Archive for August, 2009

Capote

August 31, 2009

So refreshing is it to see an intelligent movie about intelligent people. Phillip Seymour Hoffman proves not only that he’s the best actor of his generation, but that he has effectively inherited the mantle of De Niro and Nicholson. No surprises there. The acting (all around, including work by Chris Cooper, Catherine Keener and Bruce Greenwood) is superb, the direction, editing, and cinematography are all top rate. Likewise, the movie’s art direction is spot-on but, more than that, it heightens our emotional experience of the film.

What keeps Capote from achieving classic status, however, is its screenplay. While good, it fails to really dig deep enough to uproot the conflict between Capote, the literary opportunist and wily journalist, and Capote, the compassionate and sympathetic human being, as he strikes up a rapport with Perry Smith, one of two killers convicted for the murder of a rural Kansas family in 1959. The movie really hones in on Capote, at a literary turning point in his career, going from young New York dynamo towards the more established rank of American writers, and his six-year crucible of writing In Cold Blood.

While his friendship with Harper Lee is well portrayed, it’s his far more complex relationship with Perry Smith that needed some more incisive work. The screenplay gradually gives us the impression of merely going through the paces as Capote visits Smith (and his co-killer Guy Hickock) at Levenworth, and alternates that with his dazzling high-life among the New York literati, the self-styling of his literary myth, and, eventually, his vexation at his inability to finish his novel (because the killers keep getting stays of execution!).

The guilt that Capote ultimately feels once Smith and Hickock meet their fate might’ve been more effectively conveyed if, while Capote is developing his piece, we see more of how he is psychologically manipulating his subject (Smith), how that affects his relationship with his lover, his friend, and his editor at The New Yorker, etc., pretty much everything through the primary layers of Truman’s life. What we get is a tad immaculate and elegant and too dainty for its own good; I’d like to have seen a darker grain course through this movie. Through intertitles that appear before the close of the movie, we learn that Capote never completed another book after In Cold Blood. We can guess that alcoholism and conscience were both key elements that deterred him from assaying another long-form work, but why didn’t the screenplay depict this more persuasively in the body of the film? Still, Capote is one of 2005′s best, a milestone in modern acting, and quite fascinating in any number of ways, particularly its depiction of the minutiae of the writer’s life.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Bennett Miller
Written by: Dan Futterman
Cast: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins Jr., Chris Cooper, Bruce Greenwood, Bob Balaban

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Drama | Leave a Comment »

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

August 31, 2009

Nine decades have worn some of the novelty off this most famous example of German Expressionist Cinema. Still, I wonder if audiences reacted to its demented set design and psycho-paranoia with the same excitement that fanboys are these days to something like Sin City. It’s a fairly creepy story–in the vein of Gothic late-19th century European fables–about how a crazed psychotherapist experiments with post-hypnotic suggestion by commanding his “somnabulist” (basically, a homicidal sleepwalker) to commit acts of murder as they travel the countryside under the guise of a carnival act. The story bears down on the events in a small town where Dr. Caligari has arrived and proceeds to use his somnambulist to go on a murderous rampage, terrorizing a young man and his fiancée. Robert Wiene directs with some visual aplomb (though he doesn’t have the genius of, say, Fritz Lang who came along in the ’20s then promptly blew apart and reinvented German moviemaking). This is one of those curio flicks that can make your skin crawl if you’re watching a good print with a moody orchestral soundtrack. It’s often used in film classes but don’t let its academic value put you off. Caligari is still creepy good entertainment on a rainy day.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Robert Wiene
Written by: Hans Janowitz, Carl Mayer
Cast: Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich Feher, Lil Dagover

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Horror, Silent, Thriller | Leave a Comment »

District 9

August 31, 2009

District 9

The premise for District 9 — even as alien invasion scenarios go — is pretty damn ludicrous. But if you can get past it, and you’re a fan of the Peter Jackson school of over-the-top, shoot-em-up violence, then you stand a good chance of enjoying what’s otherwise a clever and provocative sci-fi thrill machine. Here’s the stretch: A superior alien civilization arrives on Earth in a spaceship large enough to house thousands, or even millions. It conks to a stop above Johannesburg, South Africa.

