Hacker Cinema
Tropic Thunder
2008 · Film · 107 min
Directed by Ben Stiller
A group of self-absorbed actors set out to make the most expensive war film ever. When budgets skyrocket and schedules fall far behind, the director tries to save the production by leading his cast into the jungles of Southeast Asia, where they inadvertently encounter real danger.
10 positive3 negative1 mixed21 neutralfrom 35 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
36 comments on Hacker News
The one I hate so much is fake ai-made movie trailers. I just got fooled by a fake AI-generated for a new Tropic Thunder. There's another one where they have ai-made Harrison Ford playing the old man from Up, and one of the girls from FRIENDs playing the Golden Girls. It's not art it's deceptive. It's so aggravating.
>One thing that the multiple entertainment industry unions did is raise quality by ensuring continuity by ensuring livable pay.
Was the pay not livable back then for the people who made the likes of The Matrix, The Gladiator, The Dark Knight, LoTR trilogy, Tropic Thunder?
> the rise of streaming
Streaming still needs workers to make movies and shows. Rise of streaming means an increased demand for movies and shows. Does not explain the fall in quality.
As a Brit, I generally prefer American Humour when it comes to comedy. My favourite films are Happy Gilmore and Tropic Thunder. A lot of British Humour is around that everything is crap, it gets tiresome after a while.
There is no way Tropic Thunder would be made today and this is true of many comedy movies before the 2010s.
Oh of course, when all the hard cold facts and indisputable evidence is against you, and after getting called on trying to use your own pretend ignorance as a shield, then you pathetically resort to the old "It's impossible to know any facts, because there is no such thing as truth" argument.
That's unmitigated bullshit. Elon Musk now IS the censorship industrial complex of a corrupt government.
You sure have a lot of nerve and contempt and disrespect for the HN community to repeatedly be THAT brazenly unethical and dishonest in a discussion about ethics. Read the room and take the L.
With all due respect, as Musk would tell you, and I literally quote, which you can independently verify yourself: "Please post a bit more positive, beautiful or informative content on this platform." [1] ... "Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face." [2]
[1] Notorious troll Elon Musk ripped for demanding more ‘positive, beautiful’ content on his social media platform: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-x-positive-content-b2671550.html
[2] Musk Appears to Quote Popular Film in ‘F** Yourself in the Face’ Tweet: https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-appears-to-quote-tropic-thunder-with-f-yourself-in-the-face-tweet/
FYI, while that quote was popular to use online, it is sourced from the 2008 movie Tropic Thunder:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/full-retard
I miss the cheesy but wholesome comedies and parodies of the 1990s and 2000s: Anger Management, Rush Hour, The Cable Guy, American Pie, Scary Movie, Bruce Almighty, Eurotrip, Tropic Thunder, Hot Shots, Borat, Idiocracy, How High, White Chicks, etc.
We can't have any like those in this age because someone on Twitter will claim to be offended. Good thing to back-up those old gems as well before they get cancelled/edited to comply with modern sensibilities.
> They made a mistake and got too greedy and make a subscription I barely paid attention to something that got too expensive...
That's the thing, in the past I I'd go months without watching anything on Netflix yet still pay them for it, so they were essentially getting a free $8 a month (or whatever) off me during that time.
Now the prices have gone up so much it doesn't make sense to keep subscribed for something I'm barely using, just so I can easily watch a single show that interests me once every three months or so.
The only streaming service that has makes some sense for me to pay for right now is Youtube's, since that's my goto for videos anyway, and it's nice not to have ads for those.
Additionally they also have a bunch of great older movies free to watch movies on Youtube, probably a better selection (of movies I care about) than Netflix right now (saw/rewatched Train to Busan, Little Shop of Horrors, Ghostbusters, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Tropic Thunder, Fifth Element, Big Trouble in Little China, Dr. Strangelove, 12 Angry Men, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, The Truman Show, Air Force One, Dirty Work, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It recently).
The issue is that all the modern actors have emerged from the tongue-in-cheek Marvel franchise or similar. Tom Cruise almost exclusively plays dramatic roles (the only comedic role I can think of is the one where he's in Harvey Weinstein-esque prosthetics for Tropic Thunder) and he picks his roles very carefully. He dedicates 100% of his life not just to the movie he's in but to the role and mystique of the movie star which is at complete odds with social media marketing and trying to be a relatable person to get the public to like you.
