→ April 25, 2021
→ By

Oscar picks, 2021 edition.

The Oscars are happening tonight, about two months later than usual, so I’ve put together this post with some loose predictions, my own picks for each award, and, most importantly, links to every one of these films I’ve reviewed. I’ve seen all of the Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay nominees, and all but one of the films in the four acting categories, as well as all five documentaries and all five animated features, with 50 total films seen from the 2020 awards cycle (which ran fourteen months).

Best Picture

The Father
Judas and the Black Messiah
Mank
Minari
Nomadland
Promising Young Woman
Sound of Metal
The Trial of the Chicago 7

Who will win: Nomadland

Who should win: Nomadland

I don’t feel that confident in the prediction here; I’m a little concerned that Chicago 7 will win, as it’s such an actor-focused, Very Important Film that it might resonate with the same voters who picked Green Book two years ago. I’ve seen Minari, and loved it, but haven’t posted a review yet.

Snubs: A Sun didn’t even make the Best International Feature cut (it was on the shortlist), but it belongs here, as does One Night in Miami, the exclusion of which I simply do not understand. Never Rarely Sometimes Always would have been a good if out-of-the-box choice. I haven’t seen First Cow yet.

Best Director

Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg)
Mank (David Fincher)
Minari (Lee Isaac Chung)
Nomadland (Chloé Zhao)
Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell)

Who will win: Zhao

Who should win: Zhao

This award and Best Picture used to be more closely linked than they are now, but I’m not sure I see them splitting the votes this time around. Vinterberg’s nomination seems inexplicable, unless it’s a sympathy vote, as his daughter was killed in a car accident during filming; she helped inspire the script and he dedicated the film to her.

Snubs: Regina King was supposed to be a lock for this category for One Night in Miami. I would have given Florian Zeller a nod as well for The Father.

Best Actress

Viola Davis, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Andra Day, The United States vs. Billie Holliday
Vanessa Kirby, Pieces of a Woman
Frances McDormand, Nomadland
Carey Mulligan, Promising Young Woman

Who will win: Mulligan

Who should win: Mulligan

Davis could win this, but I don’t think this is particularly close on the merits. Mulligan gave one of the two best performances I saw this year, and if pushed I think she gave the best one. I was very glad to see Kirby get a nomination even though she has no chance to win – she is that movie, and she’s clearly a star on the rise.

Snubs: Carrie Coon for The Nest and Sidney Flanigan for Never Rarely Sometimes Always would both have been better choices than Day, who does a fine job with a terribly written part.

Best Actor

Riz Ahmed, Sound of Metal
Chadwick Boseman, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Anthony Hopkins, The Father
Gary Oldman, Mank
Stephen Yeun, Minari

Who will win: Boseman

Who should win: Hopkins

Boseman’s going to win, obviously, and he was very good … but Hopkins was just better, in a more significant role. I wouldn’t want to see the reaction if Hopkins were to win.

Snubs: I’m good with these five. Dev Patel was great in A Personal History of David Copperfield.

Best Supporting Actress

Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
Glenn Close, Hillbilly Elegy
Olivia Colman, The Father
Amanda Seyfried, Mank
Yuh-Jung Youn, Minari

Who will win: Youn

Who should win: Youn

I feel like this is a lock, and of the four I’ve seen – I haven’t seen Hillbilly Elegy and see no good reason to do so – I’d put Youn and Colman as 1 and 1A, Bakalova second, and would give Seyfried a participation trophy. Maybe Close gets some sort of lifetime achievement thing here, especially after losing to Colman a few years ago when she was supposed to win, but people forget that The Wife was actually a shit movie.

Snubs: Tilda Swinton was superb in The Personal History of David Copperfield, certainly deserving of Seyfried’s spot.

Best Supporting Actor

Sasha Baron Cohen, The Trial of the Chicago 7
Daniel Kaluuya, Judas and the Black Messiah
Leslie Odom, Jr., One Night in Miami
Paul Raci, Sound of Metal
LaKeith Stanfield, Judas and the Black Messiah

Who will win: Kaluuya

Who should win: Kaluuya

I’ll say this – if Raci wins, it’ll be an amazing story, and I’ll cheer for him. But Kaluuya was slightly better in a much more significant role, and he’s one of the best actors going today. Of course, he was really the lead actor in Judas, but that’s another story entirely, I guess.

