Anyone who ever said, “Is nice,” in a broad unidentifiable accent, or wore a bushy fake moustache or, horror of horrors, donned a fluorescent Mankini Swimsuit Thong for a day at the beach will need no introduction to Borat Sagdiyev. Fourteen years ago Kazakhstan’s most famous reporter, the comic creation of Sacha Baron Cohen, spawned a million Halloween costumes and ten times that in bad, inappropriate impressions.
Now, into a world of fake Borats, the real deal returns. “Borat Subsequent MovieFilm,” streaming exclusively on Amazon Prime Video, once again blurs the line between comedy and tragedy, reality and fiction.
The new movie begins with a chance for redemption. After the events of the first movie Borat was thrown into prison, an embarrassment to his country and family. His son is so ashamed he changed his name from Sagdiyev to Jeffrey Epstein. Only his daughter Tutar (Maria Bakalova) still talks with the family patriarch.
The action begins with Borat being released from prison, cleaned up and once again sent to “Yankeeland” on a mission. His job is to earn the respect of Donald Trump by giving the gift of a monkey to “Vice Premier Pence.” When Borat arrives though, the monkey is gone from its packing crate. In its place is Tutar. “My daughter is here,” Borat reports back to Kazakhstan. “Should I give her as a gift?”
Thus, begins the journey that will see Borat and Tutar meet with a real-life cast of characters that offers cringe worthy insight into Western culture. There’s an Instagram influencer who teaches Tutar to be submissive to increase her appeal to men. “You want them to like you so you can get money from them.” Then two MAGA men take Borat to a rally where he performs a country song—“Journalists! Who wants to inject them with the Wuhan flu? \ Chop them up like the Saudis do.”—that elicits cheers and straight-armed salutes from the crowd. And then there’s a debutant ball “fertility dance” that redefines the term OMG.
Those scenes are as nervy and squirmy as humour gets but the sequence everyone will be talking about sees a sit-down interview with Donald Trump’s handsy personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. It begins with Rudy asking, “Did you ever eat a bat?” and goes downhill from there. It is the most outrageous of the film’s several must-be-seen-to-be-believed moments.
It’s not often you can describe a comedy as nerve wracking but “Borat Subsequent MovieFilm” is that film. Baron Cohen’s audacious work is often hilarious but it is the danger that comes along with his stunts that pushes the material from funny to fearless. His work is “Candid Camera” with a sharp edge; a cutting satire that mixes real life undercover reporting with aggressive and often tasteless humour. It is both a high brow exposé of the dark underbelly of this American election year and a low brow comedy that will anything to make you laugh.
Just like the year it is being released “Borat Subsequent MovieFilm” is a chaotic, uncomfortable experience. It will make you laugh but is geared to also make you think.
“The Trial of the Chicago 7,” now playing in theatres, sees Aaron Sorkin return to the courtroom twenty-eight years after he put the words “You can’t handle the truth,” into Jack Nicholson’s mouth. This time around he’s re-enacting one of the most famous trials of the 1960s, using transcripts from the actual proceedings as a basis for the script. There is no one moment as powerful of Nicholson’s “truth” declaration but there is no denying the timeliness of the film’s fifty-two-year-old story.
Here’s the basic story for anyone too young to know the difference between Yippies and Yuppies.
The trial, which was originally the Chicago Eight until Black Panther leader Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) had his case severed from the others, saw 60s counterculture icons Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong) of the Youth International Party (the aforementioned Yippies), and assorted radicals David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch), Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp), John Froines (Daniel Flaherty), and Lee Weiner (Noah Robbins) charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot stemming from their actions at the anti-Vietnam War protests in Chicago, Illinois, during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Behind the prosecution desk is the young and meticulous Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) acting as assistant to the truculent chief prosecutor Tom Foran (J. C. MacKenzie). On the defense is lawyer William Kunstler (Mark Rylance), a boldfaced name in civil rights litigation. On the bench is Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella), a conservative judge who once presided over an obscenity case against Lenny Bruce.
Those are the players and to a person they deliver solid performances, making the most of Sorkin’s snappy, rapid-fire dialogue. Of the ensemble cast Baron Cohen stands out, handing in a straight dramatic role; there’s no Mankini in sight. He’s too old by half to play the character who once famously urged kids to, “Never trust anyone over thirty,” but maintains the edge that make his comedic characters so memorable.
