We Support his War of Terror

A sure sign that you've allocated too many days in Vegas: It's 3 PM on a Sunday afternoon, and you’re sitting in the Mirage sports book, bleary eyed, watching the Canadian Football League Grey Cup.

This is the situation two of the founding members of the Ten found themselves in last weekend. Finally, rather than risk any more money on sports or gambling, we finally decided to take in a movie while waiting for our 11:50 PM flight home.

(Note to future Vegas moviegoers: skip the movie theater at the Orleans. Although the Day Care facilities and in-house arcade are a nice touch for those gaming parents too strapped to afford a babysitter, after walking thru this Casino we were overcome with a wave of depression worse than the time we saw Leaving Las Vegas. We pulled the plug entirely and just went back to a theater on the strip.)

The movie we saw was Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

Some observations:

• Was it funny? Oh yeah. As Graham points out, the extended naked wrestling scene had the audience in tears, and the "hang like sleeve of wizard " line is one of the best lines ever. There are plenty more.
  
  
• We're not surprised at its popularity. The movie's a great take for people too young to remember Andy Kaufmann and Tony Clifton. For those of us who do remember Kaufman, it's still a good laugh.
  
  
• Anyone who’s offended at the Jewish humor clearly doesn't get the joke, and probably should not be allowed near comedy, as the sharp edges can really hurt these people if left unsupervised. We recommend they stick to something with a slower speed.
  
  

Bottom line? Borat was as funny as advertised. But still…


We had some problems with this movie that still linger.

First and foremost, stop telling us it says anything about America. It doesn't. The easy analysis is to say that Borat sheds much-needed light on Americans and our culture and our attitudes. But does it? As Hitchens put it best, the only thing it says about America is that Americans are unfailingly polite, and would risk humiliation rather than be rude to a guest (humorless lesbians are apparently an exception to this rule.) We could care less if this movie has anything to say- just make us laugh. But so much of its press paints this as some sort of wake up call to America, and we just don't see it.

Secondly, it cheats. A lot of the scenes are clearly staged, or were put together using a number of different takes. And not all of the people were real; some were actors. We're fundamentalists about this, so forgive us for this greivance, but once you start to mix staged scenes with "real" situations, you risk taking the humor out of both. For example, a real New York subway rider telling Borat to "fuck off" is funny; an actor posing as a New York subway rider telling Borat to fuck off is simply cliché. Sitting thru the movie, we weren't really sure which it was, and our enjoyment of much of the Funny suffered.

Here's a Salon.com article about what was real and what wasn't (the article's free, you just need to watch an ad first, and a few days later you might be getting some recruitment info from the ACLU.)

Or maybe we just weren't in the right frame of mind for this movie, considering that up to that point we had enjoyed a profitable weekend in Vegas until Chad Pennington threw two interceptions and completely bolloxed the spread, and the Colts, losers of something like 2 regular season games over the last 6 years, inexplicably lost to the Cowboys in a game that was a pick 'em. How many times are you in Vegas and you get a chance to just pick a winner, no spread at all? And it’s a Colts game no less. Worse, one of the Ten Angry Wives had picked the Cowboys to win for reasons that we still can’t understand but expect that it has something to do with the shade of gray used in their uniform pants. After the day's NFL debacle, we had to be forcefully prevented from placing a $1,000 bet on the CFL coin toss before leaving to see Borat.

Tomorrow, we give you a review of Happy Feet.

* by the way, congratulations to the British Columbia Lions.