Completely Unnecessary

It has been widely observed that I can’t enjoy movies because I insist on analyzing them. This is not true. For instance, my favorite part of Transformers was about a four frame cut of two elderly Qatarian men. They looked on blithely as seven marines were chased, guns blazing, by an enormous, scorpion robot. They both had a look that said, “Eh, I’ve seen worse.”

As usual, I laughed alone. But I did enjoy myself.

Over at The Stranger, Transformers was described as “retarded Republican-scented fascism porn”. Maybe not, but were some definite smacks of gung-ho Americanism.

Most notably - Bumblebee. All the Autobots were good ol’ fashioned GM American cars, but they beat it a bit over the head with Bumblebee. In the cartoon he was a VW Bug, but that kind of national socialist bullcrap doesn’t sit so well with America, so he’s a Camero instead. Not only that, but he actually attacks a yellow bug sitting next to him that… whatisname is maybe going to buy. American automotive engineering is aggressively superior to that of other nations.

It’s not.

But it is in this movie - there are alien robots, anything could happen.

Second - aliens attack Earth and AGAIN they’re fighting in the southwestern desert. It’s almost as if that’s where most of our ‘undesirables’ turn up. What with immigration reform being a hot topic the last few years, I can’t imagine why they’d make a movie about Americans fighting aliens in the southwest.

That being said - this movie is a bit different because the battles take place in podunk towns. I can’t remember where they said it was occurring (somewhere in Nevada?), but it sure wasn’t LA or New York, the two usual suspects for disaster fiction. Message = terrorism/immigration can happen anywhere.

A brief aside: Can John Turturro please be in every movie? Thanks.

I’m less excited about this project than I was as it was running through my head in the shower this morning. Work, class and a glass or two of wine will do that to you. Also, I’ve been reading Wonkette’s live blogging of the CNN/YouTube/Morons debate and I feel like writing in bullets instead of complete thoughts.

Which brings us to my last point, which is: I don’t consider myself hugely affected by September 11th. I wasn’t in NYC, I don’t know anyone who was directly affected - I’d feel kind of cheap to say that it ‘touched my life’. That being said (and minor spoilers, I guess), during the big fight Starscream takes Optimus Prime through a skyscraper. He’s in complete plane mode, so it’s basically a jet driving straight through a skyscraper. I was pretty upset by that image, actually. I thought it was tacky, at best. Worse, if they were using it intentionally, which they probably were. I don’t think too many Americans would have missed that one.

So Republican fasioporn? A bit. There were some complexities - for instance the bad guys were almost uniformly instruments of war. Then again, (spoilers if you’re dumb!) they were defeated by the American Army and not by the other aliens. Rah America.

It was still overly long and kind of crappy (sorry Paul - I don’t think he reads this). Seriously, cut some stuff, Mr. Editor! I do not need to watch people hunt for an object in a bedroom for half an hour! Yes, yes, it yielded numerous masturbation jokes. He he. Hilarious. Cut to the action.

Vaguely Related

• Things That Exist
• Things I’ve Been Interacting With Lately

Last blog today. I swear. I didn’t want to read about media regulation anyway.

So apparently, this exists. Here’s the poster! And here’s a still:

Also, here are some excerpts from the moviefone website:

There was a time when Lazarus (SAMUEL L. JACKSON) played the blues; a time he got Bojo’s Juke Joint shakin’ back in the day….

The God-fearing, middle-aged black man quickly learns that the young white woman he’s nursing back to health is none other than the town tramp from the small Tennessee town where they live…Abused as a child and abandoned by her mother, Rae is used by just about every man in the phone book…

Refusing to know her in the biblical sense, Lazarus decides to cure Rae of her wicked ways – and vent some unresolved male vengeance of his own. He chains her to his radiator, justifying his unorthodox methods with quoted scripture… Unleashing Rae emotionally, Lazarus unchains his heart, finding love again in Angela (S. EPATHA MERKERSON). By saving Rae, he frees himself.

And the trailer, which you have to watch before we can proceed and which I’m having trouble embedding.

I don’t even know where to start with this movie, though I should probably figure it out before I write my thesis on it next year. Things that come to mind, just off the top of my head:

• No pants on Christina Ricci at any point
• The name Lazarus
• Yet another appearance by the ‘magical black man’! (I mean Eko was killed off on LOST, so…)
• “Everything is Hotter Down South” as the tagline
• The racial and sexual double entendres in the title
• Curing a woman of her sluttishness
• Chaining a woman against her will in your home
• The comedic holds in the trailer
• Moms cause sluttishness!
• That Christina Ricci still has not gained any weight

Shit, I can’t even do this today. I’m supposed to be napping, but now I’m not going to be able to sleep because this movie is so horrific and wonderful. Plus, I’m going to need the time to work “blackfemreligiousploitation” into popular vernacular.

Vaguely Related

• Colorado Initiative Would Grant Personhood to Embryos
• You Think Gay Pride, Bimbo

I haven’t seen the Borat movie yet, but everyone says it’s just hilarious. I’m sure I’ll see it soon. Truth be told, however, I’ve always had a bit of trouble with the Borat character. Whereas Ali G is portrayed as uneducated, he’s also a poser, not to mention from a familiar culture. It’s easy to see Ali G for what he is. Similarly, Cohen’s Bruno character (my favorite, actually) is a broad gay stereotype, largely rendered innocuous by the wallop he delivers to his vacuous and pretentious (or homophobic) victims.