When humans find that its occupants are ailing or debilitated, they promptly remove and house them in makeshift refugee zones in the city. Soon thereafter, these zones become sprawling, militarized slums, where the aliens (whom we derogatorily call “Prawns”) live in shanties, amidst poverty, corruption and political oppression, segregated from the human population. Off the bat, District 9′s apartheid-informed, sociopolitical allegory comes raging at us full-force with scenes of alien riots and police brutality. Except, these aliens aren’t simple life forms, like bees or ants, as the filmmakers would have us believe; by the magnitude of their advancement — their superior weaponry, physical strength and space-travel technology — we can’t buy that even the Prawns’ version of “worker bees” does not possess the survival instincts to resist and overpower their bullying, would-be human oppressors. What’s weirder, the Prawns trade their hyper-advanced guns (seriously, one shot is all it would take to turn you into a splatter of pasta sauce on the wall) to local Nigerian racketeers for cans of cat food — apparently, the Prawns develop a taste for it (as they do for human prostitutes). At this point, it’s as if Jackson and company dumb-down and degrade their aliens just so their humans will appear more disgusting and oppressive in opposition. By conceding to such absurd, simple-minded ideas, they risk dumbing down their entire, already shaky premise.

All great science-fiction, especially of the “Close Encounters” variety, asks us to question our natures and our place in the universe. Most often, mankind comes up short when faced with the prospect of encountering “the other.” From The Day the Earth Stood Still to Close Encounters, Contact and even The Terminator series, humans usually get suspicious, agitated, devious, or even downright hostile. Though a few individuals in these stories have the sagacity to overcome such base instincts, mankind by and large is depicted as being dominated by them. District 9 lands squarely in that territory as Blomkamp, his co-writer Terri Tatchell and producer Jackson revel in the gross venality and xenophobia of the human species. We’re not far into District 9 before our simmering contempt for our own kind reaches a roiling boil as scenes unravel of armed security forces running havoc in the aliens’ shantytown, badgering and brutalizing them into submitting to government plans to re-locate the Prawns to a new site.

It’s during these eviction operations that District 9 kicks into full gear. When Wikus (Sharlton Copley), a by-the-book bureaucrat in charge of the Prawn re-location scheme, gets exposed to an alien chemical, he finds himself, to much terror and bafflement, turning into a Prawn himself. As a human-Prawn mutant, capable of operating the aliens’ bio-mechanical weaponry, Wikus is suddenly the most highly prized guinea pig in the world. On the run from the military, Wikus holes up in the Prawns’ shantytown and finds his only ally and confidante in the alien’s leader — resourceful, intelligent, and the only one who knows how to restore Wikus to his human state. The leader promises to help Wikus if he, in turn, helps him secure the last bit of technology he needs to render their spaceship operational and, hence, return to the Prawns’ home planet.

What District 9 does exceptionally well — and this is crucial for an action-thriller — is draw the line distinctly between good and evil. In this world, the humans are the villains, and, if you were to judge from District 9, humans have got to be the nastiest, sleaziest life form around, quick to hate, greed, and violence. It makes one wonder how we, as a species, survived as long as we did given the vileness of our nature. As a viewer, I haven’t hated humans this much since Children of Men and, before that, T2: Judgment Day. That clear polarity makes us identify with the aliens that much more, and root for Wikus and his Prawn allies.

The violence here is excessive to the point of being cartoonish — people are blowing up like paintballs left and right — but it’s predicated on such an emotional investment that we want the aliens’ fight against the humans to be as bold and decisive as Blomkamp’s visuals and the digital soundtrack will allow. Indeed, the movie’s final 40 minutes is an extended, Saving Private Ryan-esque action sequence that’s as riveting as they get as Wikus fends off an army of zealous, machine gun-happy troops while his alien comrades set their own plan into motion.

Precision editing and a clever sense of narrative and point-of-view — we’re told the story through a variety of means, from news blurbs (a la Starship Troopers), surveillance cameras, docu-style coverage blended together with more traditional styles — all amp up tension, suspense, and keep us hooked no matter the silliness of the story’s set-up. District 9 doesn’t carry much weight as sociopolitical commentary or satire but, taken on the merits of its shrewd story sense and craftsmanship, it’s a popcorn entertainment destined to stay in our minds. Till the sequel at least.