Snubs: I’m also good with these five, although Kingsley Ben?Adir was pretty amazing as Malcolm X in One Night in Miami.

Best Documentary Feature

Collective
Crip Camp
The Mole Agent
My Octopus Teacher
Time

What will win: Time

What should win: Collective

I just don’t know; I thought Time was the shoo-in here, but Tim Grierson thinks My Octopus Teacher – easily my least favorite of these – is going to win, and no matter what, Collective should win, because it’s the best story and it’s told so effortlessly.

Snubs: Transhood. It’s on HBO Max. You should watch it.

Best Writing, Original Screenplay

Judas and the Black Messiah
Minari
Promising Young Woman
Sound of Metal
The Trial of the Chicago 7

What should win: Promising Young Woman

What will win: Promising Young Woman

The screenplay categories have become a way to honor a film that has no shot at Best Picture (or maybe anything else) with a little pat on the head to say, “good job, we liked your little movie.” In this case, though, I’m good with Promising Young Woman taking this award home but not getting Director or Best Picture; the script itself is daring and novel and gets at least some of the credit for enabling Mulligan’s performance.

Snubs: A Sun, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, The Nest.

Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
The Father
Nomadland
One Night in Miami
The White Tiger

What should win: One Night in Miami

What will win: The Father

I could go either way here with those two screenplays; The Father is a better movie, because of Hopkins and some directorial choices, but Miami gets a very slight edge for me in the writing department.

Snubs: A Personal History of David Copperfield. You may remember the original.

Best Animated Feature Film

Onward
Over the Moon
Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon
Soul
Wolfwalkers

What should win: Wolfwalkers

What will win: Soul

Pixar just has such a huge advantage in this category that it seems contrarian to predict any non-Pixar film to win, but I’ll pull for Wolfwalkers, another hand-drawn film from Cartoon Saloon, even knowing it probably has no chance. Soul might be fourth for me among these nominees.

Snubs: The only other eligible film I saw was A Whisker Away, an anime film you can see on Netflix, which offers a far better story than Onward.

Best Animated Short Film

“Burrow”
“Genius Loci”
“If Anything Happens I Love You”
“Opera”
“Yes-People”

What should win: “If Anything Happens I Love You”

What will win: “Burrow”

“If Anything Happens I Love You,” available on Netflix, follows a couple after their only child has been killed in a school shooting. It’s devastating, and the style of the art further evokes those emotions. But I always assume Pixar is going to win this category. (I haven’t seen “Opera,” which appears to only be streaming on the subscription site ShortsTV.)

Snubs: “Cops and Robbers,” also on Netflix, can’t quite match the animation quality of “Yes-People” or the style of “Genius Loci” (which bored me), but the story, told as spoken-word poetry, is more relevant and more powerful. I don’t think dialogue gets you far in this category, though.

Best International Feature Film

Another Round
Better Days
Collective
The Man Who Sold His Skin
Quo Vadis, Aida?

I’ve only seen Another Round and Collective here; I’d vote for Collective of the two, but I think A Sun was better than both. The last two are now both on Hulu, so I’ll get to them eventually.  

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
→ April 21, 2021
→ By

The Father.

Nominated for six Academy Awards this year, including Best Picture, The Father gives a devastating portrait of dementia from the perspective of the sufferer, recasting the experience as a psychological mystery – but one without the promise of a neat ending. It brings together an incredibly clever screenplay and a BAFTA-winning performance from Anthony Hopkins, while making superb use of the limited space of a film set almost entirely in one flat. (It’s available to rent now as a premium/early access option for $19.99 through amazon and other VOD sites.)

Adapted from the stage version by the playwright Florian Zeller, The Father starts out simply enough: Anthony (Hopkins) is arguing with his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman, also nominated for an Oscar) because he has scared off his most recent carer. He says it’s because she stole his watch, and rants about his other daughter, Lucy, whose name seems to bring the film to a screeching halt whenever Anthony broaches the topic. In the following scene, Anthony finds a strange man (Mark Gatiss) in his living room, and the man says he’s Paul, Anne’s partner, whom Anthony doesn’t recognize – and when Anne returns, she’s played by a different actress (Olivia Williams) and Anthony doesn’t recognize her either. Is this just his memory failing, or is something more sinister at play?