Sorkin, who also directs, has made a period piece that reverberates for today. A bridge that spans the five decades from the actual events, it’s a bit of history that comments on contemporary hot button topics like protest, civil rights and police brutality. The sight of Seale, the lone African American defendant, bound and gagged at the judge’s order, is a potent reminder of racial injustice in the penal system. Re-enactments of police brutality during the riots and the consequent discussion of who is to blame for the violence, the protestors or the bill club swinging cops could be ripped from today’s headlines.
“The Trial of the Chicago 7” isn’t perfect. Gordon-Levitt’s character is a cypher, a prosecutor who breaks with his colleagues at a crucial moment and Hoffman is played as a pantomime villain, but as a reminder of how history is repeated, it is a compelling watch.
Alice Through The Looking Glass, the six-years-in-the-making sequel to Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, takes place in a world where chess pieces come to life and the Cheshire Cat’s grin is as toothy as ever. It’s a flight of fantasy, based on a story published by Lewis Carroll in 1871, but grounded by the very human character of Alice Kingsley.
Mia Wasikowska has played Alice since the 2010 film, signing on to the first movie when she was just 18 years old.
“There is always a little bit of trepidation especially when you’re dealing with a character who is so iconic and so beloved by so many people and so many generations,” she told me on the release of the first film.
“But there is also a certain amount of realism to it because you know you can’t please everyone and not everyone is going to be pleased so it is more just making the character your own and feeling comfortable in the decisions you make.”
Originally imagined by Carroll in 1865, the little girl who found a world of wonder down the rabbit hole has become one of literature and film’s more enduring and malleable characters.
She was the insane character of America McGee’s video game Alice and the martial arts instructor of a Syfy channel adaptation. In 2010 Wasikowska said she thinks the stories have lasted because people relate to the strange characters and situations.
“I don’t believe in normal,” she said. “Nobody is normal. Everyone is crazy in his or her own way. So although these are extreme characters I think that just makes them more identifiable.
People want to see these characters, understand these characters, love these characters, feel comfortable with these characters because they are like everybody in this world who are kind of crazy. Everyone has felt like an outsider at some time in their life so it is a very identifiable story.”
Alice first got the big screen treatment in 1903 in a 12-minute silent version starring Mabel Clark, who was also employed on the set as a “help-out girl,” making costumes and running errands.
In 1966 director Jonathan Miller cast Anne-Marie Mallik as the lead in Alice, a mad-as-a-hatter made-for-BBC movie. Miller called Mallik, who auditioned by reciting a poem, a “rather extraordinary, solemn child.”
Not everyone agreed. Peter Cook’s biographer described the teenager’s take on Alice as “sullen, pouting, pubescent with no sense of bewilderment.” Mallik later said she wasn’t impressed with her illustrious co-stars — John Gielgud as the Mock Turtle and Peter Sellers as the King of Hearts — because she had grown up surrounded by the very accomplished friends of her “much older” parents.
After production wrapped she “retired” from acting and afterward the BBC had trouble paying her a royalty because they couldn’t find her.
It’s hard to know what Alice Liddell, the young girl who inspired the character would have thought of any of the wild and wacky versions of the story, but we do know she enjoyed the 1933 Paramount version.
“I am delighted with the film and am now convinced that only through the medium of the talking picture art could this delicious fantasy be faithfully interpreted,” she told the New York Times. “Alice is a picture which represents a revolution in cinema history!”
“Alice Through The Looking Glass,” the six years in the making sequel to Tim Burton’s $1 billion grossing “Alice in Wonderland,” takes place in a world where butterflies speak and the Red Queen applies her lipstick in a heart-shaped motif, but what should be a flight of fancy is grounded by a dull story.
The topsy-turvy world of Underland is more or less intact since the last time Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska) visited. Chess pieces still come to life, Tweedledee and Tweedledumb (Matt Lucas) continue to speak in rhyme and the Cheshire Cat’s (Stephen Fry) grin is as toothy as it ever was.
One thing is different, however. The Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), Alice’s greatest friend and ally in the otherworld, is having some problems. Call him the Sad Hatter. “He’s just not the same anymore.” Thinking of his family’s demise courtesy of the fiery breath of the Jabberwocky has thrown him into a depression. To help the Mad Hatter out of his funk Alice steals a time travel device from Time (Sacha Baron Cohen) himself (“I am time,” he says, “the infinite, the immortal, the measurable… unless you have a clock.”) ignores warnings about changing the past and careens across the ocean of time to find out what happened to Hatter’s folks. “Do try not to break the past, present or future,” purrs the Cheshire Cat.