Grade: B

Directed by: Neill Blomkamp
Written by: Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell
Cast: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, Nathalie Boltt, Sylvanie Strike, William Allen Young, Vanessa Haywood, Robert Ho

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Science Fiction, Thriller | 4 Comments »

Brokeback Mountain

August 17, 2009

Many have criticized Ang Lee’s style as being restrained to a fault, inexpressive, but I would argue that Lee’s approach is exactly what this material requires. The love shared between Ennis and Jack, after all, has to be negotiated in a very careful way; the lovers must delicately pick their way through the briars of social mores so as not to disrupt the tranquil landscape of normalcy over a twenty-year period. Ang Lee, along with his screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana (working from a short story by Annie Proulx), portrays the relationship that builds between Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) with precise, deliberate patience. The big-sky cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto, more than being just magnificent, underscores the equilibrium that must be maintained in the social order by way of its carefully balanced compositions. This balance is only offset in those brief but seismic moments in the narrative when Ennis and Jack upset the social equilibrium by succumbing to their passionate impulses.

McMurtry and Ossana’s script builds masterfully in the first hour as the two cowboys, working for an unscrupulous rancher on the eponymous mountain, strike up a camaraderie before deeper, more romantic, feelings spark between them. The sense that theirs is a guilt-ridden, confusing and furtive relationship is the most heart-wrenching element of the whole thing; in one way or another, we’ve all struggled or continue to struggle to reconcile personal yearnings with societal pressures and dogmas. The individual is usually, if not always, at the losing end of that fight. We know this deep down, and that private knowledge is what prompts our engagement with Ennis and Jack. Ledger and Gyllenhaal deliver brave, creditable performances and each serves his character honestly: Gyllenhaal’s Jack is an open-hearted soul, apt to express his love and angst directly, and he alone can see through the armor of macho reticence that Ledger’s Ennis continually wears. Ennis, for his part, harbors a barely-controlled hostility towards the world, towards himself, and it’s scary to witness those moments when it is unleashed.

Upon finishing their work on the mountain, the two men part ways and, over the next several years, follow a socially regimented path–both marry women from their local communities and raise families. The story flattens and lags during these sequences, as Ennis and Jack settle into a life of monotonous domesticity. Lee isn’t sure what to do during these scenes, and they lifelessly blur together. It’s only when Jack contacts Ennis and the two renew their ties that the drama kicks into gear again. You can’t keep the lid on such overheated emotions, though, and it’s painful to watch Ennis’ wife, Alma (tenderly played by Michelle Williams) negotiate her marriage through this impossible terrain. Jack’s wife, Lureen (Anne Hatheway)–at once a bronco-busting tomboy and a porcelain doll of a housewife (in other words, the feminine ideal of the American West) seems either to be living in perpetual denial or in plain ignorance. Lee’s treatment of her is ambiguous, but Hatheway is up to the challenge, mixing grit and gentility in composing Lureen’s outer facade. But behind her dark, saucer-like eyes, she could well be nursing unspeakable heartbreak. By the end, we’ve come closer to her heart, but the social bastions behind which she resides will keep us forever from her truth.

The movie majestically traverses twenty years in Jack and Ennis’ lives. In its final stretch, as the men grapple with how and whether to continue their relationship, Lee’s story gathers steam again, but wisely chooses neither to judge their actions nor the actions of the hostile-seeming world–the only world either of them knows–in which they must live out their lives.

Brokeback is paced slowly, the tensions tightening little by little in a protracted linkage of small, domestic scenes. For that reason alone, it’s a rare occasion–a story that we don’t see often, if at all, from today’s Hollywood. Lee’s reined-in exposition is reminiscent of the kind mastered by humanist filmmakers like Jean Renoir and Satyajit Ray. A gallery of worthy performances, crisp direction and a quietly graceful script make Brokeback Mountain something of a landmark in Hollywood’s 2005 slate of movies. What keeps it from scaling to the heights of a masterpiece, I think, is its reluctance to sound deeper: The situations and characters remain fairly static and simplistic, treading the brave but, ultimately, familiar territory of the Tragic Love Story. It’s homosexual themes may spark debate in certain corners, but Brokeback Mountain, at heart, is an age-old and universally resonant parable of how societies conspire to kill anything they do not and cannot understand.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Ang Lee
Written by: Larry McMurtry, Diana Ossana
Cast: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway, Randy Quaid

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Drama | Leave a Comment »

Cloud Nine

August 17, 2009

cloudnine_pic

Inge, a 67-year-old woman plunges into an affair with a 76-year-old man, Werner, and faces the consequences it brings to her 30-year marriage. Add a dollop of senior citizen sex and nudity, and Cloud Nine sounds like a tasteless spin on the marital drama. But director Andreas Dresen — who made the wonderful ode to enduring friendship, Summer in Berlin — guided by a sensitive script (which he co-wrote), and aided by a first-rate cast, has created a sincere, thoughtful tale of the human heart.