The Father utilizes those tricks and more – details of the flat change as well, part of the nonlinear nature of time in this film – to express Anthony’s disorientation to the viewer beyond having him show his confusion. His flat and his daughter’s share a structure, but things like light fixtures, furniture, and wall colors differ slightly, just enough to throw Anthony and the viewer off as we try to figure out not just where we are, but when. Hopkins is truly incredible here, still showing a plus fastball here at age 81 (when it was filmed), delivering the sort of performance the film requires and that you’d expect to see in a stage production. His confusion is palpable, his attempts to mask it through word and action realistic, and his rapid mood shifts – one of the scariest aspects of dementia for family members – are just a series of hard line drives, impressive because they’re subtle and yet impossible to ignore. The script avoids the obvious, such as having Anthony become violent, or scream obscenities, or other possible behaviors of someone with his condition, and instead lets Hopkins deliver the smaller but no less devastating changes in a way that hammers them home to the viewer.

This film is as replete with symbolism as any I can remember watching, perhaps a reflection of its stage origins, although in this sense it felt just as much like a classic novel. The color blue is everywhere in this film – walls, backsplashes, furniture, clothes – which seems like an obvious nod to the sadness and depression suffered by both a patient developing dementia and their loved ones, while the color also appears in a new setting at the end of the film that makes the connection more explicit. Anthony’s obsession with his watch, which can be a common behavior in patients with memory loss, may also represent his slipping grasp of time; in one scene, the time jumps from early morning to evening without a cut, leaving Anthony, still in his pajamas, even more confused than usual. There could be more – the shattered tea cup, the painting above the fireplace, the trees – but I will assume the chicken is, in this case, just a chicken.

The one quibble I have with The Father is the ending, which may be completely realistic but does take away some of the mystery that Zeller built up in the preceding 100 or so minutes with a resolution that, again, is probably accurate to such stories, but took some air out of the dramatic balloon. We spent much of the movie trying to come up with possible explanations for everything that was happening – for example, are Gatiss and Williams some sort of confidence artists? – but the story is much simpler than that.

Hopkins is just incredible here, my favorite lead actor performance of the year, although I don’t think there’s any chance he wins the award over Chadwick Boseman for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (and I’m not sure I would want to see the reaction if he did). Colman is superb as well, my favorite of the three nominees I’ve seen, although it appears the favorite is one I haven’t seen, Youn Yuh-jung for Minari. It’s also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, which could be its best chance for a win on Sunday. As for the film itself, I would still lean towards Nomadland for Best Picture, but this sits at #2 on my ranking of movies from the 2020-early 2021 awards cycle, with just a couple of candidates left to see, and one more that made my top 5 still left to review.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ February 22, 2021
→ By

Nomadland.

Nomadland has been the front-runner for Best Picture for several months now, taking home the Golden Lion at Venice, winning Best Film or Best Picture from multiple cities’ film critics associations (Boston, Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco, Houston, DC, Dallas, Seattle, and London), and landing four nominations at the upcoming Golden Globes. It’s a very different sort of film than anything I’ve seen, layering a traditional, fictional narrative on top of a work of cinema verité, based on an acclaimed non-fiction book but with Frances McDormand delivering what might be her third Oscar-winning performance. The movie is now streaming exclusively on Hulu.

Nomadland is about vandwellers, people who have chosen, or been forced to choose, to live itinerant lives in their vans or RVs, traveling around the country and taking on seasonal or other short-term work, but avoiding the fixed lifestyle and long-term obligations of home ownership. The book, by Jessica Bruder, was non-fiction, and explored this subculture of outcasts, misfits, and nonconformists, and the movie brings in many of the same people who appeared in Bruder’s book as the backdrop for the fictional story of Fern (McDormand), who is forced into this life when her job and the company town where she lived all go away in the span of a few months in 2011. (She’s not a real character, but the town, Empire, Nevada, became a ghost town, and the factory shown in the movie is still shuttered, although the gypsum mine has since re-opened and there are about two dozen people living in Empire.)