Compare Cruise with Chris Hemsworth who's probably the closest thing to a bankable action star we've got right now (The Rock doesn't count because he essentially isn't acting, but is just playing the Rock in every movie). Chris Hemsworth makes some good movies but he doesn't choose the directors and projects he works on carefully the way Cruise did with Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson etc. Hemsworth is also out there hawking his fitness app, he's doing comedic bit roles and he relies quite heavily on his physique in a way that's closer to Stallone and Arnie. Cruise doesn't do any of these things because he knows that the more you see behind the curtain the less mystique there is. Hemsworth or an actor like him might raise his net worth by creating and selling his own whiskey but his value as a movie star declines when he does it - it cheapens him and his work, which have now become a vehicle to sell things outside of the movie. In contrast, Tom Cruise cares, above all else, in being a movie star. He dedicates himself to it not just inside the movies, but with his entire life outside of it too.
She's since changed, but there was a good interview with Lady Gaga on Johnathan Ross' talk show just after her first album came out. She was sat on the sofa in one of her extravagant costumes and Ross was trying to get her to admit that she went home afterwards and stuck her jogging bottoms on and her takeout stained t shirts and just chilled like the rest of us. Obviously it's true - you'll even see her in her casual attire around the house in her documentary. But at this point in time, pre-social media, Gaga refused to cave. She didn't want her fans to associate her with that - she wanted to be an embodiment, a symbol, an archetype, whatever you want to call it, of the elevated, mysterious pop star. Because that is what feeds the fanatic energy - people want their heroes to be bigger than them, to be above the drudgery of normal life, because that is what inspires them to dream bigger themselves. Tom Cruise is basically the last actor in the lineage of the mysterious movie star, dating right back to the early days of Hollywood with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and later, Clark Gable, Cary Grant etc where movies and moviemaking themselves were both novel, mysterious and glamorous.
Until Hollywood stops making every leading role an ironic tongue in cheek comedian and also stops with the relentless "we're just like you" YouTube video press machine, you won't get another Tom Cruise because Tom Cruise is the embodiment of the movie star archetype. Between the current crop of actors and the studios, none of them seem interested in going to the lengths necessary to craft the mystery, spectacle and otherness necessary for a movie star anymore.
> is what kills an art form.
This is how art has always worked though? The humanism of the renaissance is a direct conversation with the christian art of decades prior. When paint became cheaper and non kings could get portraits, rich people got still lifes to show they had fresh fruit and stuff other's couldn't. Almost every art movement can be traced directly to the people, the time, the wealth or the previous art movement. This is not a modern art problem.
> Even without context, you can get something out of looking at Michaelangelo's Pieta
I have had a panic attack in front of a Rothko. Even without context about him selling those paintings to the Tate before committing suicide the emotion on them is insane and I say this as someone who spent years mocking Rothko as a dumb rich person experiment of how much BS sothebys and christies can sell.
> which so far have not taken that hermetic turn to the same extent.
I think this is incredibly easy to refute, considering the amount of movies related to making movies. Due to the specialisation from capitalism, now the experts in making movies, only know how to make movies and go further and further into making movies like The Fablemans about their own industry. (This is not a one off; once upon a time in hollywood, a star is born, the artist, hugo, hail Cesar, tropic thunder...) They are even making movies about focus groups like Air about how they managed to make people design by comittee the greatest basketball shoe ever.
Their viability as comercial products, focus testing, and appreciability with little to no movie experience is hurting the art, not enhancing it. Movies are dumbed down nowadays because the aim is having as many people as possible understand them. Movies where metaphor is heavily used are usually not blockbusters. See Anihillation, a great lovecraftian horror dealing with cancer, change, loss. And whose entire conversation online was about "aliens" despite the movie being super in your face about what it was really about.
> then everything becomes a game of relying on what experts say
You are allowed to like or dislike "high" art without expert opinions. A lot fo it isn't that high anyway. I love conceptual art, absolutely love it. But it also takes seconds to make. I think the piece Perfect Lovers which is just two wall clocks next to each other is brilliant, but I see why many don't like it. (The piece was made after the artist found out his bf had AIDS and the piece is just two clocks ticking away, knowing the battery of one will run out sooner than the other, and at some point you have one clock ticking and the other stopped before both run out and they replace the bateries).
