Nowhere to Go But Downey

By our unofficial count, exactly one actor performed in a movie in blackface in 2008. Tropic Thunder may have seemed like just another wacky-brave escapade in the fascinating career of loony-tune genius Robert Downey Jr., but there was a method to this particular madness: Bobby D. was tracing a cursive line back to his pop’s subversive strain of anarchic comedy. You see, in the ’60s and ’70s, Robert Downey Sr. wrote and directed a quiver of clever and largely undisciplined (read: mightily stoned) movies satirizing social conventions. "Under the Underground: The Films of Robert Downey" concludes tonight with the messy bull-in-a-china-shop escapades No More Excuses (clocking in at just 44 hit-and-run minutes) and the ultrarare Moment to Moment (starring the comic dervish Elsie Downey, Pop’s wife and Junior’s mother). Don’t be shocked if someone dashes across the screen in blackface.

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• Robert Downey Jr.
• Elsie Downey
• Tropic Thunder
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

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No More Excuses screens with Moment to Moment starting at 7 p.m.
Thu., Jan. 15, 7:30 p.m.; Sun., Jan. 18, 7 p.m., 2009