Yesterday, for my birthday, my wife and I saw two flicks.
Moon
Easily the best movie I’ve seen in years. While there are plenty of hat-tips to 2001, Moon is its own movie. Sam Rockwell plays a man (also named “Sam”) who is coming to the end of his 3-year contract managing a H3 mining station on the moon. It’s a solo operation, so he’s been alone for 3 years and is looking forward to returning home to his wife and a 2.5 year-old daughter, whom he’s never met.
I don’t want to give away too much of the plot in this, so I’ll just say some general things about the movie. Rockwell should be nominated for best actor. It’s one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. He’s completely believable. You feel everything he’s feeling and you care deeply for the character, largely due to his vulnerable execution of the role. The script gives him an extremely dynamic range to cover and he does it deftly. You never catch him acting.
You don’t have to be a sci-fi fan to appreciate this movie. It’s a character-driven story (as all truly good sci-fi is), and the tight writing combined with Rockwell’s skillful acting will draw you in. The special effects, while good, are just support for the story—you don’t really notice them, you simply believe Sam is really living on the moon.
The music was another notable piece to this puzzle. Unique and fresh, the soundtrack pulls you down emotional corridors with subtle ease.
I hope you get a chance to see this movie before it’s out of the theatres. Apart from some language, it’s appropriate for teens and up.
Bruno, on the other hand, isn’t really appropriate for anyone. That’s the other movie we saw yesterday.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m one of the world’s biggest Sacha Baron Cohen fans. He was the funniest part of Taladaga Nights and is my favorite voice (Julian) in Madagascar. As a former professional stage actor, I marvel at his ability to stay in character when he’s improving with people who have no idea he’s an actor. Borat was brilliant, but Borat also had a heart to it. You cared about and sympathized with the main character. He was naive and driven and you cheered for him. The comedy Cohen creates with unsuspecting people is remarkable—the fact that he can string those unscripted events into a 3-act story is a mark of just how smart the guy is; which is why I was largely disappointed in Bruno.
I feel like Bruno was a waste of Cohen’s brilliance, and that it was a step backwards from Borat. I would put Bruno more in line with Jackass; a series of offensive hijinks with no real connective thread. Cohen suffered from “sequelitis” apparently, having to go further than he went with Borat, and doing it in desperation. So desperate, in fact, that there’s a good 30 seconds of a tight shot of his manhood swinging in slow motion to a disco beat. Yes, people laughed in the theatre, but it was largely because we all knew we just shouldn’t be seeing something like that.
And I did laugh a lot in this movie. Cohen, by being so absurd, brings out some of the worst in people who are blind to the fact that they’re being set up in a film. The most difficult scene for me to watch was not one of the many over-the-top explicitly gay scenes, but one in which Bruno is interviewing parents of infant models. He’s asking them what they would and would not allow their baby to do to get the part. One parent agrees to let her toddler have liposuction to lose ten of her thirty pounds before the shoot. The same woman is told her baby got the part, and the woman is thrilled. Bruno then tells her that her daughter will be dressed as an SS officer, pushing another Jewish baby in a wheelbarrow into a gas oven. The woman says, “gas oven?” somewhat suspect, Bruno says, “Yes! Isn’t it wonderful? How do you feel?” to which she replies, “I’m just so glad we got the part!” The father of another child was asked, “is your baby OK with handling lit phosphorous?” Dad: “Yes.” Bruno: “Does he like it?” Dad: “He loves it.”
Remember, these are real people who don’t know they’re being used for this movie. I’m sure the lawsuits will follow, just like they did for Borat, and they’ll all be thrown out, just like they were for Borat, but one of Cohen’s goals in these movies is to show America its own absurdities, prejudices, and biases. He succeeds in many ways. Another classic example of this is when he invites Paula Abdul to his rented house for an interview. She believes him to be a star from Austria who is doing a celebrity interview show in America. When she gets there, there is no furniture, so Bruno invites her to sit on one of the Mexicans who was formerly cleaning the pool. There are 3 mexicans on hands and knees, acting as furniture for Bruno and Paula to sit on. Paula is clearly confused, but she actually sits on one of the men and answers Bruno’s questions about her humanitarian efforts. In a moment of luscious irony, she says, “helping others is the air that I breathe, the water I drink,” while she’s sitting on a Mexican pool cleaner and reaching for a glass of water on the back of another mexican, who is serving as a coffee table.
These are the moments I love Cohen for. However, the graphic sexual deviancy in this film detracted from the sparser social commentary. Yes, I get that he’s showing America’s intolerance for homosexuality and some ridiculous sexual perversion, but there are things, as a culture, that I think we would be wise to be shocked by. After a focus group is conducted to watch Bruno’s pilot for his new celebrity interview TV show, which is (of course) ridiculously offensive and lewd, one of the attendees says something to the effect of, “whoever made that has no moral compass,” I tend to agree. Even though I know Cohen grew up in an orthodox Jewish home, and himself professes Judaism, he doesn’t seem to let those moral teachings affect his art.
My $.02
by swan
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