Bloggasm

One could lazily say that Sacha Baron Cohen’s ability to make us laugh simply lies with his keen adeptness to draw out the most racist and sexist personas of his interview subjects and display them in all their ridiculousness. But then that would ignore some of the funniest scenes in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which seemed as if they could have snugly fit within the realms of a Jackass movie. In fact, Cohen at some points dives so far into the shock factor humor that the audience becomes desensitized to it, as is often the case with race humor. When we watch the citizens of Kazakhstan participate in the annual “Running of the Jew,” in which large hulking costumed “Jews” chase the children through the streets, you’ll likely hear forced laughter in the audience at what is essentially over-the-top anti-semitism. Later in the movie, when Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his producer Azamat (Ken Davitian) find out that they’re spending the night with a Jewish couple, their fear that the couple will poison them never does much in inducing real laughter.

That is not to say that the racism isn’t funny, it’s just more entertaining when Borat manages to let his interview subjects spew their racist remarks. Perhaps this is why he only spends a very small portion of the movie in New York City before hitting the road, because Cohen understood the guarded, stand-offish nature of the New Yorker. When Borat goes to kiss a random New Yorker on the street, the response you almost always hear is “Get the fuck away from me, don’t you fucking get near me.” When he’s in the south, the southerner will either awkwardly let him kiss him, or politely tell him “No, we don’t do that kind of thing here.” Cohen preys on the exaggerated polite mentality of southerners, who will go out of their way to accommodate even the most obnoxious guests. Borat is always able to cause the southerners to let down their guard through his own sexist and racist affirmations, and through some bizarre assuredness that the camera filming them will never reach American eyes, they spew forth the most vile stuff imaginable.

Borat, in its faux-documentary style, puts together a coherent plot rather than jumping from interview to interview like in the short lived Da Ali G Show. Borat is a Kazakhstani journalist who has been sent to America to make a documentary about American cultural life that will theoretically be emulated by Kazakhstan’s people (something that’s confirmed in the epilogue of the movie). He’s accompanied by his producer Azamat who is there to keep him disciplined towards his final goal. But when Borat watches an episode of Baywatch, he becomes immediately transfixed with Pamela Anderson and decides right then and there that he is to marry her. He convinces Azamat that they need to travel to California in order to get the full range of American life, and of course on the way there they curve their path into the deep south.

The attempt to make a coherent plot is a thin one, and Borat’s interactions with Azamat are, for the most part, insubstantial and not very funny (with the main exception being when they get into a huge fight that causes them to part ways). During their trip in the south, Borat encounters an entire range of southerners, from rodeo owners to tongue-speaking evangelical churches to antique dealers, and to borrow a cliche, hilarity ensues. To dictate said hilarity into the written word would flatten it and dry it out; its humor can only be conveyed through the screen. But suffice it to say that Borat is probably the funniest movie to emerge this year.

With its major popularity and inevitable cult following, Cohen must have realized that the death of Borat is eminent. He has been propelled into a notoriety so large that he will never again be able to sneak under the radar in order to trick his interview subjects. But perhaps that’s what’s so fantastic about the movie, that he approaches it with his gloves off, willing to do the most outrageous things imaginable until tears of laughter well up in the audience’s eyes. Many critics will label this movie a mockumentary, but Cohen has painted such a true-portrait of the south’s landscape that he will no doubt be the envy of any serious documentarian, who must deal with the barriers created by those who know every word of theirs will be picked over and dissected by the unrelenting liberal-than-thou criticism of their fellow Americans. Cohen has managed to remove the lense of political correctness to display the racist southerner in its most basic, Neanderthalic beauty.