Directors Commentaries and behind the scenes documents were (and still are to an extent) the main reason I buy physical Blu-Rays.
Apple's store (not Apple TV, but the one you can "buy" movies from) has actual extras for a good selection, but they're still at the whim of one company to take away.
Nothing will ever beat three things, the cast commentary on Tropic Thunder ("Man, I don't drop character 'till I done the DVD commentary." - and he doesn't), the commentary on Deep Blue Sea (Samuel Jackson f's off the studio when his character dies halfway) and the sheer insane volume of BTS material on the LOTR extended DVD boxes.
They really are. A few articles examining the "Death of the mid budget movie" have touched on it. I miss solid, theatrically released comedies.
I recently watched Game Night (2018) which was hilarious, before that I'm reaching back to Tropic Thunder and Forgetting Sarah Marshall (both 2008 IIRC). I'm sure there are more, but it feels as if they've really fallen off.
People who say you can't make movies as offensive (or playing as much with offensiveness, anyway) as Tropic Thunder or Blazing Saddles anymore need to look into some of Lloyd Kaufman's output with Troma... the 2020 Shakespeare's Shitstorm is about as wildly-offensive (but maybe to good purpose? I'm still not sure, LOL) as it gets, and even directly targets the (in the pejorative sense) "woke" crowd (plus, like, a lot of other groups, including stuffy conservatives, big business, and shitty bigots) which is one of the riskiest moves a film could make these days, and that's just one of several risky moves it makes. Like, the movie's basically built of risky, boundary-pushing creative choices relating to very-relevant topics, which... might serve some greater, noble whole? Maybe? I think it's trying to, at least.
Now, a wide-release, mainstream movie, that might be true.
Following up on this I wonder if Tropic Thunder (2008), a relatively new movie could be made today.
There really isn't another movie like tropic thunder Imo
Part of this story was adapted as part of the Vietnam war documentary Tropic Thunder, although they took some artistic license
Reference to the movie quote in "Tropic Thunder" from Robert Downey Jr.s character.
This is backwards.
And whatever this is, does not make sense to me.
1. You can just go to the show's subreddit and browse, or browse with filters such as top, hot, etc. And you can filter the time period.
2. You can use Google. This works great for me. Just type "the wire reddit" or "site:reddit.com the wire", and the first result will be the subreddit page, but if you scroll down, you will start to see threads from other subs as well. This way you can access more discussions outside of the dedicated subreddit.
____
In a more general note, you can find all sorts of different stuff by using Google to browse reddit this way.
I have watched quite a few really good movies by searching "your top 5 movies reddit", "your favorite movies reddit", or "best movies reddit". I just go through the past viral threads and find highly upvoted responses, or responses with some of movies I liked and some that I haven't watched.
I have discovered Clue, Primer, Hot Fuzz, Tropic Thunder, The Big Short, etc. this way.
The recent "Nobody" is a good twist on action, as well as "Hardcore Henry" is interesting. When the storyline takes unexpected turns, or uses clichés as bait and does not follow through on the cliché can be fresh. In general, a feature length film is too short to do many literary works justice, and serialization does a far better job relating a quality story. For example, Netflix's "Ozark" would not be called "action" in the feature film sense, but the intellectual violence in that show is far and above stupid gun/car/fist violence. Films like "The Congress", "Terminator 2", and "Tropic Thunder" represent the best the Hollywood feature film system can produce.
Obviously comedies will still get made on some level - and certainly times will adjust ...
... but I am I am listening to Conan O'Brian's podcast with Sean Penn at this very instant and they've literally brought up the challenges of comedy writing in cancel culture. Literally today's episode.
These are comedy/acting figureheads discussing the problem, so I'll take the word that it's an issue.
Casting is far more controversial that it's ever been, with an ever developing set of rules for who can play what under what terms. 'Progress' in the 1960's was allowed more expansive casting, i.e. breaking taboos. We are now in the process of establishing taboos.
Sean Penn just said 'I would not be allowed to play Harvey Milk in today's climate'. He then indicated that it's important to support people who have not had opportunities, but said in private conversations (this would be Hollywood 'elite' - Sean Penn is extremely connected) - the view is universal that anyone should be allowed to play anyone and that it's only on podiums on TV do the more radical voices come out. He and Conan then both agreed to terminology as 'Virtue Signalling'. It's a thoughtful discussion I recommend the podcast episode.
