BEFORE: "The Trial of the Chicago 7" is one of those films that give me a ton of linking options, I could have followed it with an action film with Michael Keaton in it, a sci-fi film with Eddie Redmayne, a classy film with Mark Rylance, or even "Mudbound" with Kelvin Harrison, a Netflix film that's been on my list for what feels like forever (which then could have linked to "The United States vs. Billie Holiday", I just realized...). Hell, I could have linked to "The Man Who Killed Hitler and then Bigfoot", which I'm very curious about - but I'm going to pass on all that and link to the "Borat" sequel, and try very hard to not go down the rabbit hole of second guessing myself. A funny thing happened since I added this film to the list last October, it became the Oscar-nominated "Borat" sequel, with noms in the category of Best Supporting Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay. Umm, adapted from what, from the first film? I'm not sure that's how things should work. Not my problem...
Anyway, Sacha Baron Cohen carries over, and that's an obvious link, but sometimes I need those to get me where I want to go. This also sets up my political documentary chain that starts tomorrow, which in many ways is long overdue. We had an election and a pandemic and a riot since I last watched anything really political, unless you count the three documentary series I watched, all trying to figure out who Q is. (No spoilers here, but I don't count TV series in my mix.)
Let's check the TCM schedule for tomorrow's "31 Days of Oscar" line-up, April 18 and then get to "Borat" OK? Chenquie...
6:00 am "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" (1936) - SEEN IT
8:00 am "My Fair Lady" (1964) - SEEN IT
11:00 am "My Favorite Wife" (1940) - SEEN IT
12:30 pm "My Favorite Year" (1982) - SEEN IT
2:15 pm "Mystery Street" (1950)
4:00 pm "The Naked Spur" (1953)
5:45 pm "National Velvet" (1944)
8:00 pm "Nebraska" (2013) - SEEN IT
10:15 pm "Network" (1976) - SEEN IT
12:30 am "Night Must Fall" (1937)
2:45 am "The Night of the Iguana" (1964) - SEEN IT
5:00 am "Ninotchka" (1939)
That's a good day for me tomorrow, 7 seen out of 12. I probably saw "National Velvet" some time when I was a kid, but I'm just not sure. Never saw "Ninotchka", but I saw "Silk Stockings", which is essentially a remake. Either way, I rise a bit to 886 seen out of 207, which is 41.5%
THE PLOT: Borat returns from Kazakhstan to America and this time he reveals more about the American culture, the COVID-19 pandemic and the political elections.
AFTER: Big credit to Borat's creators for bringing him back at JUST the right time - we need laughs more than ever right now, especially laughs at the expense of Republicans, Qanon/preppers, EverTrumpers, anti-abortionists, plastic surgeons and debutante balls. Am I ready to laugh about the pandemic yet? Hmm, I'm not sure. Give me some time, but I do tend to watch all my news filtered through the lens of the Daily Show and other nightly talk show hosts, so there's humor to be found in anything, if you approach it from the proper angle. When I switch to MSNBC at about 2 am, that's really when the humor stops.
They didn't need to explain where Borat Sagdiyev has supposedly been for the last 14 years, but he's been breaking rocks in a gulag in Kazakhstan after his last moviefilm made the whole country look ridiculous and backwards. Then they didn't need to explain why Borat/Cohen dressed as Borat can't walk down the street in the US and A without people stopping him for an autograph, only they sort of had to, and it leads to Borat/Cohen both having to adopt even better disguises than the last time, and finding people to interview who obviously didn't see the first film. I don't tend to watch other "prank" comedy, but it's a big thing now to dupe people on camera and still somehow get them to sign a release. Nobody really does it better than Borat/Cohen, but to be fair here, we're not really sure how much of this all was candid, and how much was staged. The entire debutante ball seen here, for example, was a fake event, but it's possible that the attendees were not aware of that, and thought it was real.
Same goes for the Trump rally in Olympia, Washington, where Borat dresses up as a hick to find his daughter at the rally, but he ends up on stage singing a song as "Country Steve", about the Wuhan Flu, and what to do with Fauci, reporters, basically anybody that the Trumpers don't like. That had to be a set-up, start to finish, but who's to say? I mean, from a filmmaking perspective the band had to know the music, security had to know what was happening, but beyond that, we're not sure who's in on it and whose reactions were genuine. The two Qanon conspiracy guys that Borat/Cohen was staying with, didn't they wonder why this guy had a cameraman following him around, recording him all the time? Who invites a foreigner to stay in their house for an indeterminate amount of time, during a pandemic lockdown, and then agrees to let the cameraman and sound guy come along, too? That's a lot to ask, and it starts to call the whole cinema verité thing into question. But I'm probably overthinking it, and should learn to just take it all as it comes, right? Can't do it, can't shut off the "producer brain" that always wants to know how a scene was done, what went into the filmmaking process.
