Larry Charles, 2006

In an effort to catch up on my film-watching and director-berating, I spent much of this past weekend staring at various screens. Borat was the main event, but I also experienced that sense of productivity that only Netflix users with a giant queue can feel and watched a documentary, a comedy, and the end of a popular TV show’s brilliant second season.

I will tell you this: Borat is leaps and bounds better than Sacha Baron Cohen’s first attempt at a feature-length story behind one of his characters – Ali G Indahouse – that failed to harness what makes Cohen humorous: the way in which he interacts with real people. Da Ali G Show’s Borat segments revolve around the premise that Borat is a real guy, a TV journalist for Kazakhstan, who travels around interviewing people and covering footage for the folks back home. Borat talks to people who actually believe that the segment is legit, and the beauty comes from watching them struggle to remain professional and polite in an increasingly inappropriate and wholly artificial “culture clash.”

The film version is a pretty genius integration of these interviews with “real” documentary footage of Borat and his producer Azamat traveling across the USA, interacting and embarrassing more people along the way. Even if they’ve been tipped off beforehand (as a lot of the time you imagine they must be), they still create an air of authentic discomfort as only an actual Texan stuck in an elevator with two naked men can. And because they aren’t actors being paid to look horrified, as in Ali G Indahouse, their stricken faces allow for that much more hilarity.

There’s another aspect to this that everybody’s fixating on: the way in which he’s captured and exposed the breathtaking ignorance of middle and rural America. Luckily for Cohen, Borat’s been hailed as a highly intelligent comment on how stupid people are in our country, but, like, other than a couple scenes with some frat boys that make me physically nauseous and a rodeo in my (mortifying) home state, this doesn’t really happen that much. Most of the people he talks to reject his anti-feminist, anti-Semitic, and anti-most-things-now-protected-by-law, thank goodness. It’s their spirited and angry reaction to his “unintentionally” obscene remarks that make it funny and not too sad.

I mean, if he had spent the entire movie with the frat boys (who I hear are now suing him), I could understand why this would be a groundbreaking expose, but as it is, it was just successfully funny in a fresh way. Go see it, but don’t expect to have your mind blown, especially if you’ve just taken my advice and rented…….

Unknown White Male

Rupert Murray, 2005

Ok, if I seem a little blasé about Borat, you’ll have to forgive me, because I’d watched this documentary the night before (jumping on the bandwagon late) and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It’s the story of a hot guy who wakes up on a train in Coney Island and wonders first what the hell am I doing in Coney Island and second who the hell am I? Luckily for us, he’s loaded and doesn’t have to scramble for money, so we get to go with him on his videotaped quests to figure out who he is. Eventually, his friend Rupert Murray decides to put his (annoyingly self-conscious yet forgivable) filmmaking capabilities to work and make sense of it all.

The questions Murray raises at the beginning of the film are sort of unnecessary – how much of our personality is crafted from previous experiences and how much is “pure us”? What the film actually asks is, “If you lose your history with everyone you know, do you still have an obligation to hang out with them, listen to their advice, visit them for the holidays?” At a certain point in the film, as Doug goes on for a couple years without getting his memory back, you start to understand the casual way in which he says that he doesn’t care if he gets it back or not.

I didn’t realize that there was such controversy over whether or not this story is a hoax. I want to be on board with the naysayers because I get sick pleasure in exposing how gullible people are, but I just don’t buy that somebody made all of this up. For one, the reasons behind that argument seem to revolve around:

1. He probably wanted to be able to just get a clean slate and start over.
2. He’s too good-looking to be a real person.

Please note that this guy is already a millionaire who retired at the age of 30 to reinvent his life two years before the event even happened. Seems like he could buy his clean break without making up something this elaborate. And come on, too good-looking? My boyfriend is good-looking, and if he won a MacArthur Genius Grant* and somebody wanted to make a film about him, I would certainly hope that his grant-winning capabilities wouldn’t be questioned just because he’s a little hotter than average.

But it doesn’t matter anyway, because Unknown White Male’s authenticity is irrelevant. Eternal Sunshine was fiction and raised related questions, why can’t this film?

Miscellany

I’ll try to wrap this up. I also saw Thank You for Smoking and thought it was clever, original, and worth your time. I feel bad that it was eclipsed by the above two movies, so make it up to Aaron Eckhart’s chin and rent the DVD, if only so you can see that it is possible to make a funny movie about smoking in which not one cigarette is lit throughout.

Lost is pretty much the most compelling show ever (besides my girl Veronica Mars), and as is Lost tradition, the season finale features Jack, Sawyer, and Sayid in a topless medley. It’s worth waiting all season for the removal of this clothing and the subsequent force of the electromagnetic disturbance it creates.

And finally, nothing is funnier than Andy Samberg dressed up like a jogger from 1992 and trying to catch his breath while talking about Crystal Pepsi. You just can’t rent that on DVD.

* Is it seriously too much to ask for just one MacArthur Genius Grant once in awhile?