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Easy A
Mean Girls by way of Nathaniel Hawthorne
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reviews containing any of these words: Borat, Kazakh
Borat
(2006)
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| Comedy
Rated: R
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| One of the more benign offenses committed by the Kazakh television reporter of the title is driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Yet it's probably the best metaphor for the movie. As the fictional Borat, British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen gleefully goes against the grain - culturally, socially, politically - while capturing the cringe-worthy results on camera. Cohen travels across America as the boorish Borat, interviewing real people in an attempt to get them to reveal their own boorishness. Unlike other gonzo, reality-based comedians such as Tom Green or even Andy Kaufman, Cohen is after something specific with his brand of anarchy: He wants to expose the intolerance that lies right under our noses. |
Bruno
(2009)
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| Comedy
Rated: R
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With Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen holds up another mirror to American society, and if anything we’ve only gotten uglier since Borat.
Or maybe we’re just uglier when it comes to homosexuality. Borat, Cohen’s 2006 guerrilla comedy, exposed intolerance and prejudice of all kinds, but Bruno, in which Cohen masquerades as an unambiguously gay Austrian fashion celebrity, hones in on a very specific form of baseball-and-apple-pie hatred. If you can’t quite fathom why gay rights are so hard to come by in this supposed land of the free, watch this.
Cohen’s method – he’s sort of a politicized Andy Kaufman – is to adopt the guise of an outrageous character, enter the real world and coax unsuspecting bigots or regular old morons into revealing their own particular brand of outrageousness on camera (Larry Charles returns as Cohen’s director).
In Bruno, this results in an excruciatingly embarrassing sit-down interview with the Family Research Institute’s Paul Cameron. In trying to “convert” Bruno from homosexuality, Cameron reveals that his homophobia is nothing compared to his disgust for women.
Bruno is encouraged by such ambassadors of heterosexuality to immerse himself in manly activities, so at one point he attends a coed swingers’ party. The evening begins awkwardly and ends in startling violence, revealing that perversion pays no mind to sexual orientation.
Then there is the mullet-haired karate instructor – he must have been Danny McBride’s inspiration for The Foot Fist Way - who gleefully demonstrates how to defend against gay attackers. When Bruno comes at him armed with three sex toys, he doesn’t flinch.
Not all of the gambits work. Cohen verges on sexually assaulting Ron Paul in another interview, yet only manages to elicit a mild slur from the former presidential candidate. Other seemingly sure-fire scenarios – including the moment he stumbles into an anti-gay march wearing bondage gear – produce little gold. For whatever reason, Bruno’s batting average when it comes to on-camera stunts is below that of Borat.
There are other faults – the first third, which establishes Bruno’s hedonistic gay lifestyle, verges on homophobia itself – yet Bruno ultimately works as a shocking societal snapshot. During one terrifying sequence, in which Bruno and his male assistant square off in an Ultimate Fighting-style cage match and instead start making out, the outraged fans in the crowd literally begin foaming at the mouth. You can see the hatred literally dripping from their gnashing teeth. If the election of Barack Obama had you thinking America’s prejudicial barriers had been broken, Bruno offers a stark reality check. We still have a long, long way to go.
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Religulous
(2008)
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| Documentary
Rated: R
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| Religulous is a profane, sacrilegious and very funny anti-religion documentary that is well worth seeing - perhaps especially if you're a person of faith. Written and hosted by Bill Maher and directed by prankster filmmaker Larry Charles (Borat), the movie follows Maher on a world tour during which he intends to "preach the gospel of I don't know." The movie spends a lot of time on easy targets - televangelists, a representative of Kentucky's Creation Museum, and tooth-challenged truck drivers at a roadside chapel – yet it’s still a jolt to the system in the way that Michael Moore's films often are. It's an important conversation-starter at a time when political correctness often snuffs out any chance of meaningful conversation. |
| Eastern Promises
(2007)
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| Thriller
Rated: R
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| Director David Cronenberg remains in the real world for Eastern Promises, teaming up once again with his A History of Violence star Viggo Mortensen for another meditation on criminal brutality. Eastern Promises, in which Mortensen plays a cleanup man for London’s Russian Mafia, doesn’t have the mythical pull of History, yet Cronenberg is too accomplished and clever of a filmmaker to let this gangster tale seem rote. Without even one fantastical, bug-like creature, he still makes you feel squeamish and icky. With Naomi Watts – largely wasted as a nurse who gets caught up in this underworld – and a harrowing fight/nude scene for Mortensen (it’s something like the infamous wrestling match in Borat, only deadlier). |
| Tulpan
(2009)
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| Drama
Rated: NR
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I would call Tulpan the sweetest movie to ever come out of Kazakhstan, except that it’s the only movie I’ve seen from that former Soviet republic. Maybe they’re all as artful and endearing as this.
