Why do people hate ben stiller

It just isn't quite how it was meant to be. So what is he to do? Tropic Thunder, his latest film as a director, hardly signals a U-turn. It is a big, loud, fitfully hilarious blockbuster about a bunch of preening megastars who get lost in the jungle while shooting a Vietnam war epic.

Stiller headlines as a fading action hero named Tugg Speedman, while Robert Downey Jr co-stars, in blackface, as an Australian method actor, who may or may not be based on Russell Crowe.

Stiller explains that he actually had the idea for the film 20 years ago. In the late s, he had a small part billed 12th in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun and auditioned unsuccessfully for a role in Oliver Stone's Platoon. This was the era of Hamburger Hill and Full Metal Jacket, when Hollywood pups were getting packed off to actor's boot camp and then insisting that it was, y'know, just like the real thing, man.

It's about pretending to be a tough guy from a very pampered position. He's come a long way since then. Oddly enough, the spectacle of a white actor in blackface caused barely a ripple when Tropic Thunder was released in the US. Instead, the controversy was sparked elsewhere.

Stiller's movie contains a film-within-a-film called Simple Jack, in which Tugg Speedman makes a blatant bid for an Oscar by going "full retard". Simple Jack is a stammering village idiot who coos winsomely over his mother's deathbed and tells the local beauty that she "m-m-makes his pee-pee-maker tingle". I found this funny; others did not. At the film's premiere, a coalition of disability advocacy groups organised a picket, insisting that "the R-word is hate speak".

And the issue never came up until a week and a half before the film came out - and that was because someone saw the marketing material and took it out of context," he shrugs. To me it's very clear that the joke is at the expense of the actors. All right then, let's look at the actors - and one actor in particular. Among its gallery of grotesques, Tropic Thunder makes room for a jaw-dropping cameo from none other than Tom Cruise.

He plays a bald, boorish studio boss; a monstrous alpha dog who orders underlings to punch directors in the face and celebrates each success by dancing exuberantly in his office. It's hard not to be shocked by Cruise's physical transformation, this clownish change of gears, but Stiller insists it's not really so surprising. Good actors are good actors, whatever genre they're working in.

Even so, the Cruise connection strikes me as significant, in part because the two actors have a long and intertwined history. Back when he was acting for Spielberg and auditioning for Stone, Stiller took time out to shoot a brief parody of Cruise's performance in The Color of Money. More recently he played the star's fawning body-double in another comedy short, Mission: Improbable.

But fans of Ben Stiller have noticed a troubling trend when it comes to discussing the films he's been in. They suggest that movie snobs dislike Ben Stiller, and they think they've figured out why.

The film snobs -- AKA normal people who love movies and obsess over movies in online forums and on blogs -- mostly populate Reddit threads and sometimes Rotten Tomatoes reviews. And there's an interesting trend that fans have uncovered. Ben Stiller has a very long resume in Hollywood, and he's best known for his comedic chops. For example, his "evil cameo" in 'Hubie Halloween' was the result of a long-running gag and it definitely had fans chuckling. But many self-proclaimed film buffs don't like Ben's characters or his movies.

They downright bash most of his projects and say they're "bad movies. And it's weird , say fans, because who doesn't like to laugh? On The Ben Stiller Show we did a lot of parodies. Something like Tropic Thunder is a bit more satirical. But then hopefully you develop past that. That really affected me, and so did watching Albert Brooks movies. So I started exploring that, and it was very derivative for a long time, which is part of the process of figuring out what your voice is.

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