***

Related posts: The Science of Sleep, The Prestige, Best Blonde joke ever, Thank You for Smoking: If only lobbyists had it so good

“I can’t remember to forget you,” Leonard Shelby’s voice-over says of his dead wife in Memento, and even though Charlie Koffman has his characters poke fun at screenwriters who use voiceovers in Adaptation, Christopher Nolan crafts them so that they convey such a lonely obsession that we never even question their legitimacy. And it’s intentional irony that Nicolas Cage’s Adaptation character speaks often in the very voice-over that is so bemoaned. There were times during Hugh Jackman’s voice-overs in The Prestige where one could almost believe that Guy Pearce was hired to do them. Nolan uses these voice-overs to symbolize his character’s isolation within his own head, conveying to the viewer that by becoming obsessed with something, you are essentially alienating everything else in your life.

Obsession is a theme that Nolan portrays well. Leonard Shelby is told by Teddy that he no longer knows who he is, indicating that one can be defined by his own obsession. Shelby is so set on finding his wife’s killer that (spoilers!) it no longer matters if he finds the right one. In the case of Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman), he too is consumed with an obsession so acute that he often sacrifices his own wealth and happiness to achieve it.

Because there are so many twists to the actual plot of The Prestige, following it for too long drags the reader so far into Spoiler Land that it seems futile to do so. Add to this the fact that it’s actually difficult at times to follow the linear progression of what is happening in present time because of the constant use of flashbacks, then one can truly understand the difficulty of providing even a basic premise to the film.

The Prestige is the story of two rival magicians, Robert Angier (Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), who essentially progress through their entire careers trying to simultaneously out-do and sabotage each other. The crux of this rivalry lies in the debate of whether or not Borden is responsible for Angier’s wife’s death in a magic trick which went fatally wrong. How it went wrong–Borden’s stubborn insistence on using a different kind of knot when binding her hands together–represents his inventive resistance to the norm. It is Borden’s belief that magicians should be continually refining their acts to push through to new levels of greatness; he isn’t satisfied with what he considers boring, stale tricks. Angier, on the other hand, is less inventive but more given to the theatrical nature needed by a good magician. In his mind, the trick itself isn’t what matters, but rather how one delivers it. Borden, though his tricks are easily more amazing, doesn’t know how to handle the crowd, and the viewer can see this plainly with the rather dull settings of his magic performances.

Borden eventually creates a new trick called “The Transporting Man,” which causes Angier to digress from a mere rivalry to an unhealthy obsession. He can’t figure out how the “The Transporting Man” is done, so he makes it his life’s almost-spiritual quest to unlock its mystery. This segways into another rivalry between the famous scientist Thomas Edison and another scientist named Nikola Tesla (David Bowie). Their scientific battles are juxtaposed against Borden and Angrier’s own, and so Angier naturally takes on a kind of comradery with Tesla in their quests to out-do their opponents. How they help each other do this lies so deep within the realms of Spoiler Land that we dare not venture that far.

All of this is told in flashback form. In the present, Borden is in prison, and the viewer deduces early on that he was framed at some point for murder during the mental battle of the wits with Angier. Because that’s what this is, a mental chess game, where moves are often made in the anticipation of how the other will respond, allowing for a plethora of surprises and the notion that nothing is as it truly seems. Borden often plants misleading clues along the way to throw Angier off his scent, and the viewer is forced to follow Angier down every path, even the ones that turn up cold.

The Prestige is easily one of the best films this year. As one reviewer put it, it’s the movie that gives Nolan enough room to fully extend himself so that his complex narrative can be realized. The movie is over two hours long because it needs to be that length. It’s multi-layered and has the room to slowly unfold itself, and though a keen viewer will be able to guess several of the twists before they happen, he or she won’t feel let down by it since Nolan never makes the story hinge off the twist, as is often the case with directors like M. Night Shyamalan. No, the entire story rests upon the weight of obsession, and how it slowly becomes its own antagonist, a beast that will never release its stronghold from the neck of its own creator, not until he’s destroyed by that very obsession for which he was defined.

Related Posts: The Departed, Thank You for Smoking: If only lobbyists had it so good

It was one of those movies that I looked forward to since the first day they released the trailer online. Friends and I had joked about the anti-smoking propaganda that assaults us on our TV screens (we were getting sick and tired of those over-dramatic, self-righteous masturbatory TRUTH commercials) and finally, here was a satirical comedy that spun the tables in another direction: Smoking isn’t so bad after all. We were sold before we even read the first reviews.

