The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com Monday, November 6, 2006 - 5A Steamy 'Shortbus' looks past the sex By HYATT MICHAELS DailyArts Writer Though its rapid succession of graphically uncensored sex scenes will undoubtedly scare away the prudish audiences, director John Cameron Mitchell's' ("Hedwig and the Angry Shortbus Inch") provoc- At the State ative new film ATheater "Shortbus," is much more ThinkFilm than a run-on- the-mill raunchfest. It's a cinematic ode to post-Sept. 11 New York City - an homage created solely to push its audience toward seeing what's beyond the surface of things. Like Woody Allen''s "Manhat- tan," "Shortbus" uses backdrops of the famed city to complement sto- ries of incorrigible characters in love and lust. But while the former used romantic shots of the city's skyline as relief from the non-stop narcissism of its characters, "Short- bus" instead aggressively imposes an audience voyeurism, zooming in from the darkly drawn skies of an animated New York to the three- dimensional lives and sexcapades of a troubled group of 20 and 30- somethings. The stories we find aren't always written - or acted - perfectly. But there's something incorruptibly real, and ultimately moving, about the people we meet. Fitting, consid- ering many of the actors helped pen "Shortbus" with Mitchell. We meet the adorable Sophia, a sex therapist who's never had an orgasm. She befriends two of her clients, a gay couple with sexual issues of their own, and the three eventually end up in Shortbus, a pleasure palace where the sexually starved and bored come to chat, drink and solve problems by get- ting off. Of course, the most explicit scenes occur here, but with no gra- tuitousness. Despite a glimpse here and there of breasts, bare buttocks and stimulation, our attention is pretty much glued to Sophia and her journey into her new world. John Cameron Mitchell man- aged to stage tragedy and comedy incredibly well with his avant-garde musical "Hedwig and the Angry Itch" a few years ago, and he does so again with "Shortbus." The stories feature main characters struggling with deeper issues beneath their sexual dysfunctions, and they're 'Hedwig' director creates a new sort of sex ed. seamlessly pieced together, each convincingly doing justice to heart- break without neglecting its humor. And their discomforting resonance actually has less to do with sex than with the characters' surroundings - New York City. Mitchell never takes a clear position, but when a character reveals that she wants to leave the city because the rising cost of living after Sept. 11, deeper worries than sexual dissatisfaction are certainly implied. Coming to America WHY 'BORAT' ON FILM DOESN'T WORK AS POLITICAL SATIRE ByJEFFREY BLOOMER ManagingEditor Sacha Baron Cohen is a very smart man. Sure, he is as an entertainer, but for a moment let's pause in recognition of the man as an unparal- leled hellraiser of popular *k**C culture. Known to most as Ali G, or more recently Borat: as Borat, the wide-eyed Cultural Kazakh journalist who Learnins roams America coast to of America coast, Cohen has been a for Make force in television for some Benefit time. Now he's suddenly Glorious taken Hollywood by storm, Nation of and if his comfort with the Kazakhstan new role is any indication, At the Showcase he doesn't plan on going and Quality16 anywhere anytime soon. The debut feature of one 20th Century Fox of his most, um, beloved personalities, "Borat: Cul- tural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," or as the kids are calling it, just "Borat," has been heralded as everything from the funniest movie of the year to (in a particularly absurd case of hyperbole) the funniest movie ever made. Don't for a second think that's because it actually is. In truth, the film, surprisingly uneventful and small in scale, clocks in at 84 minutes of very studied goofball comedy. What makes the movie remarkable is the extent to which Cohen has turned it from irreverent satire into one of the most extrava- gantly hyped, worshipped films in memory - all before anyone had even seen it. Between the You- Tube clips and Cohen's one-man variety act giv- ing interviews in character across the country, the blitz surrounding "Borat" requires the kind of media and studio cooperation that can only be the work of Cohen, who has taken a mostly tra- ditional gross-out comedy and made it into the moviegoing event of the fall. Is the movie funny? Of course it is. If theaters ran the trailer on loop across the country the movie still have would been funny. The problem here is not Cohen's talent for comedy, which is not in question, but his ability to balance the movie's mouth-foaming desire to expose the ignorance of middle America with its equally ravenous desire to have a 350-pound man rub his naked ass into another man's face. That scene, in outrageously Nothing we are going to say is funnier than what he was actually saying, so why bother? graphic and overlong form, is the centerpiece of "Borat," and it is funny if only for the fact that the performers actually seem to have a good time executing it. The problem is that it's paired with sequences, like, say, one in which Borat's declara- tion to a rodeo crowd that his nation supports the American desire to kill every man, woman and child in Iraq is met with continuous applause. Cohen, if he is half as smart as his act suggests, wants us to be shocked by this. So why present it in the one genre of film designed precisely so that no one will take it seriously? Surely the film is effective in its central aim - exposing and exploiting Americans' ignorance about others and, surprisingly, themselves - but at the same time, it's content with ending such a sequence with a sight gag aboutBorat's manhood. The film's collection of gun-shop owners and frat boys and rodeo chiefs say just about every last thing Cohen wants them to, and their responses are stunningly bigoted. To its credit, the film's obvious