Fran is widowed and has nothing to tether her to Empire, including, it would appear, no real ties to friends nearby, so she buys a van, refits it for nomad life, and hits the road, starting out by working at an Amazon warehouse for her first seasonal job, then connecting with a group of nomads who teach her a little about the lifestyle and offer some tips. Many of these wanderers are real vandwellers from the book – Swankie, Linda, and the evangelist of the vandwelling lifestyle, Bob Wells, whose history of failing to pay child support is not mentioned in the story. One who isn’t is David, played by David Strathairn, whose voice would give him away even if you didn’t recognize him through his unkempt hair and white beard. He’s smitten with Fern, and the two run into each other multiple times, with David trying to convince Fern to come along with him and, eventually, to join him when he decides to give up van life and settle down with his son’s family.

Director Chloe Zhao’s previous feature, The Rider, also used non-actors in most of its roles, with its protagonist playing himself, so she’s mining some familiar ground here, but it is hard to imagine this movie without McDormand in it. She is utterly essential to this film, not her story specifically but the way she inhabits this niche in our world and makes it entirely plausible that she is, in fact, Fern, a woman abandoned by fortune who is trying to avoid going over the cliff. Her portrayal of an anguished, grieving person looks so effortless and so delicate that it reminds me of when extremely athletic players (often players of color) are accused of showing too little effort when the truth is that they’re just that talented.

Zhao also films this in a way that empathizes with the vandwellers without patronizing or mocking them. This could easily be misery porn, or a screed about our broken economic system (especially around health care), or a sort of weird cautionary tale about how people end up living out of their cars. Instead, Zhao presents this world without judgment, giving us the people in it as they are, so that their humanity is at the heart of the film, not their choices, and not their misfortune.

Nomadland is also frequently gorgeous as Zhao gives us soaring landscapes across the American West and some close shots of forests or other natural vistas, including the view from what I presume was supposed to be Fern’s old house, now abandoned but still intact. The film doesn’t romanticize the vandwelling life, but there’s a certain romance in the idea of getting in a van or an RV and just driving across these great unpopulated swaths of land, without so much as a destination in mind, although I find it hard to fathom doing that alone – and that’s without the added concerns that a woman would have making the same sort of journeys by herself.

Right now, Nomadland is my #1 movie from 2020, and my wife’s as well. I’ll go out on the shortest of limbs to say it’s going to take at least four nominations at the Oscars – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Cinematography – and I can at least see why it’s the favorite to win the first one, because it’s a great movie and, in a roundabout way, speaks to the economic uncertainty of modern American life. It also gives Zhao an excellent chance to become the second woman and the first woman of color to win Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow won in 2010 for The Hurt Locker). We should see two women nominated in that category in the same year, with at least one of Regina King (One Night in Miami) and Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman) joining Zhao, which would be a first, although knowing the Academy’s history I wouldn’t be shocked to see them screw this up too and give one nod to, say, Aaron Sorkin instead.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ February 5, 2021
→ By

The White Tiger (film).

Aravind Aviga’s first novel, The White Tiger, won the Booker Prize in 2008 for its grim, satirical look at the pernicious effects of caste and economic discrimination in India, just as the country was working to change its global image to that of a more modern society. (As if modern societies were somehow free of this sort of discrimination.) It seemed perfectly suited to an adaptation for the screen but it took over ten years for filming to begin, and the movie finally saw the light of day this winter, appearing on Netflix in January. I loved the book, and the film, which is very faithful to the original text, is also great, with some reservations.

The White Tiger tells the story of Balram, a poor child in the state of Rajasthan, who realizes early on that there’s no escape from the underclass if you’re not out for yourself, and the promise of upward mobility is a fiction for people like him. He manipulates his way into a job as a chauffeur for Ashok, the son of the village’s wealthy landlord, known just as “The Stork.” He gets the job, and tries to ensure his job security, by being obsequious to his bosses no matter the insults or abuse they throw at him, until one night, Ashok’s wife, Pinky, has an accident while driving, and they make Balram take responsibility. After that, the gloves are off, and Balram’s loyalty to himself takes priority over his loyalty to his employers. Yet Balram is no saint, and rationalizes away some of his own worst behaviors even before the accident, arguing that this is India and it’s every man for himself.

