There are certain inside jokes among us chronic online movie fans that will likely earn you weird looks if you crack them without real-world context. Take Zack Snyder’s Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, an animated fantasy epic that grossed $139.7 million at the box office but, as the internet’s running joke goes, no one has actually seen it. Then there’s /Film’s own recurring joke referring to Mark Wahlberg as a hamburger vendor, which is more fact than you might have realized. However, if you Really want baffle Impress your regular-guy pals with your in-depth knowledge of niche humor on social media. All you have to do is applaud Emma Stone for her representation of the Asian American community.

To clarify for anyone who has no idea what I’m talking about, this now nine-year-old punch line featuring the “Superbad” veteran was born out of Cameron Crowe’s controversial flop “Aloha.” On the surface, the “Almost Famous” director’s 2015 romantic comedy admittedly sounds harmless. The plot centers on Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper), a disgraced military contractor who returns to his former stomping grounds in Hawaii and begins a romance with a younger, sprightly Air Force pilot (Stone). However, as she cheerfully explains to those around her in the film, Stone’s character Allison Ng is one-quarter Hawaiian and one-quarter Chinese, which Stone herself… is not.

Crowe’s film came out the same year that #OscarsSoWhite began, and quickly became a prime example of casual Hollywood whitewashing in certain online circles, and not without reason. However, FlixPatrol reports that Aloha has become the second most-streamed film on Netflix in the U.S. over the past two days (just behind Lee Daniels’ demonic possession thriller The Deliverance in first place). It seems that those watching this flick for the first time will soon discover what the rest of us already know: Stone’s casting is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this film’s chaos.

Of course, in real life, there are many people of different races who don’t appear biracial, like Allison in “Aloha.” In a 2015 blog post responding to subsequent criticism of Stone’s casting, Crowe revealed that the character was even inspired by “a real red-headed (Hawaiian) local” who imagined herself like Allison. Regardless, the filmmaker offered “a sincere apology to anyone who thought this was a strange or misguided casting,” and Stone herself has apologized multiple times, even going viral for shouting “I’m sorry!” when Sandra Oh joked about her casting at the 2019 Golden Globe Awards.

That said, Aloha is a fascinating flop across the board. The film is packed with shady subplots involving Brian reuniting with his now-married ex-girlfriend (a wasted Rachel McAdams) and Bill Murray playing a sleazy, eccentric billionaire who wants to launch a private armed satellite for questionable reasons, forcing Brian to choose between what’s best for the Hawaiian natives and his own selfish interests. Emails made public by the 2014 Sony hack have revealed that things were just as chaotic behind the scenes during filming and post-production, as it became increasingly clear that Crowe’s script had all sorts of tone and story problems and just didn’t fit together whether it was rewritten or not. Even taken in isolation, the romance between Brian and Allison is a potpourri of Cameron’s worst cliches as a storyteller (including, yes, The one).

Nearly a decade later, Aloha has yet to receive the kind of reappraisal that other romantic comedies of yore have received after the genre all but disappeared from theaters for years (before the recent success of Anyone But You, of course). I’m skeptical that will change thanks to its Netflix release, but only time will tell. And as for Stone? She’s won two Oscars and has recently worked with wonderful weirdos like Yorgos Lanthimos and Julio Torres. She’s doing well.