Kevin Hart was cancelled for the Oscars and that's a 'huge' thing as it's a global brand and they were left without a host. They've made all sorts of adjustments due to popular outrage. Just as a quick example.
It's not so much 'cancellation' as the mobs influence over the very sensitive Studio Execs and their various decisions.
Superbad would not get made today. It could (if they cleaned it up a bit) but it's just not thematically right: it's way too young white guy, crude, the tranny jokes, the 'girl on period jokes' - it just wouldn't make it past the ideation stage. Seth Rogen is now doing 'Social Progress' movies aka 'Long Shot' with definitive feminist values. Nothing wrong with that at all (it was modestly funny) - other than to say - that's what's being made instead of Superbad.
Tropic Thunder is comedy genius and it simply could not get made because of the main character's blackface, and the other major characters portrayal of mentally handicapped people. They couldn't adjust the script around that. So forget 'ideation' even if it was pitched it would be a 'no go'.
The Hollywood system is very sensitive these things and all sorts of deviations are made. A lot of it is good spirit, but a lot of it is just suffocating.
What you're referring to is 'broad comedy' - and that's my point. They don't make them in a big way.
The films listed above are not 'broad comedies' they're comedy/dramas.
I'm not sure of the 'Mel Brooks is not an argument' (link in one of the responses) is a defence at all, because the fact is, he took excessive risks while trying to make a point, risks which would not be made today.
He was Jewish and took on very serious issues with Nazis ... but he definitely was not Black, and Blazing Saddles ... wold be too much for today.
By all accounts, Tropic Thunder would not get made today because of the ostensibly 'blackface' character - I think that's a really good 'threshold' to analyze because while I don't think the character is generally offensive and most wouldn't see it as that - but it's definitely going to be for some, to the point where Execs just couldn't back making the movie. There's going to be guaranteed outrage, and that outrage, if the press decides to amplify it, will kill a film and have all the parties involved running scared with apologies.
The Kids in the Hall (Kevin McDonald) indicated they couldn't make what they made today. They did indicate they got pushback back in the day from some of their bits that mocked religion - particularly from the US - but they still got to make it, which is the point.
Casting for any role which involves 'mixed' anything is a minefield which risks overthrowing a project. The casting of Cleopatra (who was Macedonian), caused controversy by people speaking on behalf of ... Ancient Egyptians? Whom even modern Egyptians could hardly make a claim to?
There's a lot of good talk about having more people from different backgrounds in roles, and especially have them among rank and file production, which is obviously good, but this should be a different theme from say, what jokes are acceptable and not.
Those are different kinds of issues that are getting crossed up in a cacophony of Twitter noise.
HBO, Disney and Netflix are not interested in creative expression, they're inserted in products, broader audiences, and films that speak to their choice narratives. If you listen to some podcasts you can hear the opinions of these executives themselves speak about it. These are not your 'creativity first' type of people.
Cable TV has always allowed for a narrow set of channels that challenged conventions, kind of a 'Late Night Loophole' in which naughty stuff was tolerated. We need this equivalent for streaming sources. We need an 'Adult Swim' version of Netflix that invests heavily in outrageous things.
Yeah, Tropic Thunder, is a much better example of a recent movie that could never be made just a few later because somebody might be offended.
I don't think Tropic Thunder "would be allowed to be made" when it was made.
I still don't quite get how they managed to get a movie centered around a character in black face made, even though it was obviously a parody.
> Another argument you could advance is that TV and Film have generally been moving away from comedy as a genre
I noticed this for movies and it makes me sad. I asked people around me what's the latest funny, full-on comedy they've seen, and I think the newest one would be "Tropic Thunder" which is 13 years old.
There are still a couple around, but I can't think of an equivalent of "Airplane!" or "Blazing Saddles" for the current generation. The closest one is probably half of "Zoolander", and even that one is almost old enough to drink.
This is exactly why I bought a copy of Tropic Thunder on blu ray. I suspect that one day this movie will not be on streaming services.
