Monday, November 06, 2006

HIGH FIVE! BORAT Review, Simpsons Treehouse of Horror, and MORE

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Well it's back to the grind for one more week ... a good weekend was had with Friday's viewing of Borat and Saturday's birthday / belated Halloween / Pageoween II bash in Pasadena at la casa del Carlos. I thought my K-Fed getup was pretty sweet, but lo and behold I was like one of five K-Feds in da hizouse. Still, I was the only one with a kickass homemade T-shirt sporting the classic catchphrase of "Popo Zao." Beat that. Well, my friend Erica can beat that, as she actually ATTENDED a K-Fed concert last week. Yes, you heard right. I'm just waiting for Mr. Federline's burgeoning career as a professional wrassler to really take off, so that we can enjoy the first ever Britney-on-a-pole match (within the confines of a 15 foot high steel cage, of course ...). Otherwise, the party was a fun time even if it was weird being the resident old-school former NBC page. I got to meet some of the newer crop of pages though, so at least I'm slightly in the loop as to who is currently donning the blue polyester and giving guided tours of NBC Studios. Funnily enough, I've seen two different people actually dress as NBC Pages for Halloween this year, presumably thanks to the hilarity of the page character on NBC's 30 Rock. Who would have thunk it?

As for Borat ...

BORAT Review

Okay, well, let's see ... how to describe my reaction to BORAT? Well, first of all - yes, this movie is pretty freaking hilarious, no doubt about it. Sascha Baron Cohen is in absolute top form as Borat, and in Borat he has created one of the most inherently hilarious characters we've seen in years.

BUT ...

Going into this movie, based on my love of Da Ali G Show, well, I was honestly expecting a movie that was not only hilarious, but one that would instantly rank as one of the all-time great comedies - a movie that without hesitation I could call one of the funniest things I had ever seen.

The problem with this movie is that, while it is excellent, it isn't as good or as original or as ... pure, I guess ... as the original Borat sketches from Da Ali G Show. Those pieces are pure comedy magic thanks to the combo of Cohen as Borat and his interaction with real, unsuspecting subjects. In the movie, that comedic purity gets watered down by an underwhelming attempt to connect everything via a typical Hollywood narrative, with Borat on a quest to find his object of obssessive affection, Pamela Anderson. On one hand, the narrative sections of the movie do provide some undoubtedly hilarious moments (the opening and closing scenes in Kazhakstan are both great, and that one scene, you know - the man-on-man naked wrestling one - is admittedly gut-bustingly, side-splittingly funny). On the other hand, most of the Borat as man-on-the-street sections of the film feel overly cropped and squished together to accomodate the "Story" of the film. Did we really need a subplot where Borat falls in love with an overweight prostitute, for example? To me, Borat and Cohen are at their best when they are doing their Andy Kauffman-esque, reallife-meets-fiction take on reality TV, interacting with unsuspecting rubes, having Borat interact with regular people to hilarious effect. I wish there was more of that in this movie, as opposed to the scripted portions that were, at times, funny, but ultimately getting away from the real point of the character and of Cohen's act.

The other problem is simply that there's not enough new material in the movie. Many of the gags are recycled from Da Ali G Show, for example - from Borat showing off an increasingly dirty series of family photos, to an awkward attempt at the national anthem, to his attempts at being polite at a southern dinner party -- fans of Borat have seen much of this before. Even many of the new jokes and one-liners from the movie have been repeated ad-nauseum in various in-character interviews and TV appearances. As funny as Borat's schtick is, I wish I hadn't already seen so much of it beforehand.

So those are my grievances ... which basically amount to this movie being very, very funny and comedically daring, just not the ultimate, instant-classic movie comedy that I was hoping it would be. In general, I think Sascha Baron Cohen's Ali G characters represent some of the absolute best comedy of the last several years - even with only a handful of episodes available in the US, I place the show up there with The Simpsons, Arrested Development, Seinfeld, The Office UK, and a few others as my favorite comedic TV shows of all time. I think that Cohen's ability to stay in character, to live, breath and play the part so well that everyone from store owners to southern gentlemen to esteemed politicians all buy into his act, is simply amazing. It's totally fearless comedy that is, also, some of the absolute best social satire around. I think a lot of people probably like Borat for his funny look and accent, but I hope that people are smart enough to realize just how deeply the character is satirizing America. I think they are, but in the back of my mind I am kind of worried that people will start to think it's cool / funny to actually mock Jews a la Borat, when of course, he's actually mocking the ignorance inehrent in antisemitism - to great satiric and comedic effect (nothing in the movie beats his shockingly funny "Throw The Jew Down the Well" bit from Da Ali G Show). So again, Borat the movie is, as expected, ridiculously funny, but it also loses a bit of its bite by getting too many laughs from the Borat character and not enough from the social satire that elevated Ali G from the level of merely "funny" to that of "great."

So please, go see Borat. I can't tell you how happy I am that this movie was #1 at the box office, though again, I do somewhat worry that some people might take Borat at face value, just like the people he interviews in his movie. But more than that, I hope that Cohen's real point will be taken to heart here - that we Americans, as enlightened and sophisticated as we like to believe we are, are not as far removed from a goofily naive and backwards eastern-European dolt as we'd like to think.

To sum up - not QUITE the comedic masterpiece I had envisioned, but as expected to those in the know, it's typically crazy, brave, and hilarious. I like!

My Grade: A -

TV STUFF:

THE SIMPSONS TREEHOUSE OF HORROR - This whole Simpsons schpiel is getting a little old, but for the uninitiated, I'll repeat: Once, the Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror was the most beloved of Halloween TV traditions - a yearly showcase for some of the funniest writers in comedy to brilliantly blend the hilarity of The Simpsons with spot-on tributes to classic horror and sci-fi. For several consecutive years, each new Treehouse of Horror was an annual television highlight. Now, of course, like the show in general, we've seen several years in a row where the once-superlative episode has not lived up to its past greatness. After so many years of subpar Simpsons though, many longtime fans have come to accept that the show is no longer at its creative peak, and gone into each new season with considerably lowered expectations. But still, I know for me, the sheer potential in these annual Simpsons horrorthons is to much to pass up. So I tuned in Sunday with scaled back hopes, and what I got was an episode that was ... predictably average, but, not quite as bad as I'd feared, with a few decent laughs to be found even if none of the segments proved particularly memorable. Despite most of the stories not really going anywhere, there was something inherently funny to me about a golem voiced by Richard Lewis, and there were a few very funny lines scattered throughout the ep ("SKINNER! I wish I had gotten to know you better."). But this was far removed from the old-school Simpsons' spot-on parodies of Dracula, The Twilight Zone, etc ... instead the last few minutes were a ham-fisted critique of the war in Iraq, following an odd mix of War of the Worlds and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Keep it simple, guys! By no means classic, and probably not even good per se, but not totally bad either - and much better than the bar-lowering talking dolphin ep from a few years back, that's for sure.

My Grade: C+

FAMILY GUY:

- A somewhat funny ep, that once again was pretty hit or miss humor-wise. Sometimes this show just finds the right subject to parody that I just find inherently funny - I mean, finally, a good Choose Your Own Adventure joke! The Brian and Stewie in the army stuff was just okay, but there were nough good jokes to make this an episode worth watching, even if, as a whole, this show is still really struggling to capture it's past level of wit and humor.

My Grade: B -

Alright ... I'm out ...

HIGH FIVE.

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