But why is this movie deserving of high-level government support when "Innocence of Muslims" was treated like the garbage that — on an artistic/expressive level — it actually was? Let's have some consistency! Do we love free speech and stand up to foreign bullies or don't we? Pick one!

"Do you know what the ‘Hunger Games’ movies are about?... It’s teenagers killing other teenagers."

Said Rush Limbaugh, quoted in Politico, "Rush ties killings to 'Hunger Games.'" The father of the Santa Barbara murderer was an assistant director on that movie, so what does that mean?

“Why not blame Hollywood movies here? Oh, we can never, ever go there...” [Rush] said, sarcastically.

The "sarcastically" is helpful, because people who don't listen to the show really do have trouble understanding what Rush is trying to say... especially if they are anti-Rush, and the fact is that Rush loves to rope in his antagonists and laugh at the way they don't get him. Listeners — and I am one — are encouraged to think of ourselves as in-the-know insiders. We get it.

I don't think you have to be that smart to get it if you listen and hear the performance of the words, especially if you're on Rush's side, and this interplay between Rush lovers and haters creates energy that Rush endlessly recycles and amplifies. It's a very popular and high-profile show, and yet, listening, you feel included in a pretty friendly little circle. It's magic. A different kind of magic than movies, and so it's interesting to get the radio man's take on Hollywood.

But Politico moves on to something a WaPo columnist wrote and the reaction it got from 2 Hollywoodland critters:

“How many students watch outsized frat-boy fantasies like “Neighbors” and feel, as [suspect Elliot] Rodger did, unjustly shut out of college life that should be full of “sex and fun and pleasure”?” [Ann] Hornaday wrote over the weekend. “How many men, raised on a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl, find that those happy endings constantly elude them.”

Both [Seth] Rogen and Apatow slammed Hornaday and called the critic misinformed, with Apatow adding that she “milked tragedy.”

Here's the transcript of the Rush show segment, "The Left Takes Another Human Tragedy and Converts It Into a Political Issue." Excerpt:

I can't tell you the number of guys I knew growing up that were bragging about all the sex they were having and it was simply a dream.  They wanted everybody to think it, but they couldn't get past first base any better than this kid could.  And the ones who weren't talking about it were the ones that you learned later on that were the studs. And they weren't talking about it because of manners, self-respect, respect for the girls involved, who knows what.

Of course, movies are that teenboy dream, the bragging of sexually unattractive males like Apatow and Rogen who — via Hollywood — get into a position to make the dream look real through the magic of cinema. Unlike the consumers of the cinema, the filmmakers acquire the money to make the dream real in their lives, even as Rush, through his radio magic, has acquired the money to get him the women he could only dream of in high school.

Rodger was the rich kid who reasoned that since he already had the money, he should already be the man to whom women yield. They didn't, and in his impoverished mind, he couldn't get any farther than that. He had to walk out of the rom-com showing on screen 1 in the multiplex and into the slasher film on screen 2.