Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (**3/4)

? This is the big-screen debut of the TV character created by Sacha Baron Cohen as part of Da Ali G Show. In that HBO reality show, Cohen transforms himself into three outlandish characters who interact with celebrities and others who aren’t in on the joke. The movie version incorporates a plot whereby Borat, said to be a Kazakh journalist, travels from his homeland, a misogynistic, anti-Semitic backwater, to make a documentary about the USA. (Hence the mangled syntax of the title and the cheap TV-style graphics we see.) Bookended segments take place in this fictional version of Kazakhstan, where Borat jovially introduces such figures as the town rapist and we get to see the annual “running of the Jews.” Most of the movie is a quasi-travelogue, with Borat and his manager meeting Americans in red and blue states.

+ A lot of the movie is flat-out hilarious and prompted a lot of laughter at the preview screening I attended. In the “real people” segments, Borat has it both ways. It’s funny when the people are shocked by Borat’s attitudes and/or ignorance, and funny (if disturbing) when they seem to agree. In other cases, such as when he appears on a local TV news show (which apparently aired), the people are just bewildered or made uncomfortable by the “Kazakh” customs such as men kissing on the cheek. I’m sure some people would be offended by all the anti-Jewish remarks of the sort not usually seen outside a Holocaust drama, but given that they emanate from a character who’s basically a buffoon (and played by a Jew), this seems an obtuse view.

- I was a fan of Da Ali G Show, and I think I still would rather watch that. The “documentary” segments only serve to accentuate the artificiality of the part added for the movie, which is to say the plot. I would have been happy if all or nearly all of the movie was just unsuspecting people talking to Borat, without all the stuff about having his money stolen and such. Although Cohen never breaks character, Borat does engage in some Jackass-style antics that, while comical, don’t seem like anything even an ignorant, anti-Semitic misogynist would do. All that being said, there was one particularly funny (if disturbing) sequence with Borat getting into a naked altercation.

= **3/4 [original rating **1/2] Cohen’s characters make me a little uncomfortable, either because I’m embarrassed for him or for the people he’s fooling, not all of whom deserve it. If you like this kind of humor, which is really a variation on shows like Candid Camera, that might not bother you, nor will the uneven plot.

IMDb link

Ask the Dust (**3/4)

Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek are well cast as wary lovers in writer-director Robert Towne’s artful adaptation of John Fante’s 1939 novel. Towne beautifully captures the feel of the time and place, a Los Angeles seething with multi-ethnic newcomers, but the couple’s interactions have a stiff, literary quality.

John Fante’s autobiographical 1939 novel was languishing in semi-obscurity when writer Robert Towne first thought of turning it into a movie. That was over 30 years ago, before Towne cemented his reputation with his script for the 1974 classic Chinatown. Meanwhile, the novel’s reputation grew, and Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek grew up and got cast when Towne finally secured financing. For Towne, it’s a return to an older Los Angeles, though the characters in Chinatown probably wouldn’t know the ones here. Newcomers like Farrell’s Arturo Bandini, a struggling, Italian American writer, or Hayek’s Camilla, a Mexico-born waitress, formed a diaspora in the desert that swelled the population by a million in just 20 years. The way Towne artfully conjures this long-gone L.A. (filming was in South Africa) is as much a reason to see the movie as anything else. Camilla is a step below Arturo on the racial hierarchy of the day, and this makes a difference. Nowadays, we see period dramas, like The Notebook, where the characters feel too modern. These don’t. They casually insult one another’s ethnicity; they rent by the week; they suffer from TB. This is what I liked about the movie, plus the actors. But there’s something too literary about the adaptation. The verbal battles between Arturo and Camilla struck me as stilted, even as I admired the snappy dialogue. And the sudden intrusion, and equally sudden departure, of a third (or fourth) character in the drama, seemed unnatural. The couple’s halting romance lurches to a resolution that’s heart-rending to the extent you’ve bought the characters. I was about half way there.

IMDb link

posted 9/9/13

 

Lord of War (**3/4)

This tries to do for the arms trade what Traffic did for drug dealing, though Blow, the Johnny Depp film, is probably a better antecedent. Nicholas Cage is the title character, who narrates his own rise from Ukranian immigrant to world-class gun peddler. The weapons trade is as worthy of examination as the drug trade, and I wanted to see this movie. I was never bored watching the story, but I never really felt like I’d learned much about the arms trade, the way I’d felt like I’d learning something about the drug trade after watching Traffic or Blow. To his credit, writer-director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, S1mOne) never romanticizes his main character (a flaw in Blow), but neither does he provide the details that make such a character completely believable. For example, his fluency in Chinese and other languages is explained by saying that he had a gift for picking them up, as if a few chats with a foreign arms dealer would do the job.

Nor does Niccol go very far in explaining the motivations of wealthy nations in the arms industry, or the kinds of moral complexities that evil creates. The mostly Third World victims of war are shown as faceless hordes, though a fictional Liberian dictator is vividly portrayed. Bridget Moynihan plays a counterpart to Catherine Zeta-Jones’s role in Traffic, the trophy wife who’s happy not knowing the source of her lavish lifestyle. Ethan Hawke plays the lone lawman trying to get the goods on Cage.

IMDb link

circulated via email 9/22/05 and posted 11/19/13