“Looking Glass” is an epic fantasy artfully directed by James Bobin but lacking the effortlessly odd feel of Tim Burton’s work on the first film. It’s a trippy story that transverses time and space and should invite the viewer to turn on, tune in and drop out but the true weirdness of the story, the unhinged voyages of imagination, are absent. Instead we’re thrown into a world that feels like we’ve seen it all before: familiar and not nearly whimsical enough. It’s a sea of CGI with a story cut adrift inside it.
It’s lovely to hear Alan Rickman’s voice, if only briefly, as Absolem the Caterpillar on screen again and Baron Cohen does his best to breath life into his character, but no one, not even the Mad Hatter—who should more rightly be called the Quirky Hatter—is interesting enough to merit the movie’s hour-and-forty minute running time. There is a high level of craft evident in the computer-generated images, the costumes and set decoration, everywhere, in fact, except the story that seems to value “time” puns over actual plot.
Perhaps in six years or so, if they decide to add another film to this franchise, they’ll take heed of a bit of “Looking Glass’s” theme about learning something from the past and give the next movie the excitement and story Lewis Carroll’s creation deserves.
The idea behind “The Brothers Grimsby” was to make an outrageous comedy with all the earmarks of an all-out action flick. “The Transporter” helmer Louis Leterrier knows his way around a car chase and can blow things up real good, but can Sacha Baron Cohen provide the laughs to go along with the action?
The “Borat” star plays Grimsby native “Nobby” Butcher, a lager-loving football hooligan from northern England, with a Liam Gallagher hairdo and eleven kids. He hasn’t seen his baby brother Sebastian (Mark Strong) in twenty-eight years and has no idea his long-lost sib is now a high-powered MI6 agent. When they do reunite Nobby inadvertently puts in motion a series of events—including almost killing a World Health Organization ambassador for peace in the Middle East—that see the estranged brothers team up to do battle with a deadly assassin, travel the world and hide inside an elephant (you read that right, that is NOT a typo) in an effort to save the world.
“Yesterday I was down at the pub having a regular day with my mates,” says Nobby. “Today I’m with my brother, running, swimming, jumping and doing all sorts of cardio.”
If “Borat” and “Bruno” made you laugh like a hyena on a nitrous oxide binge you’ll know what to expect from “The Brothers Grimsby.” The new film doesn’t have the same cutting edge innovation as Baron Cohen’s best-known work, but it still has plenty of edge. It’s the kind of movie that uses a blocked toilet as a plot point and finds delight in HIV jokes, registered sex offender gags and too many bodily fluid quips to count. It should be a bonanza for those who enjoy their humour on the gastrointestinal side.
Nobby is Baron Cohen’s least developed character yet, a comedy concoction who feels like he might not be that out of place in a particularly raunchy “Carry On” movie. He uses Nob’s idiot temperament to make some social comments—“I understand why you like guns so much,” Nobby says after shooting a gun for the first time. “They completely detaches you from the guilt of your actions.”—but the character has none of the danger and few of the interesting quirks that came along with his mockumentary creations.
Mark Strong waffles between his action man pose and wild slapstick and pulls off both but I’m afraid the image of him covered in elephant ejaculate will stay with me the next time I see him trying to play it straight in a dramatic role.
The guys are given plenty of screen time and some fun stuff to do, which cannot be said for the women in the cast. As Nobby’s wife the usually hilarious Rebel Wilson is wasted, reduced to a fat joke and Penélope Cruz’s character makes her recent turn in “Zolander 2” look like Lady Macbeth.
Like all the best spy movies “The Brothers Grimsby” has international locations like South Africa, Chile, Jakarta and some good action scenes, but like all Baron Cohen’s films it is outrageous lowest common denominator stuff. It may make you laugh, but those laughs come along with a certain amount of shame at finding some of this stuff amusing. At least at a scant eighty-five minutes it doesn’t overstay its welcome.
For many people, especially those who troll around in the more unsavoury corners of the Internet, the first exposure to celebs like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian came from that most modern form of celebrity introduction: the sex tape.
Paris and Kim’s videoed sexcapades weren’t the first tapes to become public — in 1988 Rob Lowe was embarrassed when VHS images of him and two women popped up on the news — and they weren’t the last.
This week in Sex Tape, Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz are Jay and Annie, a married couple who try to spice things up in the bedroom by videotaping themselves. All goes well until Jay forgets to erase the tape and mistakenly stores it on the Internet. “Our sex tape has been synced to several devices,” he says, “all of which are in the possession of friends!”