I worked with a guy that was a SFX guy for the old Walker TV series. Talking about some fun stories. He showed me a few "near misses" where the explosion was "slightly" larger than anticipated, and if you know where/when to look, you see the SFX team running for their lives in footage that made it into the edit. None of the guys I've worked with come close to the Danny McBride character in Tropic Thunder though.
Thinking back to when Tropic Thunder came out, I remember the scandal relating to the movie had nothing to do with RDJs character, but with the fact that they say "retarded" in it.
I've always viewed Tropic Thunder as somewhat of a successor to Blazing Saddles, but I largely agree that it couldn't be recreated today.
The time period in which these movies were made is a lot of what makes them so special. That's not to say that what we'll have next won't be special, but 1974 (and 2008) was a different time.
>I explained to her that these kinds of movies can’t be made anymore because too many people would be outraged.
I don't get this attitude. I think movies like this aren't made any more because they wouldn't be original or worth making. They wouldn't be commercially viable. Outrage is only going to come from a minority, and everyone else just won't care.
I think we have so far passed the degree of shock that people don't even notice any more.
Borat, South Park, Tropic Thunder, Shameless, The Boondocks, examples are easy to find and I don't even care for this flavor of humor.
I guess these examples are mostly from several years ago or more, but I have been hearing "these kinds of movies can't be made anymore" for the last 20 years.
The way South Park employs xenophobic/racist/sexist tropes is interesting - they are either so silly that its really hard for anyone to take offense, or they spread it around so much - no one group is ever singled out - and no one group is ever spared. That gives us all permission to laugh at them, and laugh at ourselves, when the time comes.
Or... the portrayal isn't actually targeting group of the character embodying the trope. It's targeting those that hold such tropes, in a way that exposes the absurdity of them.
There was a movie few years ago, Tropic Thunder. Robert Downy Jr is in black-face the entire movie, and it's hilarious - and somehow he isn't cancelled. Why? His character in the movie is a white, self-serious method actor (he stays in character all the time), who had medical treatments to alter the pigment of his skin in order to portray the African-American lead in a movie. And his depiction is one giant super charged trope. But the actual butt of the joke isn't black people - its actually the pretentious actors and Hollywood in general. In essence, its making a statement about the absurdity, self-importance, actors, studios, etc in Hollywood, and the lack of the social justice and equality there.
South Park wields "*ist" tropes in a similar way, and I think its incorrect to think of it as racism, or xenophobia, etc.
In South Park, there's one black character in the cast, and his name is Token. As in the token black kid. Out of context, and on its face, it might seem racist. But its saying something else, just like RDJ's role in Tropic Thunder.
Oh come on, this is a lot of faux-trage over a movie here. Racism wasn't emboldened by Tropic Thunder or Robert Downey Jr. People that like to pick arguments sure got a lot out of the movies though.
Hollywood have a grand tradition for satirizing themselves mercilessly - from Sunset Boulevard to Tropic Thunder. They don't shy away from presenting powerful Hollywood producers as drug users, as in True Romance, and in The Player you have cameos of Hollywood personalities playing themselves in a movie which present the business as deeply corrupt and opportunistic. I dont' think anybody is as openly cynical about Hollywood as Hollywood itself.
From Arc's broader statements made at the time, I'm not sure they would agree with your first statement, or agree that there _is_ a neutral usage:
> “In our culture, `retard’ and `retarded’ carry a lot of baggage from the days when people were institutionalized in large state facilities,” [...] They don’t deserve to be treated in such a dehumanizing way.”
> Leaving aside the movie’s offensiveness or lack thereof, the uproar also serves to highlight the evolving standards of acceptable terminology [...] “Adults with retardation self-advocated. They clearly told us that the use of the word `retarded’ was very hurtful.
https://www.dailynews.com/2008/08/13/some-give-tropic-thunder-an-f-over-the-r-word/
FWIW, I don't necessarily agree with them in totality -- I have various disabilities and have zero issue with "disabled person" or "the disabled" (unlike the linked article) -- but linking to Arc doesn't appear to support the use of "retarded", even where the intent is neutral.
Are you the author? "We have no idea how to create Original movies anymore ". This is funny. It should be a sequel to tropic thunder. Aptly named.
Well written article btw.