The Borat character, however, ‘comes’ from a culture with which few of the viewers are familiar. It allows Cohen to play with a wide range of stereotypes for his victims, but the depictions of Kazakhs has always made me a little uncomfortable. For instance, Kazakhs look nothing like Borat. Nor do they act anything like him, I’d be willing to bet. And while one could claim it’s all in good fun, blackface used to be in good fun, too…

From what I understand, the supposed Kazakh bits are mostly for filler, and the meat of the film is taking racist/homophobic/etc Americans to task. So is my comparison of Borat to blackface a bit of an overreaction? Probably, but maybe we should ask the people of Glod, the Romanian town where Cohen filmed the scenes of his “hometown.”

Mr Tudorache, a deeply religious grandfather who lost his arm in an accident, was one of those who feels most humiliated. For one scene, a rubber sex toy in the shape of a fist was attached to the stump of his missing arm - but he had no idea what it was…

He invited us into his humble home and brought out the best food and drink his family had. Visibly disturbed, he said shakily: ‘Someone from the council said these Americans need a man with no arm for some scenes. I said yes but I never imagined the whole country, or even the whole world, will see me in the cinemas ridiculed in this way. This is disgusting.

‘Our region is very poor, and everyone is trying hard to get out of this misery. It is outrageous to exploit people’s misfortune like this to laugh at them.

According to the story in the Daily Mail, the villagers were only paid a pittance for their work in the film, which they though was either an art piece or documentary. The man who’s house was used as Borat’s said,

‘It was very uncomfortable at the end and there was animal manure all over our home. We endured it because we are poor and badly needed the money, but now we realise we were cheated and taken advantage of in the worst way.

‘All those things they said about us in the film are terribly humiliating. They said we drink horse urine and sleep with our own kin. You say it’s comedy, but how can someone laugh at that?‘

Well put.

If these stories are true, it’s shameful for Cohen et al to treat these people in such a fashion. It’s one thing to get frat boys drunk and let them tie their own nooses, it’s quite another to select people specifically because of their poverty, and then mislead them and rip them off. It’s exceedingly poor form, and the larger cultural disregard is what has always bothered me about the Borat character in the first place.

Links:
Woman selling tomatoes at Zelyony Bazaar in Almaty, south eastern Kazakhstan (Photographer: Anthony Plummer) [Lonely Planet]
Blackface Pic [Tremors Rockabilly]
Borat Film ‘Tricked’ Poor Village Actors [Daily Mail]

Vaguely Related

• Transformers: A Film Analysis (of sorts)
• Things That Exist

I have a summer cold, which is, of course, the worst kind of cold to have.

On the plus side, now I’m really glad that I didn’t bother going down to Lollapalooza volunteering this week. As it was about 110 degrees each day, I didn’t much feel like being out in it for 18 hours just for concert tickets I kind of wanted.

On another plus side, my cold has also justified the watching of both Pretty in Pink and now Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I haven’t seen the latter since I was eight, and it’s actually better than I remember; I thought it was horrible at Jenny Lefier’s birthday party. In the last scene, Bill and Ted were revered in the future to some power ballad. Strange.

On the final plus side, as always, my cold has made my voice drop conspicuously. I could sing Pretty in Pink along with Psychedelic Furs with no problem.

Vaguely Related

• Transformers: A Film Analysis (of sorts)
• Things That Exist

So, I took the day off work today, and spent the early morning (for some reason I still felt the need to get up at 7am) watching Back to the Future. It’s one of my favorite movies anyway, but it got vaulted to new status today because of something I’ve never noticed before.

When Doc uses the remote control to drive the time machine at the beginning of the movie, they put the the remote control in the foreground and really ask you to focus on it. I think this is because Robert Zemeckis doesn’t want you to look in the car and realize that there is a man in a dog suit behind the steering wheel. He’s seriously looking out thru the dog’s mouth. I rewound that a couple times.

Completely changing tack: I was thinking about a conversation from about a year ago that actually I wasn’t even part of. Someone, I forget who, had a conversation with a girl who had apparently dated an ex-boyfriend of mine after I’d dated him. My name came up in the conversation, and this girl remarks “Oh, Brie. She hated me for that!” Not only did I have no idea that this chick dated my ex, but I also had no idea who she was. Still don’t. And for the record, I can’t really imagine me hating a chick for dating a guy I wasn’t anymore. All my exes are fair game ladies (if you’re ready to take one for the team). Clearly, she was still thinking about this enough a year or two later to say it to my friend. I’m one of those people who feels guilty for stupid, foot-so-far-down-my-throat-it’s-threatening-to-come-out-my-ass moments years after the fact. It occurs to me that the people I feel so bad about offending may not remember the incident, or even me. That makes me feel good enough that I’ll probably go out an completely embarrass myself several times tonight.

The most random memories pop up in my head. Right now, I’m vividly recalling drinking a box of wine that cost approximately $4.00 with this guy Wayne in Canberra (Wayne and I spent most of our three day trip on the wrong side of that box of wine). We then proceeded out with a big group of people to a Canberra nightclub, located like most Canberra scenes in a mini-mall. Wayne got absolutely blind, and we got separated from the group, wandered into a variety of bars before finding our friends at the very same mini-mall club at which we’d started. Dancing ensued and some random guy started grinding on me, and I amused my group of friends by making faces he couldn’t see. I forget the kid’s name now, but he thought we were really hitting it off. We weren’t. Then we went outside and I performed an ill-advised cartwheel, ripping my skirt straight up the back. In case you wondering, I just realized I’m wearing said skirt (dutifully repaired along the seam), hence the memory apparently. Also, cartwheels in skirts, no matter what your inebriated and hopeful brain might tell you, are rarely a good idea.

Vaguely Related

• Transformers: A Film Analysis (of sorts)
• Things That Exist