The overall story-arc here is good, though, Borat is released from the gulag on a mission to America, and he's glad to "make reportings" again, now that the US&A has been taken over by an evil, corrupt presence in the White House - Obama, of course. But the "news" is good, that a new savior is in command who's going to fix everything, and his name is "McDonald Trump". ZING! If the shoe fits... So Borat's sent to America on a mission, to get close to Trump, by offering a gift to VP Pence, initially this gift is Kazakhstan's Minister of Culture and greatest porn-star, Johnny the Monkey, but due to a mix-up, it turns out to be Borat's own daughter in the crate. Facing execution for botching the mission, Borat decides instead to offer his daughter, Tutar, to Pence, because he knows for a fact how much of a ladies' man (and vagine-grabber) that Pence is. This all is wrong on so many levels that it somehow makes perfect sense in the Borat-verse. (The complete title of the film also includes: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, but that really gives away too much, plus it doesn't fit on a marquee, so I'm just going to refer to it by the shortened title above.)
This leads Borat and Tutar on a non-straight cross-country journey that brings them to the CPAC conference (Georgia?), the Texas State Fair, Oklahoma City, and then up to Washington state before ending in New York, and Borat is forced to adopt many new disguises (including a Klansman and Trump himself) before somehow making it to NYC in time to stop his daughter from offering herself to Rudy Giuliani, in last year's most controversial hotel room scene that just may have influenced the 2020 election. Come on, we all knew Giuliani was dirty and had the morals of a sea slug, but the scene was interrupted and now we'll never know EXACTLY what he's capable of, even though we already know.
At the end of it all, Kazakhstan becomes a less patriarchal society, Borat's daughter learns that women can drive cars and don't need to get breast implants, and the country's "Running of the Jew" ceremony has morphed into the "Running of the American", plus Borat learned that the Holocaust was real and Jewish people don't infect others with venom. As personal character growth goes, this really is about the best that we can hope for. Now, what are we all going to do about the U.S. citizens who believe FOR REAL that Democrats and Hollywood stars are running pedophile rings out of pizza restaurants, and that they drink the blood of scared babies? I'm waiting....
I'm basing my score on how often I laughed, which was very often. Heading in to a bunch of probably very dry political documentaries, I kind of needed this as a palate cleanser of sorts. By no means is this a perfect film, but I appreciate how difficult it probably was to make this, and find the right comedic tone in these difficult times. (I know I'm going to catch some flak for this from my friends..."Wait, are you saying this film was BETTER than (name of film they liked)?" Well, in some ways, yes, but you really can't compare any two of my ratings to prove a point, each film is its own thing, and sometimes a film just HITS on a particular day, when I'm in a particular mood.)
Point of order, I watch films with the subtitles turned on whenever possible, since I got my hearing aid last year this just makes things easier - I can hear fine, but you never know when that battery is going to run out, and this also helps me avoid running sequences over again when an actor is hard to understand. So I started watching today's film on AmazonPrime, made sure that the subtitles were toggled on, then sat down in the recliner across the room - I usually watch Amazon, Netflix and Hulu through our PlayStation, and the game controller only reaches a few feet, but our TV is so big that I sit about 10 feet away to watch. I soon realized that the subtitles were NOT in English, they'd somehow been switched to a language I'd never heard of, Bahasa Melayu or something. This was extra bizarre, watching a film with the sound in English, characters speaking in mock-Kazakh, with subtitles in Malaysian. Was this another prank, does this film play on Amazon with random subtitles? If not, how did our account settings get changed? It took me like 10 minutes to figure out how to change the subtitles back to English...
Also starring Maria Bakalova, Dani Popescu, Manuel Vieru, Miroslav Tolj, Alin Popa, Ion Gheorghe, Nicolae Gheorghe, Nicoleta Ciobanu, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Pence, Brian Patrick Snyder, Macy Chanel, Jonathan Bright, Jean Sheffield, Charles Wallace, Jeanise Jones, Alan Knight, Jerry Holleman, Jim Russell, Judith Dim Evans, with a. cameo from Tom Hanks (last seen in "A Very Murray Christmas") and archive footage of Barack Obama (last seen in "This Must Be the Place"), Donald Trump (last seen in "Da 5 Bloods"), Melania Trump, Vladimir Putin (last seen in "Angel Has Fallen"), Nancy Pelosi, Justin Trudeau, Jair Bolsonaro, Kim Jong-Un and Kanye West (last seen in "Fyre Fraud").
RATING: 8 out of 10 gypsy tears
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