Change Your Image
afterwords
Reviews
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Hate Sacha. What a creep.
I was looking forward to this movie. I had high expectations because of positive reviews. I didn't realize how foul, vile, ugly and cruel, it was going to be (not all, but far too much of it). Look, I love the Daily Show. I think Stephen Colbert, Rob Corddry and John Stewart, Samantha Bee et al are awesome. But those characters poke as much fun at themselves as they do to their reporting subjects. I simply can't picture any of them violating someone's trust the way Sacha did when he was at the etiquette dinner. It's one thing to pretend to be a doofus, it's another to carry a bag of Sacha, I mean, poop, into a dinner. I mean, it's not cool. Then the prostitute shows up and he gets nasty with the hosts. What a horrible thing to do: shame on anybody who thinks they "deserved" it. Also, his depiction of Kazaks as virulently anti-semitic... a joke to Americans (why?)-- not to them. No, Borat is a testament to one's man self-righteousness, smug, smirking sense of superiority, an overrated creep with a vicious, callous, antisocial soul.
Joined for Life (2003)
Telling
This was a well-done piece, non-exploitative and personal.
The title is more apt than perhaps intended: there is no avoidance of the fact that one day, one of the girls may experience health issues which will also affect the other one. If one dies, the other cannot survive.
The same happened to the most-famous "Siamese Twins." The conflicting career ambitions make me want to cry.
One wants to be a dentist, the other a pilot. Frankly, neither can do either without the ultimate commitment from the other.
Kudos to their parents for making their world safe from intrusion... if only there was a way to give them full freedom in their future. But alas: in days gone by they might not have survived childbirth, and to be alive is a great gift. That they may be limited in what they do when they grow up is not the end of the world.