Because it’s Thanksgiving weekend stateside, I’m giving everyone yet another reason to be thankful: two of my Top Movies of the Decade instead of the usual one!
#18) Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
I don’t know for certain if Borat is truly listworthy but I don’t know it’s not either which speaks to what’s most compelling about the movie. Writer-star Sacha Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles create a mockumentary that makes it very difficult to tell when they’re playing it for real and when it’s all just stupendously staged and scripted. While many in the audience walked out shaking their heads about stupid, ignorant, racist and homophobic Americans, just as many couldn’t believe how gracious and tolerant most of Borat’s victims were.
The naked wrestling alone makes me stop and watch a little bit of the movie whenever I come across it not so much for the ass-in-face moments but for the genital blackout effect which hangs down to Borat’s knees, suggesting he’s swinging some serious pipe. It’s that attention to the… ahhh.. little details that ultimately pushes Borat up onto the best of list and marks Cohen as a comedic heavyweight. Let’s hope this move and not his follow-up, Brüno, proves to be the rule not the exception.
#17) Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005)
Another colon titled movie, this one a film within a film within an adaptation of an unfilmable novel. It nails the essence of the book which sets out as an autobiography but whose narrator gets sidetracked, waylaid and interrupted to such a degree that it ends at the moment of his birth. The filming of the film is similarly ridden off the rails due to actor willfulness and an overall lack of direction.
Starring my favourite insufferable Britcomic, Steve Coogan, he plays himself; an insufferably neurotic actor with the nominal lead of the movie who hasn’t bothered to read the novel and slowly realizes that in fact Tristram Shandy is really a minor character in the proceedings. Confused? Yeah, it’s a difficult movie to explain on paper but is well worth a watch. Coogan’s interaction with his co-star, Rob Brydon, is truly a thing of beauty to behold.
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The filming of the film is similarly ridden off the rails due to actor willfulness and an overall lack of direction.
