Tag: Borat

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick synopsis: A group of 20 year-olds party in a mansion during a hurricane and decide to play a party game. The bodies start piling up, as does the tension.

Occasionally a film completely dies because of the ending. My hatred for Unfriended and The Gallows partly comes from how much they fucked up the final minutes of their respective runtimes (or in the case of Unfriended, the final 2 seconds). This did the opposite, the final minute or so of this film completely saved it. Before that, I enjoyed it, but it was slightly frustrating and felt kind of unfocused.

The ending changes everything. It does what an ending like this should do. It recontextualises everything that happened before and makes you want to watch it again. It does have the slight downside of turning it slightly into a farce, but it works. The audience in the screen I was at seemed to enjoy it, and there was a delightful 10 second period where everybody in the audience knew it was happening and was just waiting with bated breath. Before that, it is an enjoyable watch, don’t get me wrong. It’s funny, looks great, and is full of good performances.

On the subject of performances, a lot of people have highlighted Rachel Sennott, making a point to talk about how good her performance is. It’s…..alright I guess. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it didn’t really stand out to me. In my head when I try to recall it, for some reason I can’t picture her performance, instead I imagine all her scenes playing out the same, but with her replaced with Jessica Knappett. To me, the real highlight was Maria Bakalova. She graced our screen in the Borat sequel a few years ago, you know, when COVID was around and people in America were being openly racist to the point where it looked a bit violent and scary, thank god that’s not the case anymore. Here, she shows that her performance in that was not a fluke, she is, in fact, very talented, just as much in scripted as she was in the more improvised setting of Borat.

The other performances are good, and almost everybody comes out looking good. I think it helps that outside of Bakalova, Lee Pace, and Pete Davidson, I didn’t really know the performers in this. They were all fresh talents to me which allowed me to go in without preconceptions about who they are. Pace and Bakalova are talented enough to overcome them anyway, Davidson? Still a little unsure. I only know him as a performer through brief glimpses of SNL sketches I’ve come across, so I don’t know enough to judge him fully but it really does seem like he’s just playing himself in this. There’s nothing in it that feels like a “performance”, instead just feels like they filmed him on set.

It’s nice to see gay representation on screen, especially this openly. Normally it’s reduced to “they shared a look”, “oh look, they alluded to something” so they can get plausible deniability (or edit it for certain markets). This is a film that’s open with sexuality, and I can’t help but feel that part of that is because the director (Halina Reijn) isn’t American, she’s Dutch, which means she doesn’t have the same puritanical attitude to sex as an American director would. Also, when she shows lesbian physical affection on screen she doesn’t do it for a male gaze, which makes it seem more real and less “performative”, there’s genuine affection in the physicality here. This is her first English-language feature that she’s directed, when I heard that I assumed she had a long career in Dutch cinema. This is the work of someone who is comfortable behind a camera and knows the best way to express a script. But she’s only directed two films before this, and one of them was a short (For The Birds). That astounds me, I really hope this film is a success and it leads to a long career for her, if she’s this good now, I want to see what she’ll be like 3 films down the line.

The look for this is unique, the darkness combined with the neon lights gives the whole thing a slight “drunken party” vibe. The music also helps add to this. Very female-fronted rap and dance. Essentially it’s Frat-House Horror, the type of film you watch with a group of friends while drunk and high.

On that note, if EVER a film was crying out for some Ashnikko it’s this, I mean, Charli XCX is great too, but she’s not giving us lyrics like “you better stock up on tissues, jacking off to all my pictures”. That kind of open sexuality and party vibes would suit this film perfectly. It’s a minor gripe I know, but it feels so obvious that I have to say it.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020)

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Well this was a shock. The character of Borat was thought to be dead, and for good reason; how can you trick someone when everybody knows who you are? Plus, what would it have to say? Didn’t it say everything it needed to say in the first movie?

So it was a genuine shock when they announced this film, not that it was being done, but that it had already been completed and was being released in a few weeks time. I love a surprise release, and they haven’t come more surprising than this.

What’s a bigger surprise is how easy it was for him to get people to say some really stupid shit. The character may be from Kazakhstan but the film is very reminiscent of Russia, in that it’s funny, until it very suddenly definitely isn’t. And it happens very quickly when he goes into a shop and asks whether one of the gas they sell will kill gypsys. The shop assistant replies that he needs to get the bigger one.

It gets much worse, with a scene late on in the film where he gets a festival full of people to sing that journalists should be executed, after choosing between that or injecting them with COVID. Oh yeah, this film mentions COVID, and brilliantly. COVID is the first pandemic in the age of mass misinformation, and the stuff that people say in this is shocking, but also not unexpected. Maybe that’s a weakness. A few years ago, someone saying that the leader of the opposition in America created a disease in China and then unleashed it on the world just to take down the president would seem insane. Today it’s actually US government policy. So how can it be possible to shock and surprise when stupidity and hate is the default setting of half the population?

Enter Rudy Giuliani, a guy who led New York through the aftermath of 9/11, and has since destroyed his reputation with, well just his general personality, although launching a fundraiser and asking guests to donate $9.11 probably didn’t help. In this film it’s not so much what he says, but what he does, he goes to a hotel room of young woman who is interviewing him, lays on her bed, and then he, well he fluffs himself. It’s incredibly creepy and is filmed in almost haunting silence, like you’re watching a slow-motion disaster. This was huge news, in that it made the actual news. On the downside this meant you knew it was going to happen, on the upside it means that there’s a slight chance (very slight) that Borat decided the election, weird.

What’s also weird is that this actually has a good plot(brilliant segue there, fucking seamless). It acknowledges the first film, and focuses on Borat living in shame and Kazakhstan being ashamed of him (which is very based in reality considering their reaction to the film), which causes him to have to go in disguise for this, travelling US with his daughter. Oh yeah, he has a daughter (Tutar, played expertly by Maria Bakalova), and truth be told she provides some of the most shocking moments. Not only the aforementioned Rudy moment, but she swallows a plastic baby from top of a cupcake and goes to get an abortion, saying her dad put it inside her. To which the doctor tries to talk her out of having an abortion because America.

She also provides a lot of the emotional weight. Particularly when a babysitter (Jeanise Jones), is genuinely shocked and tries her best to help Tutar. She’s not scripted, her initial behaviour was to help this poor woman, that’s her genuine human nature, and it’s wonderful to see it in this film. Obviously people agree, as they raised $150,000 for her. I think that’s thee important message of this film, and I don’t know where it was intentional or not. But when rich white guys are dicks to people, there will always be others there who are looking to help. Whether it’s a black babysitter who is concerned for Tutar, a young white girl who calls her own father out on being a creepy bastard, there will always be kindness in the world, you just need to find it. There’s a moment where Borat goes to commit suicide by hugging a Jew (it makes sense in context) and ends up having a beautiful conversation with a holocaust survivor. Keep in mind he enters the synagogue dressed in what can only be described as “Jewface”, dressed head to toe in hate. And this woman, who has seen what this hate leads to, she approaches him without hesitation and gives him a hug. It’s stunningly beautiful and incredibly heartwarming. Sacha Baron Cohen obviously thought the same as he actually broke character and told her that he was just playing a character.

The most beautiful moment comes at the very end, and I’m not entirely sure if it’s Sacha Baron Cohen as himself, or as Borat. He tells Tutar (or Maria), “you were amazing”. It makes sense in the film to be said by Borat, but he says it in Hebrew, which makes me think it was Cohen. It’s…..it’s beautiful. And weirdly, that’s what I’ll remember from this film, the love. And I NEVER thought I’d say that coming into this.