Cloud Nine calls to mind such “forbidden romance” antecedents as the equally beautiful, unconventional Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (by Dresen’s German Cinema progenitor Rainer Werner Fassbinder). Whereas Fassbinder’s film explored an elderly woman’s love for a younger North African in terms of the affair’s racial and cultural ripple effects, Dresen’s film plumbs the subtleties of Inge’s (Ursula Werner) strained home life vis-a-vis her wronged husband, Karl (Horst Westphal) — a coolly detached, intellectual type — counterbalancing it with the sense of pure, unfettered joy she feels in Werner’s (Horst Rehberg) amorous company. Dresen’s decision to cast older actors does smack of gimmickry to the extent that it distracts us from the fact that this is an all-too-familiar account of infidelity and marital breakdown. But, as familiar as any story seems, it’s the details that count. And here’s where Cloud Nine shines.

Choosing to tell the story of characters experiencing new love in the twilight of their lives plays to Dressen’s point that, no matter the lovers’ age, the yearnings and betrayals felt by the heart are the same at 20 as at 80. Psychologically speaking, Dresen breaks no new ground: Inge, Werner, and Karl harbor predictable sentiments. Their scenes of emotional strife — from Karl’s humiliation and rage in learning of Inge’s affair to Inge’s helplessness in the face of passion and Werner’s shows of tenderness — comprise the overused tropes of the romantic triangle sub-genre. Cloud Nine’s rewards, rather, are in its textures: in the brave, brilliant Werner, Rehberg, and Westphal’s masterful interplay of glances, gestures and moods; in the sounds of percolating coffee denoting domestic routine, the frequent (perhaps too frequent) motifs of trains and sudden, heavy downpours suggesting lives in fits of passion and transition. It’s through the film’s textures that Dresen and his cast communicate the complex inner lives of his characters, and, to any viewer attuned to it, the story reveals worlds of grief and joy that the surfaces of ordinary lives can only suggest.

Grade: B+

Directed by: Andreas Dresen
Written by: Andreas Dresen, Jorg Hauschild, Laila Stieler, Conny Ziesche
Cast: Ursula Werner, Horst Rehberg, Horst Westphal, Steffi Kuhnert

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Best of 2009, Drama | Leave a Comment »

Brick

August 15, 2009

If wouldn’t surprise me if Brick was eventually canonized by film geeks as a cult classic in much the same way as Reservoir Dogs and Donnie Darko. Like those movies, Brick demonstrates an aggressively talented filmmaker making his feature directorial debut. Clearly enamored with ’40s-era hardboiled fiction, Rian Johnson cleverly grafts the lingo and tropes of that genre onto a high school setting, building a mystery thriller around the murder of a teenage girl. The girl’s lover–an ostracized student and loner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), still carrying a torch for his dead beloved–determines to investigate. His search leads him into the high school’s drug underworld, and into the clutches of its kingpin (Lukas Haas). More than anything, Brick is just an elaborate noir send-up, and an enjoyably kooky one at that. It’s a funhouse ride in which pubescent characters pop out of the darkness, spouting fermented hardboiled slang. But, ultimately, it’s just an inauthentic and pointless gag; more often than not, we get the feeling of post-modern actors dressing up and approximating noir roles in a high-school milieu: the jaded private dick, the capo, the heavy, the manipulative cop (a fantastic Richard Roundtree, by the way) and, of course, the femme fatale. They’re all here, going through the motions we might find in any of classical Hollywood’s Hammett-Chandler adaptations, but they can’t get their mouths around Johnson’s archaic dialogue. And without the snap and spunk of actors who know how to deliver that old-time verbiage, we’re left with a lot of incomprehensible, marble-mouthed blathering, uttered with tiresome hipster somnolence; the clash of the old and the new just doesn’t light any sparks. Still, Johnson’s connect-the-dots noir script gives him the chance to experiment with atmospherics, which owe a debt as much to Blue Velvet as to The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. When it’s over, though, and Brick’s novelties and stylistics have worn off, we’re still wondering what greater meaning any of this is meant to convey. Like his aforementioned indie-brat forebears, Johnson may be just another filmmaker with the resources to get his rocks off, but with nothing original or of any consequence to actually say.