And indeed, one can’t help but gather even more hope with the opening credits, sporting retro-colored cigarette labels and a catchy tune (“Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette,” by Tex Williams), a song that is both humorous and warm in its old-fashioned antique flavor. But unfortunately, once one dives into the actual meat of the movie itself, hope is bled dry as it moves along a conveyer belt of cinematic cliches and half-developed caricatures.

Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is a tobacco spin-doctor who works for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, a biased firm funded by various tobacco companies to try and downplay the health-risk factors of smoking. His role is idealistic in that rather than realistically portraying the various complications and major road-blocks that a lobbyist has to go through, he lives in a Lobbyist Utopia where he can magically offer any poorly-argued piece of spin for cigarettes and the opposition is reduced to a stuttering, speechless kid who couldn’t tell a rebuttal from his asshole. In fact, there are several such scenes in which this happens (you’d think that the anti-smoking brigade would get their act together and actually prepare themselves when they square off with Naylor). The worst of which is the scene where Naylor is a guest on Dennis Miller’s show (note to film producers: Dennis Miller isn’t funny), and Naylor has his first encounter with Senator Ortolan K. Finistirre (William H. Macy) who just got done tearing his aide a new one for not preparing himself for Naylor’s spin, and yet he falls into the same stammering, speechless trap.

Now, you might be wondering: What is a lobbyist? What does he do? How does one actually spin an argument? Never fear, dear reader, for this movie has provided these answers for you, in the form a convenient, bright-eyed little boy. Joey Naylor (Cameron Bright) is Nick Naylor’s son, and there’s never a doubt in your mind that he was cast for one reason: So Naylor’s character has a way of providing info-dumps to the audience. Why else would little Joey deliver such stilted, badly rehearsed questions like “What do you do for a living, Dad?” and “But isn’t that lying?” or my favorite: “What if you’re wrong about cigarettes?” When Nick Naylor talks to his son, he’s really talking to us. Joey Naylor is merely a means for delivery, a young actor who speaks in monotones and delivers what is supposed to be an uplifting speech to his father after Nick has been fired, but what instead comes off as corny and sounding like the lines have been nuked in a microwave for too long before being served to us.

Though there are a few laugh out loud moments, we are constantly being hit with caricature characters and factors that are fueled by conveniency. Heather Holloway (Katie Holmes) (note to casting crew: Katie Holmes does not fit the role of a seductress) is a journalist who is doing an article on Nick Naylor and yet he never becomes suspicious when she wants to sleep with him and asks him loaded questions while they’re having sex? Cue a scene with the cliche cinematic montage of a population reading a negative newspaper article while it’s being read aloud to us, a scenario that made me gag in Never Been Kissed and didn’t do much better here. Flash forward to Senator Ortolan K. Finistirre conveniently turning on the television just as Nick Naylor announces his triumphant come-back, and flash forward even more to little Joey Naylor and his mother conveniently walking in just as Naylor is called before the Senate Sub-committee, in which he delivers his usual lame spin and is once again met with luke-warm, stammering rebuttal.

But the real reason this movie fails (other than its bad characterization) is the fact that it doesn’t understand its own themes. What does Nick Naylor (and by extension, we) learn from all this? It’s never quite clear. After he has been fired and abandoned by the tobacco industry, he still inexplicably fights for them. And then later when he’s offered his job back, he declines, alluding to some kind of moral guilt that is somehow connected to his son. But right before the ending credits, we learn that he’s still lobbying for companies and that he’s still producing spin.

What could have been the ultimate attack on the essence of truth, a strict analyzation of bullshit, simply degrades itself into a nifty idea: Let’s make a movie that portrays the other side in a (sort-of) positive light. Unfortunately, an idea by itself isn’t enough to carry a movie, and so in the end, Thank You for Smoking wasn’t even worth the matinee price I paid to get in.

–Simon Owens