Director Sergei Dvortsevoy trains his patient, observant camera on a family living on a remote Kazakh steppe, where sheep are herded from one side of the endless horizon to the other. Askhat (Askhat Kuchencherekov) has just returned from the Russian Navy and is living with his sister, her rough-hewn husband and their children in a one-room yurt. Askhat isn’t much of a herder, yet he dreams of recreating his sister’s humble life with a wife and herd of his own. Unfortunately, Tulpan – the only eligible young woman in miles and miles – isn’t impressed by his wild tales of life at sea. Quite frankly, she’d rather go to college.
Tulpan is a wry and delightful clashing of the traditional and the modern, with a realist’s eye for the varying values of both ways of living. The movie recognizes Tulpan’s desire for independence while also honoring the purity and simplicity of life on the steppe (when the otherwise clumsy Askhat successfully aids a goat in giving birth, the film recognizes that the moment will register as one of his life’s most elemental accomplishments).
Much of what Tulpan captures looks and feels alien – the landscape literally resembles that of Mars – yet the family dynamics are heart-warmingly familiar. And Kuchencherekov, whose big ears are the source of much derision, has another feature that you’ll recognize: a dazzling and irrepressible Hollywood smile.
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| God Grew Tired of Us
(2006)
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| Documentary
Rated: PG
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| Seen through the eyes of a group of Sudanese refugees as they try to establish a new life in the United States, we Americans look like a lonely and isolated bunch of workaholics. In many ways, this country is a land of promise for these orphans, who fled war-torn Sudan, wandered through the Sahara, spent 10 years in a bare-bones refugee camp in Kenya and were then chosen to start a new life overseas. Yet the sense of cultural dislocation they must overcome is as revealing, in its own way, as that recreated in Borat. One man fails to understand how Santa Claus has overtaken Jesus as the central figure of Christmas. Another laments the fact that he can't ask strangers for directions because everyone seems to walk around in their own bubble of fear. Nearly all of them must work two, even three jobs to be able to afford the "necessities" (car, mobile phone) of a Western lifestyle. And then there is the downside of American individualism. Observing that there is little sense of community in the United States, one of the refugees longingly recalls the group camaraderie he used to feel with his fellow Sudanese. In this scene and others, God Grew Tired of Us made me wonder: What does it say about the society we've created that it makes war-scarred visitors miss their refugee camp? |
| Observe and Report
(2009)
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| Comedy
Rated: R
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Observe and Report is an occasionally amusing, persistently disturbing comedy that at times plays like a bipolar disorder episode from the inside out. Like the Farrelly brothers’ Me, Myself & Irene, it uses broad comedy to get us into a troubled mind.
Is that a fair tactic? I suppose the answer lies in whether or not you feel the movie is on the same side as Ronnie (Seth Rogen), a mall cop whose tenuous grip on reality is entirely tied to his risible position of authority.
A shrink at one point says that Ronnie “shows warning signs of delusion” and he himself says he’s on medication for bipolar disorder. The movie treats these details as gag opportunities, but I’m not sure that’s the same thing as laughing at its troubled main character.
One thing’s for sure – Ronnie would be incapable of laughing with. He’s devoted to his delusions, parading through the mall with his chest puffed out, issuing expletive-laden orders to his inept underlings. When a flasher starts prowling the mall, Ronnie sees the incident as a chance to prove himself by catching the pervert. But things go violently awry with the arrival of a real police investigator (Ray Liotta in psycho mode).
Rogen embraces his schlumpiness here as never before (and considering Knocked Up and Zack and Miri Make a Porno, that’s saying something). Ronnie is swollen, often sweaty and continually putting his own idiocy at the forefront. Each awkward exchange with a sweet coffee girl named Nell (Collette Wolfe) is an exercise in self-humiliation.
That’s a familiar theme for writer-director Jody Hill, whose The Foot Fist Way - in which Danny McBride played an incompetent, strip-mall tae kwon do instructor - was another self-loathing character study. Both movies center on buffoons striving to maintain their misplaced sense of authority.
As harsh as Observe and Report is, I still think the movie empathizes with Ronnie. You can sense it in the rare, tender moments: his conversations with his alcoholic mother (Celia Weston); the way Nell patiently waits for his bluster to die down; the montage that traces the healings of his bruises after a particularly violent encounter of his own making.
The picture even ends on a note of relative triumph for Ronnie. I won’t give it away, except to offer the warning that if the extended, ungainly male nudity of Borat bothered you, you might want to duck out early.
“I win,” Ronnie smirks at the conclusion of this riotous, delightfully deranged set piece. And because we’ve spent the movie in his head, we feel like we’ve won too.
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