Balram is played by Adarsh Gourav in his first film role, and he’s spectacular. Balram narrates the book and the movie, and the film just wouldn’t work without the right actor in that role. The character has show many faces in the story – among them simpering, wounded, and righteously angry – and make it credible that they’d all come from the same human. He’s at his best in the moments when Ashok and his family turn on him and he realizes they view him as somewhere between hired help and farm animal.  Priyanka Chopra helped the film become reality and served as executive producer; she also appears as Pinky, playing her as an Indian woman who grew up in the United States and has more worldly values, including viewing Balram as, at least, an actual person, in contrast to her husband or, worse, her father-in-law. Her character probably has the most depth after Balram’s, but I’ve never found Chopra that convincing as an actress (in English language works, though), and she’s pretty stiff in this role.

The framing device for the film feels somewhat extraneous. As the film opens, we see Balram, grown up, at the head of his own business, as he writes a letter to then-Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, bragging about his life story, praising the Chinese economy, and asking for a meeting. It’s mostly just padding, and it spoils a few plot points if you’re watching carefully. I also would have preferred not to see the successful Balram until he reached that point in the story.

Gourav really does drive the film. Balram is a great character, an antihero inhabiting a story that usually provides us with a simple, easy to cheer for protagonist, like some sort of modern Horatio Alger tale. Instead, Aviga’s story reveals layers of cunning and venality in Balram as a way of indicting the hollowness of India’s economic miracle, and exposing how income inequality might replace the caste system as an obstacle to upward mobility in class or just personal wealth. I suppose that actually makes it a lot like the United States, just not in the way they intended.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 30, 2021
→ By

One Night in Miami.

One Night in Miami marks the directorial debut of Oscar-winning actress Regina King, and seems set to earn a passel of nominations, including one for King and one for Leslie Odom, Jr., the current favorite to win Best Supporting Actor. It’s originally a play by Kemp Powers, but King expands the zone here to avoid the often claustrophobic sense we can get when scripts move from stage to screen, the result gives the four lead actors room not just to breathe but to fill out their roles as four towering figures in Black history. (It’s available on Amazon Prime.)

The night in question is February 25th, 1964, when Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston at the Hampton House in Miami, a significant upset at the time that was followed ten days later by Clay’s announcement that he had joined the Nation of Islam and would thenceforth be known as Muhammad Ali. The script brings together Clay/Ali (Eli Goree), Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), singer-songwriter Sam Cooke (Odom Jr.), and NFL star Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), who had just rushed for a record 1863 yards and would later lead the Browns to the NFL championship that December. The four men engage in a wide-ranging and often contentious conversation about the civil rights struggle, their roles in it, and what responsibilities they might have given their platforms.

The script is talky, like most plays, but with four lead characters and multiple side characters appearing (two played by actors from The Wire), it doesn’t feel so much like you’re watching a play on screen, and King’s direction – particularly the shifting camera angles – gives the audience more the sense of being in the room while the characters are talking. The dialogue is quick, alternating between banter and more serious philosophical commentary (as well as some insults), so the pace only lags when we get one of the four men away from the others. And all four of these men deliver performances that would be strong enough to lead the film if there weren’t three other guys doing the same thing.

Odom, Jr., is masterful as Sam Cooke, the least militant man in the room by a mile, who comes under fire from the other men for their perception that he’s selling out, as an artist and as a Black man, for money and fame, although he has a rejoinder to the argument and the debate circles onward. All four men get their fair share of dialogue, but Malcolm X is probably the next most important character to the plot, and Ben-Adir is just as good as Odom Jr. – perhaps aided by the makeup, hair, and glasses that make him a reasonable likeness for the man he’s portraying, but also because his character might have the most emotional range of the four. Ben-Adir has to give us Malcolm X the confident firebrand, and Malcolm X the ordinary human, with large ambitions and deep self-doubts. And his character is the straw that stirs the drink of this particular conversation (which did really happen, although we don’t know what was discussed).