Grade: B-

Directed by: Rian Johnson
Written by: Rian Johnson
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nora Zehetner, Lukas Haas, Noah Fleiss, Matt O’Leary, Emilie de Ravin, Noah Segan, Richard Roundtree, Meagan Good

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Noir, Thriller | Leave a Comment »

The Bourne Ultimatum

August 14, 2009

Director Paul Greengrass’ gangbusters visual style, together with a sharp script by Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns, and George Nolfi, provide a satisfying conclusion (unless they’ve got another sequel up their sleeves) to this intelligent series. Ultimatum takes steely-eyed superspy Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) to the upper echelons of his quest to uncover his own identity.

Bourne’s is a reverse quest as it were, one that leads him from the netherworld of his amnesia, back to himself as he traces the origins of his nature, his killer instincts. He treads dangerous terrain, though, as those involved in creating his identity now seek to destroy him, deploying assassins at every turn, in every corner of the globe, as Bourne wends his way, in Ultimatum, from Russia to New York City, with stops in London, Madrid, and Tangier, back to the inner sanctum of the CIA, where those responsible for his existential crisis lurk.

On Bourne’s trail this time around is the ice-cold, by-the-book CIA director Noah Vossen (played with chilly professionalism by the top-notch David Strathairn) who’s willing to do whatever it takes to eliminate Bourne and keep the covert carte-blanche tactics enjoyed by his bureaucracy from public record. Off-balancing Vossen’s cold-bloodedness is Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) whose shark-like drive to capture Bourne is gradually tempered by conscience as the utter venality of those she works for dawns on her. The moral symmetry thus laid in place, Greengrass and company set Bourne loose through Europe, onward to America, following the bread crumbs of clues laid down by an investigative journalist Simon Ross (Paddy Consadine), and, later, Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), the CIA operative sympathetic to Bourne for reasons never clearly disclosed, yet tantilizing just the same.

Damon has taken us shrewdly from the blundersome, scatter-brained Bourne of the first installment to Ultimatum’s more assured, tactful version, in forward velocity in every scene. He wears the role confidently, with authority, and matches up capably with the intelligence of the Bourne screenplays as well as the excellent performers he plays alongside — from Chris Cooper, Brian Cox, and Franke Potente of the series’ first half, to Strathairn and Allen of the second.

But the heart of the beast is Greengrass’ pulsating style. While I found the director’s jittery, faux-documentary camerawork too expressive for its own good in the second film, The Bourne Supremacy — which seemed too jarring a shift from the clean, crisp style that distinguished Doug Liman’s direction in Identity — Greengrass’ trademark fevered camera and editing suits Ultimatum to a tee, possibly because the stakes in the larger story are now on par with it. In fact, Ultimatum boasts what may well be among the greatest action sequences ever shot and staged — a hyperkinetic foot chase across the rooftops and balconies of a Tangier neighborhood as Bourne pursues a fleet-footed, acrobatic assassin (Joey Ansah) who has Nicky in his cross-hairs. It’s a bravura, breathless combination of camerawork, editing, stuntwork, and performance, culminating in a fight sequence that not only thrills but brings chillingly to the surface Bourne’s opposing halves: the man vs. the killing machine.

Ultimatum takes Bourne to the narrative conclusion of his search for self. The movies strip his identity, bit by bit, to nearly nothing. But what lingers, finally, and why the series is so appealing, is the enduring sense of romantic adventure, a feeling that, though all seems lost, there is much left to re-gain for Bourne. Or whatever his name happens to be.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Paul Greengrass
Written by: Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns, George Nolfi
Cast: Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, David Strathairn, Scott Glenn, Paddy Considine, Edgar Ramirez, Albert Finney, Joan Allen, Joey Ansah, Colin Stinton

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Thriller | Leave a Comment »

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

August 14, 2009

In making his transition from the anarchic precincts of British TV’s Da Ali G Show to the more populist pastures of the big screen, something disturbing happened to Borat. He died. Performer Sacha Baron Cohen’s rendering of the clueless Kazakh journalist slowly began to implode under the pressures of imminent popularity. In his indulgent appearances on MTV Awards shows in Europe and the States (followed by what was on display in early Borat trailers), Cohen’s eyes looked perpetually glazed. The grin that once denoted Borat’s clueless amiability became frozen into a soulless rictus. The mock-journalistic, malaprop-addled sobriety with which Borat conducted himself lapsed into a tired shtick about his overbearing wife, his prostitute-sister, or what they do with Jews and gypsies back in his native Kazakhstan (depicted in Borat-world as a feudal, anti-Semitic backwater).

