New today:
The Broke Down – I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go on (Merge)
Street Date: Jan. 23, 2007
Borat Movie: The New Yorker Festival Sneak Preview
I saw the Borat Movie on Saturday as part of the New Yorker Festival and it was really funny. The audience absolutely loved it and I thought it was great too, but unfortunately I had seen both trailers and they do give away quite a few of the best scenes. So, my advice to you is, don’t watch the trailers I just linked to, you’ll probably enjoy the movie more. As for the movie itself, it details Borat’s cross country journey to meet his new American love, Pamela Anderson (who is Canadian, ironically). SPOILER ALERT: The most outrageous scene in the movie is surely Borat’s naked fight and ensuing chase with his producer, Azamat Bagatov, played by Ken Davitian. The other scene which left me scratching my head was Borat’s attempted Kazahkstani marriage/kidnapping of Pamela Anderson. My cousin believed she had to have been in on it, but I thought the scene looked too authentic and that she couldn’t have faked it acted it so well. A little googling, and I wasn’t able to confirm her complicity, but I did find out that Borat crashed her dog’s wedding in 2005. So either she was in on it, and is a great actor, or she wasn’t in on it, and she just has a very bad memory. More than likely, she was in on it, because if it was real, it probably would have made the news.
As a footnote, they were really anal about not having people take pictures at the screening, so they made everyone check their cell phones. So, I have this LG phone with a crappy little camera on it and I dutifully check it at the “phone check.” What they didn’t ask though, was for people to check their cameras, so I carried my Canon into the theatre unaccosted. I didn’t take any photos or record the movie, but I just found it funny that they would go to so much trouble to get people to check devices which are not meant for filming, and then not ask for obvious things like cameras and video recorders.
As a footnote to my footnote, Aziz Ansari, Paul Scheer, and Rob Huebel were standing in line ahead of us (aka The Human Giant). I congratulated them on their recent success.