Given how many actors have appeared in sex tapes it’s not surprising that several movies have used the raunchy videos as a plot point.
In Brüno, the titular Austrian fashion reporter (Sacha Baron Cohen) tries to make a name for himself in America by making a sex tape with another famous American, U.S. Congressman Ron Paul. Trouble was, Paul wasn’t in on the joke. “I was expecting an interview on Austrian economics,” said Paul. “But, by the time he started pulling his pants down, I was like ‘What is going on here?’ I ran out of the room. This interview has ended.”
The 2006 comedy Drop Box has production values not unlike that of an actual sex tape but despite its low budget it offers up the funny and often brutal story about Mindy (Rachel Sehl), a big-time bubblegum pop star (think Britney or Miley), who accidentally returns her homemade sex tape to her local video store instead of Glitter, the movie she rented. Realizing her mistake, she tries to re-rent the tape.
Clocking in at just 80 minutes, it’s a character study about a spoiled pop princess who butts heads with an unmovable force in the form of the uncooperative and inquisitive clerk (David Cormican).
Finally, Auto Focus exposes sex tapes’ dark side. Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane’s (Greg Kinnear) all-American public persona hid a secret obsession. “I’m a normal, red-blooded American man,” he says. “I like to look at naked women.” According to the film, he liked making sex tapes with women, usually without their knowledge. The movie speculates his 1978 murder may have been related to this unlawful pastime.
It’s been a rough twelve months for Will Ferrell fans. It seemed the funnyman was losing his touch. Kicking and Screaming was an unfunny flop, Bewitched was so bad that even if I saw it on an airplane I would still want to walk out and Melinda and Melinda showed his more serious and less interesting side. He had a couple of cameos that raised a smile or two in The Producers and The Wedding Crashers, but overall it seemed that the prolific comedian was making too many movies too quickly. It appeared that the silly glory days of Anchorman, Elf and Old School were behind him. That is until the release of Talladega Nights: the Ballad of Ricky Bobby reaffirmed his status as the silliest man in movies.
Ferrell co-wrote and stars in this movie about a dim-witted Nascar driver who rises to the top of his field only to lose everything when a French Formula One racer undermines his confidence. Call it the Fast and the Hilarious because it is the funniest movie that Ferrell has been in a while.
As Ricky Bobby, Ferrell has just the right amount of mindless redneck emptiness behind his eyes, the perfect slanted grin and all-American go-for-broke spirit to bring the Nascar driver to life. Ferrell is also one of the pluckiest of the comics currently working on screen. No joke is too broad to be milked, no chance to strip down to his underwear is missed and no pratfall is too undignified for the fearless Ferrell. Whether he is saying his version of grace at the dinner table re-imagining Jesus way he likes to see him, as a baby not as the long-haired hippie, or driving with a live cougar in the passenger seat every joke is pushed to the limit.
Good supporting work from Gary Cole, John C. Reilly and Sacha Baron Cohen, (better known as Ali G), make Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby the funniest movie of the summer.
Underneath it all, behind the crazy beard, the weirdo accents and the vulgar jokes Sacha Baron Cohen must be a romantic. In “Borat” he played a homophobic race baiter who came to America to search for his love Pamela Anderson. “Bruno” was about an extreme form of self love and now, in his latest movie, “The Dictator” he plays a monomaniacal potentate willing to leave behind his despotic ways for the love of Zoey (Anna Faris), an organic health food store owner
Cohen plays the “beloved oppressor” General Aladeen of Wadiya, a small oil-rich fiefdom near North Africa. He has absolute power, plays a Wii beheading game and announces to the world he has acquired nuclear arms. When the UN demands that he attend a meeting he goes to the “devil’s nest of America,” New York City. Everything changes when he is betrayed by his second in command (Sir Ben Kingsley) who plans an assassination. Instead, shorn of his trademark beard, he is let loose in NYC with a double in his place at the United Nations. To prevent the double from declaring Wadiya a democratic nation and his former ally from selling off their oil he must regain his beard and identity.
“The Dictator”—which is apparently based on Saddam Hussein’s 2000 romance novel, “Zabibah and the King” but feels more like a modern take on Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator”—takes full advantage of the Four P’s of Comedy—penis, puerile jokes, poo and political humor.
The level of humor ranges from frat boy raunch to real wit to jokes that will make you say aloud, “That’s not right.” Of course, any movie that starts with the dedication, “In loving memory of Kim Jong-il” and features Osama Bin Laden jokes is bound to push the envelope.