Due to overexposure, Cohen’s performance as Borat gradually became a parody within a parody — a danger sign for any comic persona (consider Peter Sellers latter-day turns as Clousseau for a classic cautionary example), tolling the beginning of the end of all that made Borat so exhilarating not so long ago. None of this is to say that Borat isn’t funny. Even on half-speed, it’s funnier and sharper than the vast majority of factory-assembled comedies out there. In spots, the movie can be hysterical. But, for the most part, its appeal is not unlike that of a veteran rock band putting on a greatest hits concert. Cohen, his co-writers Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham and Dan Mazer, and director Larry Charles revisit many of the tried-and-true set pieces from Borat’s TV incarnation in a bid to garner sure-thing laughs from an audience lured as much by the movie’s pre-release hype as by an adoration of Borat himself.

As for me, I belong to the second category; I’m a genuine fan, and do believe that Cohen is the most daring and brilliant comic performer to come along since Peter Sellers. Re-watching a Borat episode again and again, either on DVD or via the generous postings on Youtube, has picked up many a drab afternoon for me (Borat’s visit to a Southern plantation where he tries to enlighten his genteel, elderly hostess on what the words “Barbara” and “Bush” mean in the Kazakh language is a personal stand-out). So it was with a mixture of anticipation and mournfulness that I experienced Borat’s moment in the mainstream, and with a predictable shrug with which I left the screening.

Cohen and his team offer nothing new in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, except to graft onto their premise a narrative arc that muddies up what are meant to be purely spontaneous high-wire comic pranks. They maintain their premise: Borat, a Kazakh TV journalist, travels to the U.S.A. (“U.S. and A”) on assignment from his government to produce a series of lifestyle pieces about American life and culture. In the movie, Borat chances on a viewing of Baywatch, falls madly in love with Pamela Anderson and determines to travel cross-country to meet Anderson and carry her off as his bride. Accompanying Borat is his grotesquely obese producer, Azamat (Ken Davitian), who’s new to the Borat universe and seems to have been installed for sake of the movie’s plot. Borat and Azamat quibble, fret, and bumble their way in an ice cream truck from New York City, down through the American South and across the plains towards Los Angeles.

Nearly everything on display here has already been done in cruder, fresher, far funnier form on Cohen’s Ali G Show. There are whole segments here rehashed from earlier TV forays: the bits in Borat’s village about his wife and sister, the Southern etiquette/banquet sequence, the interviews with right-wing politicos and left-wing feminists, the anthem-singing fiasco in front of a redneck audience, all these are retreads of scenarios attempted on Ali G, while a scene involving college boys road-partying in an RV was assayed with far greater bravado in one of Cohen’s Bruno — the flamboyant gay fashionista — segments.

The technique for getting laughs seems to have been simple: Don’t bother much with fresh scenarios and jokes. Instead, ratchet up recycled set-pieces in hopes that their amplified pitch will force a laugh from the audience. A case in point is an extended sequence in which Borat and Azamat wrestle nude down the corridors of a hotel and literally crash a well-heeled conference in one of the banquet rooms. The moment is more outrageous than funny, more noisy than inventive — and demonstrates the modus operandi for the movie at large. At other times, the recycling of a bit pays off because it manages to throw a new joke into the mix: I’m thinking of Borat’s disastrous, faux pas-ridden banquet in the company of some choice Southern citizens. After excusing himself to use the toilet, Borat re-appears moments later with a small surprise that offends the other guests into a state of dumb shock. That alone is worth the time it took to get us there.

Otherwise, Borat follows a series of up-and-down story beats mapped out by a committee of screenwriters (there are four credited), resulting in material that feels as contrived as any other plot-driven mediocrity out there. Even the potentially hilarious presence of a prostitute is infected with a feel-good aura totally out of place here. Will Borat get it together, reconcile with his estranged producer, and make it out to L.A.? Will he succeed in meeting the golden haired woman of his dreams? We find uninteresting and intrusive questions like these altering what could’ve been a blistering experiment in freeform comedy into a connect-the-dots hokum about a little Kazakh fish in a big American pond.

Grade: C+

Directed by: Larry Charles
Written by: Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham, Dan Mazer
Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Ken Davitian, Luenell, Pamela Anderson

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Comedy, Genres | Leave a Comment »

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