caricature of Kazakhstan - which, in case anyone forgot, is a real country - distanc- es itself from an actual representation of it, and Cohen knows just how far he has to push a joke to get an effective punchline. He takes nothing further than it needs to go. He doesn't offend just to offend; there's a political point to be made in most every sequence here, even if it is easy and irrelevant, which it often is. But the idea of a nar- rative inescapably clashes with the idea of bite- size satire, and the political potency of Borat asa character is lost ina feature-length context. And so, strangely enough, the film works best as a narrative. Borat can throw money at a Jewish couple in defense of his life, talk about executing gay men and tout a woman's smaller brain size, and still - curiously, paradoxically - we love this guy. When he brings a prostitute to a dinner party with a pastor and his like-minded friends, Borat is the least cruel person in the room. Truth be told, and against all odds, he's kind of sweet. His unrequited love for Pamela Anderson seems genuine. Perhaps the film's most unrecognized suggestion is that Borat's total obliviousness to his surroundings is the product of an environ- ment that has created it - one not unlike the cul- ture he encounters on his coast-to-coast road trip through America. "Borat's" failings as a film for the most part will not occur to its audience, who will no doubt explode at its jokes all the same. There is a very strongchance that said jokes will be lost on most of them - a concern even 20th Century Fox seemed to have in regulating the film's initial release mostly to urban and college-town centers. Since it's unfair to either party to judge a movie based on its audience, the question becomes one of whether "Borat" encourages its viewers to delight in the hate it subversively seeks out, and the film makes no indication that it does. For the most part, Cohen lets the bigotry he finds speak for itself, and even if it is often lost in the mix, his point in doing so is always clear. In its first weekend the film has been a sen- sation, a commercial hit big enough to be a case study and (according to IMDb.com) an audience favorite intense enough to already sit comfort- ably among users' top 250 movies of all time. It has a 90 on Metacritic for Christ's sake. (That's three points short of "Schindler's List" and six points higher than "Mystic River," in case you were wondering.) In short, this is the biggest success story of any film since "The Passion of the Christ," the impli- cations of which I'll leave for you to decipher. What I take from all this is that Sacha Baron Cohen very much knows what he's doing, and even when his film doesn't quite work, we're in the hands of some kind of master. Original comedy master to screen at Michigan By ELIE ZWIEBEL For the Daily Mel Brooks is the godfather of makingoffensive comedy seem Blazing classy. Unlike Saddles this weekend's Tonight only highly antici- at7 p.m. pated release of "Borat," eagerly At theMichigan touted for its outrageously offensive exploits, "Saddles" epitomizes the compro- mise between provocation and tasteful humor. After narrowly escaping a hang- ing, Bart (Cleavon Little, "Fletch Lives") is appointed as the new sheriff of a western town scheduled for demolition to pave the way for train tracks. The problem: Bart is a black man in a post-Emancipation, pre-Civil Rights era. Bart quickly finds his only friend in an alcoholic quickdraw, Jim (aka The Waco Kid). Played by the outra- geous Gene Wilder ("Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory"), Jim helps Bart prove his worth as a sheriff. Ultimately, the two become unlikely heroes in the battle to save the town from destruction. As part of The Michigan The- ater's Comic Masters Film Series, "Saddles" makes jokes at the expense of blacks, Jews, Germans, women, cowboys, racists, Chinese, Hollywood and so on. Brooks him- self even plays a Native American chieftain who speaks Yiddish. No one is safe from him - but no one's truly offended, either. Even if social commentary isn't yourbag,B stick - w (also playr get his pe suggests I and the p Mel olde and in a visu eline Kah is brillian dancer w upon how - Kahn is Brooksoffersplentyofslap- to ever receive an Academy Award rhen Governor Petomane nomination for singing about how ed by Brooks) struggles to "everything below the waist is n's cap back on, someone kaput." he think of his secretary, And Brooks then easily goes en slides right into the cap from a scene entirely composed of fart and burp humor to political satire, with his portrayal of a com- plete imbecile heading an unapolo- Brooks: He's getically corrupt government. It's r than Borat a mockery that's ever-applicable to , real-life politics. classier too. "Saddles" is also an accurate par- c r t ody of the classic western, follow- ing an underdog hero's ascension to small-town fame from his humble al double entendre. Mad- beginnings allthe way to hislegend- n ("Young Frankenstein") ary ride off into the sunset. Brooks t as a burlesque German is straight on with his parody of the 'ho constantly expounds genre's classic formula. At one point Smoky's Fine Cigars Ann Arbor's Newest and Best Tobacconist Featuring Michigan's Finest Selection of Premium Cigars Huge Selection of Imported Ciggs, Cloves, Pipe Tobacco and RYO We also Carry a Large Selection of Hookah Supplies Spectacular Walk-In Humidor and Cigar Lounge! Davidoff Cigars Now in Stock!! --Show Your ID and Save-- [734-222-00221 1423 E. Stadium @Packard next to Caribou Coffee sexually exhausted she is s perhaps the only actress See SADDLES, Page 8A Do you have the best leaseon campus"? Show them in our Do you experience a warning sign, such as numbness or visual disturbance, before a headache? If so, you may be eligible to participate in a research study evaluating an experimental nonmedicinal treatment during the aura phase of migraine. 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