Thing is, it doesn’t push it far enough. There’s lots of fun dialogue like:
Zoey: The police in this country are such fascists
Aladeen: And not in a good way.
And there are Baron Cohen’s trademark “I can’t believe he just said that,” material, but “The Dictator” isn’t the pedal-to-the-metal experience his other films have been. It’s not exactly safe, but it is more standard, and slightly less funny than we’ve seen from him before.
But when he hits the sweet spot it works. Who else would dare cast Meghan Fox, as herself, playing a washed up actress turned celebrity prostitute? Only Baron Cohen could get away with the single most extreme childbirth scene ever. The raunch is tempered somewhat by the love story—there’s his romantic side again—but no amount of romance could smooth over the 9-11 jokes.
But the real gold here is his political satire. It’s not subtle or nuanced, but then again, nothing in this movie is. He uses the extreme behavior of General Aladeen to comment on current events. The movie climaxes with a filibuster to the UN extoling the benefits of a dictatorship.
“One percent of the population controls the ninety-nine percent!” he yells. “You can fill your prisons with one racial group and nobody cares! Give your rich friends tax breaks!”
“The Dictator” will mostly appeal to fans of Baron Cohen’s shock-and-awe absurdity. If you hated “Bruno” and walked out of “Borat,” then you may want to take a pass here, but if you have the stomach for jokes about “rape centers” then “The Dictator” may be for you.
It’s impossible to review Sacha Baron Cohen’s films—Ali G Indahouse, Borat and now, Brüno—without first describing his trademarked brand of humor. His wild style of social commentary rides the thin line between bad taste and very bad taste. It’s also frequently very funny in a squirm-inducing way. The set-up is simple. In character he elicits embarrassing, often racist or downright inane reactions from people not in on the joke, and as un-pc as the results of these interviews are, he is simply using irreverent, ambush comedy to hold a mirror up to society.
His guerilla modus operandi is guaranteed to ruffle a few feathers—he’s been sued by some of his unwitting subjects for everything from libel to slander, invasion of privacy, fraud, negligent misrepresentation, negligent infliction of emotional distress and more—but I guess that’s the price he’s pays for exposing human foibles.
Brüno is another exposé. Where Borat gave us an inside look at bigotry and Western hypocrisy, the ulterior motive lurking just beneath the fake eyelashes and chaps of Brüno is an unveiling of homophobia.
Like Borat the set-up for Bruno involves a television reporter coming to America. In this case it’s Bruno (Sacha Baron Cohen), a campy fame-seeking fashionista who wants to be “the biggest Austrian superstar since Hitler.” When his Austrian TV show is axed (“For the second time the world had turned its back on Austria’s most famous man.”) he goes on an outrageous quest for fame that sees him try to negotiate peace in the Middle East, make a sex tape with Presidential hopeful Ron Paul, get involved with a charity which “doesn’t require much effort” and adopt an African baby. When those labors lead nowhere he has an epiphany; reasoning that all the greatest stars in Hollywood are straight, he opts for gay “deprogramming.” Along the way he meets a martial arts teacher who compares gays to terrorists, a wild group of swingers and others until he takes one last shot at fame as Straight Dave, host of a Man Slammin’ Max Out Ultimate Fighting and “Straight Pride” television show based in Arkansas.
For those fearing that fame may have dulled Baron Cohen’s edge, I can tell you it hasn’t. Bruno is chock-a-block with OMG!! moments—by that I mean those “Oh my God I can’t believe he just did that” moments—but as funny as the movie is there are more cringe worthy gags than actual funny jokes. His jab about finding the next Darfur, “maybe Dar-five” is smart and funny, but his long conversation about it with the two emptiest headed publicists ever, isn’t. Other gags have a been-there-done-that feel. The Velcro suit and Dallas talk show stunts are funny but ruined by over exposure in trailers and ads.
That’s not to day there isn’t lots to laugh at—Baron Cohen is the most fearless comics working today or maybe ever—but Bruno is ultimately less satisfying than Borat. It feels more episodic, more mean spirited and more staged than its successful cousin.
Bruno will amuse most, enrage some—one man stormed out of the screening I was at yelling, “This is the stupidest thing ever!”—and offend many, often all at the same time, but despite some advance press the gay community has little to fear.
The gay stereotypes presented in the film are so over-the-top it is hard to imagine anyone taking them seriously and even though this extremely silly movie has a serious mission—to expose homophobia—the last thing it wants is to be taken seriously.
