Weekend Journal

Twice this weekend, I handed over vast amounts of cash for stale popcorn, sticky floors and that all important three month lead time for seeing a film. Usually we just wait for movies to hit Blockbuster, because we prefer to spend our precious babysitting time drinking Bass and eating chicken wings. We’re quality people.

On Friday night, we saw Borat. As the movie starts, Borat takes us through his home village of muddy shacks on the mountain side. He describes the local customs, including the Running of the Jew. It’s so over the top that most people’s mouths were wide open, too stunned to laugh. Pretty much the rest of the movie is like that, too.

He comes to New York, where a chicken falls out of his suitcase on a subway. He tries to kiss random men walking down the street. He discovers Baywatch and true love as Pamela Anderson jiggles through the waves.

Cohen never breaks character and never dodges an opportunity humiliate himself. He marches into a rodeo arena and sings his country’s national anthem before hundreds of people. Predictably he’s booed out of there. Completely naked, he and an enormous fat man wrestle on a hotel bed and then continuing chasing each other into a conference of insurance adjusters. When he is invited to dinner by a nice Southern family, he gradually increasing the pain, even getting the poor hostess to explain how to wipe your butt, until his guest arrives, an old fat hooker. Then they finally call the cops on him. It’s really funny, but after an hour and half, my face was sore from the frozen horror. It’s like a rich dessert, better appreciated in small bites.

Was he humiliating innocent people or exposing latent anti-Semitism, racism, sexism? I didn’t get that. Other than the drunk frat boys and an old dude at the rodeo, nobody says anything remotely offensive. You get the feeling that people are sort of indulging him like when your 80 year old aunt still calls black people, “the colored folks.” Everybody’s sure that she’s too old to get it, so you don’t bother telling her that blacks stopped calling themselves colored back in the Nixon administration. With Borat, people indulge the foreigner. Cohen likes to see how far he can push things before people break and tell him to fuck off. In that regard, Cohen does have a mean streak.

The movie as a whole was okay. Cohen’s forte is the stunt, which worked so well for him as small bites on the Da Ali G show, but he tried to tie them together in this movie with a quest for Pamela Anderson. That felt a bit lame. Comedians always have trouble turning jokes into a movie, but still Borat was worth seeing for that peculiar mixture of horror and humor.

On Saturday night, we saw Flushed Away. It was a bit of a relief after Borat. We need some gentle laughs and a real plot line.