Well.. 1/2 the famous actors in Hollywood since the 90s seem to be Australian. (I could name dozens.) Which is something.. My gripe is that not only Aussies have to put up with hearing them do fake US accents in movies close to 100% of the time, but whenever there's an Australian in a US movie, they get someone from the US to play them. Arghh. As if there's no Aussie actors there! ha. Maybe they're all too famous. I guess it sounds convincing to a US audience. It must do. But OMG it sounds so fake to Australians. It just sounds like someone from the US trying and failing to do an Aussie accent. e.g. there was one in Fargo series, and it was about the only bad thing about Tropic Thunder. Please don't do this. At this rate, soon there'll be a movie with Australians doing US accents in the starring roles, with supporting cast of US actors trying to sound Australian.. Mark my words.
p.s. Is that the first mention of drop bears on HN? Well done :-)
https://australianmuseum.net.au/drop-bear
My Mac was in the shop once - attempting to install Windows XP killed it. The irony left me weeping for days.
I think that if your sample size grows, you'll find that a lot of people that use Apple really love it and don't know why. Similar to the two people you mentioned. But that's not because Apple HAS nothing good: it's because a lot of the things that they do well are hard for most people to quantify.
For me, the best way of describing it is to talk about what it was like to register my machine once it was turned on. It was a typical registration form. I tabbed over to State and typed in an N, expecting to have to hit it three or four times to get to the right letter. Instead, the drop-down list turned into a text field, and I could just type the second letter normally, no problem.
Small, small detail. If I raved about that during a typical OS dick-waving contest, I'd be laughed at. But it's so typical of what makes the Mac so incomparably good: it is incredibly focused on giving users the best possible experience. Not just in terms of things they can name in ads, though I am a fan of all that stuff, too. But in the small details. The things you notice only long enough to feel slightly irritated. The things reviewers would never mention but still stay there.
I think most Apple users stay with Apple for that precise feeling: the feeling that everything just works. It's something that's hard to contrast, because it's something that no other OS really spends much time on getting right. With every iteration of OS X, though, I see a real leap in terms of how good the operating system's become. Leopard beats Tiger in almost every way. Tiger beat Panther similarly.
And it's easy to rib on Mac, to say that it's too glam and too popular. You can pick on Quicktime and say that it's not as good as VLC, or something similar. Doing that ignores the fact that there are things that Mac does that other things simply do not. Take GarageBand, for instance. I think that of all the things I've messed with, GarageBand blows the most people away on first contact. The built-in keyboard, the really comprehensive set of loops... it's not a godsend, but the fact remains that it's there. That, if I wanted to, I could film myself using iSight, compose a soundtrack using GarageBand, and edit it all together using iMovie and iMovieHD/06, is pretty awesome. It gives you a sense of freedom that you don't get using a clunky Dell laptop and using Windows Movie Maker.
Small things. Partly that means philosophy. In Word 08, when you hover over a button it gets larger, and the button ripples. It's slightly distracting, it's ugly, and it's a waste. Microsoft doesn't get the difference between eye candy and functional aesthetic. In Pages, buttons don't do anything when you hover over them, because it's assumed that you know they're buttons. Again: not something it's easy to rave about. But there's this feeling that you're being respected.
Windows fans get mad at Apple users because they're usually too set with what they've got to change. Gamers insult Apple because it doesn't cater much to gamers, which is a fair criticism, but I've found that Boot Camp solves those problems pretty much perfectly. Linux users? That's a tougher crowd, because they believe in a different philosophy. It's true that learning to use a computer that's basically a glorified prompt results in a faster computer. The problem there lies with the steep learning curve. You can't turn on a computer that's like that and expect to know how to use everything. And when you start to use a shell, things slow down. I don't know how fast Leopard is compared to Ubuntu, but it feels a lot faster. Or, not faster. More precise. Much more polished. And Mac is very hackable. Most people choose not to, but if you DO like tinkering, you can tinker.
You can argue that Mac is overpriced. That's a matter of personal taste, but frankly, I'd pay more than I did to get an operating system that's so enjoyable to use. The more you use the Mac, the better it gets. Another small thing: when you have a file open, and there's the little icon next to the file name on the top of the window, the way you can drag that not only to any open folder but into a chat or a mail message or a file upload, that's nice. It saves me a step. If I wanted, I could go even faster with Quicksilver, but I've never installed it. No reason to.
