i'm scared of borat.

look at him and his mustache. i don't know, but everything about his look, his voice, the trailers, and the fact that several people are calling it the funniest movie ever make me more skeptical and freaked out than ever before.

i'm afraid it's going to be just like the napoleon dynamite craze, where everyone talks like him, says "U.S. & A" way too much, and i want to gouge my eyes out with grapefruit spoons. the difference is, however, that unlike napoleon dyna-mighty-overrated, this movie is being critically acclaimed and compared to things that are actually smart, like dr. strangelove. that just makes my tummy do more somersaults.

i like funny things. but overdone accents and funny hair do not guarantee laugh from this snobber, err, i mean blogger.

now that i think of it, i have often wished that more people liked more comedies like the baxter or rubin & ed, but really, if it was this whirlwind when either of those movies were released/acknowledged by a cult following, i may have been skeptical as well. marketing campaigns could have easily made "uber-characters" out of either michael showalter or crispin glover.

really, that's my problem. this "goofy character with exaggerated features = legendary comedy" routine that the american public seems to eat up, create this iconography of, and completely commodify. it becomes unfunny and just trite then in my eyes. this makes this current example especially frightening because the whole basis of the movie seems to be making fun of how people think america is so great. by that logic, creating this dumber-than-thou character for americans to swallow whole without question only feeds into everything that is wrong with america in the first place, thereby exhibiting pro-america qualities in what on the surface attempts to be anti-american and subversive.

i love reviewing movies without going through all the effort of actually seeing them.

This entry was posted by chris, on Friday, November 03, 2006. You can leave your response.