The four men are certainly more complicated than the script allows, and in some ways it makes Cooke and Brown seem more heroic than they were or are. Cooke had multiple issues with women and was killed in highly dubious circumstances. Brown’s history of violence against women and men was well-documented thirty-plus years ago, before the cultural awareness of domestic violence was a fraction of what it is today. If you knew nothing of Brown before watching One Night in Miami, you’d think he was a pretty cool cat, but this is a decidedly one-sided view of a man with a long history of domestic violence allegations.

King has done something quite marvelous here by making a stage play feel less like a stage play than just about any recent film I’ve seen that made the same shift to the big screen. The film hums along, and there’s so much good dialogue here that I’d like to watch it again to see if I missed anything – and I say that as someone who almost never re-watches films, and certainly not twice in quick succession. Much of the praise for Onie Night in Miami might be because the film and its subject are important and timely, but don’t lose sight of the fact that this is a good story, well-acted and well-told, regardless of the moment in which it appears.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ November 16, 2020
→ By

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.

Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm can’t match the shock value of the original Borat film, since we already know the deal and that Sacha Baron Cohen is willing to do anything for the sake of the gag, but I think in the end it’s actually funnier for it. There are still a few moments here where he and his new co-star, the Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova, go too far with a joke, but Cohen seems to have also realized that the real staying power of the original was that he could get the unwitting subjects to go along with him and show their worst selves on camera – which said more about America than it did about his fictionalized Kazakhstan.

After some early setup, the once-disgraced Borat returns to America on a second mission for the Kazakh government, this time to deliver a bribe to a high-ranking U.S. official – eventually settling on Mike Pence. He’s joined after some silly plot contrivances by his daughter Tutar (Bakalova), whom he decides to “offer” to Pence as a bribe, traveling across the southern United States and speaking with many ordinary Americans and some not-very-ordinary ones, most of whom come off far worse for the encounter. He gets a bakery employee to write “Jews will not replace us” on a cake, goes into a “pregnancy crisis center” with Tutar, and spends several days living with a pair of QAnon believers. He also meets a very kind and open-minded Jewish woman after he walks in a synagogue dressed as a giant pile of Jewish stereotypes, and hires a babysitter for Tutar who turns out to be the heart of the film and so popular with fans that a GoFundMe started by her pastor has raised over $180,000.

There are many laugh-out-loud moments in Borat 2, most of which come when one of Cohen’s jokes lands and the Americans he’s mocking do more or less what he’d hoped they would do. You’ve probably heard about the Rudy Giuliani scene – in which he doesn’t acquit himself well, at all, despite his later protestations to the contrary – but that’s not even among the top half-dozen scenes in the film for humor or impact. Borat takes Tutar to a Houston plastic surgeon, who takes the bait and describes how a “Jewish” nose would look by drawing the shape in the air – someone who’s highly educated and likely deals with high-income customers is completely comfortable trafficking in anti-Semitism. There’s a long setup to get to the pregnancy crisis center, but the result is a combination of old-school sitcom misunderstanding and the most cringey behavior imaginable by the pastor at the facility, who clearly has no concern at all for Tutar’s well-being.

Some of the jokes don’t land, though. There’s a menstruation joke that’s just about grossing out some Southern snobs at a dinner for debutantes, which is both unfunny and useless at exposing their elitism or the anachronistic nature of the whole practice. The end of the Giuliani sequence doesn’t really work either. It’s actually funnier to watch Cohen try to avoid fans who recognize him on the street in Texas than to watch those scenes or the drawn-out way in which he tries to reunite with Tutar after she runs away (thanks to the babysitter, who is beyond patient in explaining things to Tutar, including that women in the United States have actual rights).

Nothing is so damning as how easily many white Americans in this film show themselves to be racist or anti-Semitic, even when they know full well they’re being recorded, much as the South Carolina frat boys did near the end of the first Borat when they wished slavery still existed. The plastic surgeon is unapologetic for his comments on “Jewish noses” or his lecherous comments towards Tutar. I don’t think the bakery employee or the propane salesman who says his tank can wipe out a whole van of Roma people have said anything publicly or all the people singing along with the racist lyrics of “Country Steve.” And what would they say? This is who they are, and this is who we are. All Cohen had to do was turn his cameras on Americans and let us do the work.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,