You can argue that people who use the Mac are pretentious. That one gets thrown out a lot even on Hacker News, sadly. Yeah, and people who use Windows are tasteless, and people who use Linux have no design aesthetic. Either way, getting an OS because of stereotypes just doesn't cut it. You get an OS because it's good, period. (Although I DO like the I'm a Mac commercials, it's because I love John Hodgman.)
And I think I must be the sort of person who perfectly fits into the Mac cliche. I'm a college student, and I got my Mac specifically for college. I get called a hipster on occasion, because apparently, liking typography-related t-shirts and The Big Lebowski and disliking Tropic Thunder makes you hip. Most damningly, I'm a writer, and I dabble in poetry. So I fall under the "artsy" umbrella. Never mind that I actually attempt to make money with my writing, or that I dislike most stuff I read (Beckett excluded). Never mind that I'm only an artist in the sense that I try to make art. I've been told that obviously I only got a MacBook is because I want to seem hip and with it.
(Apology at this point, partly because of the length, and partly because this is aimed not only at the OP but at a bunch of much more brutish Mac critics. I don't assume that you're like this bockris, but I feel like I want to complete the thought before you stop. My apologies.)
Anyway: no. I got it because I tested out all the operating systems before I got this one, and because this one was the best. A lot of people who try all 3 settle for the Mac. If you don't, that's okay, but at the same time it means you're going to put up with a lot of crap Apple users don't have to, and some of us get bitchy and remind you about it because some of us are as bad as the stereotype proclaims. I'll also throw in that the Apple Store is designed to really LET you try out the operating system if you're uncertain: it's all in keeping with Apple's policy of being easy for the customer. Apple's consistent.
As a writer, there are a slew of tools designed specifically to make writing as easy as possible. I don't use any of them: I stick to TextEdit and Pages. I like writing, not planning out writing. When I have a bigger plan, I use actual paper. Even for me, though, using the default text editor, Apple's got an edge for me. Command-Control-D over any word on any application opens up the dictionary for that word in-line. If I right click and actually look it up by OPENING the application, I get instant Wikipedia, which is nice for quick research. There's also the system-wide spell-check, for when I like getting anal in iChat. (Good lord, that sounds wrong.) Or how, when I'm writing, I can hit escape partway through a word and get a list of every word that might match. Little conveniences that mean when I'm in the mood to write, I can actually WRITE.
And Apple goes halfway for me: the little gray button that nobody seems to talk about on the upper right, the one that removes the bulk space from most programs, that's wonderful for me. It gets rid of distractions. Or the drawer aesthetic for windows: I don't know if Windows has a variant on this, but the thing that opens up on any side of a window to hold information. I love that. It's such a great distinguisher. Things go both ways, too: on TextEdit, which is the Mac version of Notepad, I can format my fonts, lay out my page, and even edit images, because those are all built in to the core of the system. I prefer Pages because it's more designed for that stuff, but if I NEED it, it's there for me.
As a coder, I get a MUCH bigger assist from software, because of Coda. I'm not a very learned coder. I have a head filled with big ideas, but I don't know how to implement them. A program like Coda goes above and beyond in helping me get my ideas down. When I use it, I get the feeling I did when I first started writing: the thrill of having a blank slate and the tools I need to create something. And I've used Dreamweaver before, I've tested out other ones. They all feel wrong to me. Too bulky, too ugly. Every time I run into a problem coding, Coda seems to be right there to help me over that obstacle. And that's third-party software, too. I've found that most third-party solutions I've found on the Mac are excellent. My newsreader, my e-book creator, my DVD ripper. My Facebook sync tools with iPhoto and Address Book. Developers share the same mind for aesthetic that I do: that feeling of complete ease. And I've found that when I happen across a web site with the same feel, be it blog or 2.0 service, the ones that I gravitate towards are the ones that were made by Mac users. (I originally got hooked on a Mac when I found DaringFireball, started reading it for the quality of the writing and for the layout of the site, and... you know.)
So that's my humble little piece of advice. I don't know you, so feel free not to add me to your list of people recommending things. But my area of expertise per se deals with explaining things that other people aren't so good at explaining, and hopefully I've explained what it is about the Mac that draws people to it. It's the little things. It's things that make you feel good. And hey, I'll be honest, it's because every time Steve Jobs says "Wow," he sounds like a little kid playing with a golly-gee new toy, and because maybe that's not such a bad thing after all.