Ray Pride

No, it's funnier, much funnier than you've heard, no matter what you've heard. "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" is a marvel of economy, even in its most excessive moments, with sledgehammer social commentary performed and edited with the most feathery of touches. Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat Sagdiyev is ostensibly a correspondent for Kazakh television traveling to America to find what this country has to teach him; racist, anti-Semitic, sex-obsessed, Pamela Anderson-fixated, Borat is not so much a character of a rube from a backward country as performance art and brazen straight-facedness, a walking illustration of the most craven and narrow impulses of the human condition. That is, with jokes like the subtitle, "I still have the taste of your testes in my mustache" or the admission, "She is my sister. She is number four prostitute in whole of Kazakhstan," just before a big family French kiss. I don't even want to characterize the situations, let alone the jokes. To describe more is to diminish the power of Baron Cohen's willingness to elicit shocking confessions from his subjects, all of whom have all signed release forms, and still participate in jaw-dropping admissions of racism and meanness. Funny. It's. Just. Funny. Who's the xenophobe? The man with the mustache? He's fiction in motion: his subjects... There's no large statement like "this is America," but more like, "look at these specific Americans." Find me a movie that makes you laugh more in such a brief running time and I will pay good money to see it. For now, I'm off to a third viewing. 82m.

"Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" opens Friday.

(2006-10-31)

Also by Ray Pride

The Beauty of All History
Philip Noyce's "Catch a Fire," written by Shawn Slovo ("A World Apart"), inspired by men her father met as part of the African National Congress' battle against South Africa's apartheid government, is taut, painfully resonant, and ultimately deeply moving
(2006-10-24)

Tip of the Week
The two most beautiful sentences I've read in weeks, and they were likely penned by a lawyer: "This film is fictional. It is set in the future." Coming at the end of British director Gabriel Range's "Death of a President," about the October 2007 aftermath of authoritarian opportunism when President Bush is killed while visiting Chicago, it suits Range's neatly arrayed paranoid prognostications, which, of course, is trumped by reality each and every day
(2006-10-24)

Tip of the Week
Moving at a crushing clip appropriate to the music scene that it looks back on, Paul Rachman's superb "American Hardcore" (subtitled "The History of American Punk Rock 1980-1986"), written by Steven Blush ("American Hardcore: A Tribal History") and shot and edited over the course of five years, after more than a hundred interviews, "American Hardcore" is overloaded with sound and information, including a flurry of orchestrated chaos from self-chronicles by the bands presented, often in deliciously cruddy VHS
(2006-10-17)

I Want Candy
Seven months pregnant, wearing a black knee-length maternity dress, substituting ballet flats for her customary flip-flops, Sofia Coppola is unapologetic about the style of her third feature, "Marie Antoinette"
(2006-10-17)

Tip of the Week
(2006-10-10)

The Queen
(2006-10-10)

Tip of the Week
(2006-10-03)

Gimme Welter
(2006-10-03)

Best of the Fest
(2006-10-03)

Who Would Jesus Kill?
(2006-09-26)

Tip of the Week
(2006-09-26)

The Last Picture
(2006-09-19)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment