Cinemascope
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Posts posted by Cinemascope
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I can't really blame you, twister, it's sad how some people get carried away by personal vendettas and simple disagreements.
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Well I guess I find that the video quality you get in YouTube seems OK for short videos and clips but I don't know if I'd want to watch something long in there!
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Do you mean Joe Vs. the Volcano?
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I don't suppose it's available on DVD?
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It's a shame this thread about Brando was ruined by this offensive garbage that's being posted. Could we please get back to the topic?
It is a shame indeed, all we can do is ignore the vitriolic rantings of someone who only posts to denounce imaginary "trolls" and never once offers anything to say about movies.
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The Houston Chronicle also gave the DVD an upbeat review
Extras for make benefit glorious Borat disc
By BRUCE WESTBROOK
Borat is now ready for make sexy time on DVD. Verrry nice ? not!
But Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is very funny, especially on its creative new discs.
The DVD extends the film's verbal and technical gaffes to its entertaining menus ? and how often can we say that? Animated menus tend to be tedious and time-consuming, but for this film about a clueless Kazakh touring America, they're both germane and a hoot.
Looking like Lost's well-worn Dharma Initiative training films, Borat's scratchy, jerkily-animated menus show dancing bear heads and blunt options such as "Surplus Materials" (special features), "Censored Footage" (deleted scenes) and "Propaganda" (publicity clips).
Say, those terms work. They're direct and no-nonsense. Let's start labeling all DVD extras "propaganda" and "surplus materials."
Though the menus look cobbled from ancient stock footage that's about to implode, the only thing truly broken about the DVD is its title character's English. And the biggest bonus is 24 minutes of "censored" scenes.
"Massagings" is as funny as anything in the movie. In it, Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) welcomes a small, aging male masseuse to his hotel room, then gives him a terrible time, all while totally naked. (Exceedingly long black bands cover certain body parts.)
"Doctor" is another warped winner, as Borat informs a physician of his unorthodox sex life, but "Policings" is a hard to watch, as officers confront the nutty nuisance. (Wasting police time is an offense in itself.)
Best of all is "Sexy Drownwatch," Borat's intro for a new Kazakhstan version of his beloved Baywatch. From bouncing blubber to inappropriate swimwear, it's a stitch.
"Propaganda" combines 16 minutes of personal appearances by Cohen ? in full Borat character ? on talk shows and at film festivals. Making a bed with Martha Stewart on The Tonight Show doesn't go as she might have planned.
Though the film ripples with impudent insults and anarchic humor and earned an Oscar nomination for its screenplay, when you get down to it, Borat's "cultural learnings" are an old mix.
Simply blend the mockumentary style of This Is Spinal Tap with the "wild and crazy guy" witlessness of Steve Martin's backwoods European playboy wannabe, then sprinkle in the non-PC bent of The Simpsons or South Park, and what have you got? A big plate full of steaming hot Borat.
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I agree, it's easier to just rent or buy.
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Well I suppose the current administration is ultimately to blame, for cutting off accessible medication for needy seniors.
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"raving lunatic" might be too polite a term!
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And who'd have thought even Borat's sidekick would get a boost to his career thanks to the mockumentary?
Borat's sidekick gets 'Smart'
Ken Davitian, the obscure actor who found worldwide fame playing the portly sidekick in Borat, has joined the all-star cast of the big-screen adaptation of Get Smart.
Steve Carell (Frank from Little Miss Sunshine) is playing Maxwell Smart, Anne Hathaway is Agent 99, and Alan Arkin is portraying the Chief of CONTROL.
Davitian will play the evil assistant to Terrence Stamp's character, the head of the nefarious organization known as KAOS. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has also been cast in the Warner Bros. project.
"It's my first film that is with so many big people," said Davitian. "It's really an honor for me to work on this."
It wasn't long ago that Davitian was doing bit parts in more dramatic fare such as Holes, A Man Apart, SWAT and shows like Six Feet Under. To help pay the bills, he even opened up a French dip sandwich restaurant in the Los Angeles suburb of Sherman Oaks called the Dip. His role in Borat, along with the subsequent infamy of naked wrestling sequence and appearance on the Golden Globes, have changed all of that.
"I'm a day player who has finally made it," he said. "And that's what we're all working at. It's always about getting to the next level and being in a situation where you can utilize your talents and do the work that you really want to do."
Davitian will be seen on an upcoming episode of ER and recently booked a role on Ghost Whisperer. And he opened up a second Dip restaurant in Hollywood. He credits his older age and his family for keeping the instant fame from going to his head.
"I'm older than most famous people," said the 53-year-old, "and getting famous in the later years, I'm pretty well-balanced. I'm having a great time. I'm finally starting do to what I love to do."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/film/get-smart-gets-a-bit-of-borat/2007/03/06/1172943406605.html
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So Bartlett what's your favorite Brando movie?
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And it looks like the DVD is getting as good reviews as the movie!
"Borat" a riot all over again
By Michael Booth
Denver Post Staff Writer
Comedy is all in the timing.
Or it's in the tone.
Or it's all in the eye of the beholder.
The highly anticipated DVD release today of "Borat" proves comedy often comes from somewhere else altogether: good editing.
The extras included on "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" reveal how Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles made the funniest movie of 2006 - they left out some very unfunny parts.
The main extra on the "Borat" DVD is a set of deleted scenes many fans of the faux-Kazakh will turn to first, to get a new dose of their overexposed comic hero. If you want your image of Cohen's Borat character to remain perfectly ridiculous, I suggest skipping the dumped scenes. Watching them pulls back a bit of the curtain from the magic comedy show.
Most of "Borat's" belly laughs came from Americans reacting stupidly, profanely or incredulously to Cohen's intentionally offensive shtick. Cohen and co-conspirator Charles should have written big, fat residual checks to the minister's wife they insulted, and the frat boys they duped, and the rodeo fans they infuriated, because it was their clueless responses that made "Borat" work.
Those critics who found Cohen's style to be cruel will gain traction for their arguments in the deletions. Director Charles ("Seinfeld") cut the parts where Americans welcomed Borat with dignity, kindness and boundless patience, no matter the provocation. This handful of scenes makes Americans look like saints, and Cohen like an utter jerk.
When Borat tries to adopt a puppy, and asks if the dog can be trained to attack Jews, a nice lady tells him "Jews are God's children." When he asks if he can eventually cook the dog, she firmly shows him the door. At a supermarket, a beleaguered junior manager shows Borat a cheese aisle with 150 selections.
"What's this?"
"Cheese."
"And this?"
"Cheese."
Down the entire aisle. A good 50 times. I would have sent Borat to Turkmenistan in tiny little pieces, but the store manager never cracks.
Much richer in the comedy vein is the DVD's recap of the movie publicity stunts where Cohen insisted on appearing as Borat. He teamed with Martha Stewart for a memorable Jay Leno meeting of unequals; Stewart is trying to demonstrate how to make a bed properly, and Borat wants to know "Where do you attach the chain for the woman?"
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Another interesting tidbit regarding the great Brando:
Das Brando German filmmaker looking for Marlon
February 16, 2007
By DAN MORAN
German filmmaker Michael Strauven is searching for Marlon Brando, for reasons that have something to do with Dick Cavett.
Strauven, on the phone this week from the Internationale Filmfestpiele Berlin -- the 57th Annual Berlin International Film Festival to those of us in the States -- said he was shocked to find very little stock footage on Brando when researching a documentary on the late thespian.
"I could find only one small piece on German television -- an interview with Dick Cavett where he doesn't say anything. That's it," said Strauven, adding that the lack of archival film is no indication of Brando's enduring popularity in Germany.
"He's huge," Strauven said. "There are still a lot of people that would say, 'Oh, James Dean had more charisma.' But to people who know about acting, he's still the No. 1 hero. Him and Bogart. People don't want Steve McQueen. Everybody wants Brando."
And Strauven plans to give the people what they want in the form of a documentary for CineCentrum, a film and television production company based in Hamburg. Strauven is in the research phase of a project that he hopes to air in late May on ARD, the German public broadcasting network.
To date, Strauven's digging has been limited to books and other written material devoted to Brando, who passed away in July 2004. But he plans to fly to the U.S. in March to film segments and conduct interviews in Brando's old stomping grounds, which of course would include Lake County.
"We try to achieve the person behind the star," Strauven said. "We rely a little bit more on people who have known the person ... We are visiting the lifeline, the different towns and schools. We will not only show film clips."
Two years ago, Strauven used a similar approach when researching a documentary on Albert Einstein. He said he asked newspapers in and around Princeton, N.J. -- where Einstein lived and taught after fleeing Nazi Germany -- to publish appeals for those with memories of the late genius.
While Strauven said that 80 percent of what he ended up fielding "was nonsense," he also established contacts that he was able to use in a documentary called "Mench Einstein."
When it comes to Brando, Strauven said he realizes that time is starting to take its toll on those who knew the actor, who was born in 1924 and moved to Libertyville in 1937. Strauven said he was saddened to learn that Bob Hoskins, Brando's classmate at Libertyville High who went on to work as a dialogue director for "Mutiny on the Bounty," passed away in 2005.
"I've read so much about Bob Hoskins, I felt like I knew him," Strauven said. But he added that anyone in the area with memories of Brando is welcome to share their living history.
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And here's another one that really hit the spot -- and I would agree that the definite documentary on the making of Borat is something we're still dying to see:
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is funnier than its malapropic title?the audience with whom I saw the movie wasn't laughing so much as howling?and even more difficult to parse.
Eyes wide, face fixed in an avid grin, Sacha Baron Cohen's ersatz Kazakh TV reporter, the ineffably oafish Borat Sagdiyev, goes looking for America. It's a documentary of sorts. The road trip?he's afraid to fly "in case the Jews repeated their attack of 9-11"?takes him from New York to Los Angeles (where he hopes to bag Pamela Anderson) by way of Mississippi, and well beyond the boundaries of taste.
America, the "greatest country in the world" per Borat, first appears as a subway car, where the friendly Kazakh introduces himself to passengers and, as is his custom, attempts to double-kiss the men. Predictable agitation is trumped when Borat's cheap suitcase drops open to release a live chicken.
The alert viewer may glimpse director Larry Charles among the startled commuters, but by and large, Baron Cohen's lumpen performance art?replete with all manner of public display and daredevil idiocy?is skilled at concealing its tracks. In the most spectacular example, Borat's bedroom tussle with his heavyset "Kazakh" producer (Ken Davitian), caught **** with a picture of Pamela, escalates into a naked chase down the hotel elevator, through the lobby, and into a banquet of the local mortgage brokers' association.
Not simply a jackass, Borat (like Baron Cohen's earlier creation Ali G) specializes in one-on-ones with unwary professionals, snared by their willingness to humor a hapless foreigner and desire to appear on (even Kazakh) TV. Stooges range from a self-identified humor consultant ("Do you ever laugh on people with retardation?" Borat wonders) to a car salesman (asked if the automobile is outfitted with a "**** magnet") to a pair of pols, former Georgia representative Bob Barr and perennial candidate Alan Keyes. What did they know?and when did they know it? Keyes realizes something before our eyes when, after a long, faux-naive account of a Gay Pride rally, Borat says, "Are you telling me that the man who tried to put a rubber fist into my **** was a homosexual?"
How does Baron Cohen keep a straight face? If ever there was a movie that demanded a documentary devoted to its making, it's this one. (Press notes assert the filmmakers were reported as terrorists and trailed by the FBI.) That both Barr and Keyes are right-wing moralizers suggests something about the Baron Cohen agenda. It's hardly coincidental that the antique store he trashes specializes in Confederate memorabilia. Interviewing "veteran feminists" or Atlanta homies, Borat baffles them with his chauvinist stupidity. But picked up by a van of South Carolina frat boys or chatting with the owner of the Imperial Rodeo, he has alarmingly little difficulty getting them to articulate the idea of reinstituting slavery or making homosexuality a capital offense.
Baron Cohen has gleefully involved the government of Kazakhstan in a campaign against Borat?showing up at the White House on the day President Bush hosted Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev. But his target isn't really an imaginary version of Nazerbayev's nation (nor its enemies, the "evil nitwits" of Uzbekistan); it is rather the domain of the "great warlord Premier Bush," red states in particular. "I think the cultural differences are just vast," the Mississippi matron hosting Borat for dinner at her Magnolia Mansion (on Secession Drive) confides to the camera while her guest is away from the table. Those differences become unbridgeable when Borat returns with a stool sample, and then with the arrival of his indescribably inappropriate date?recruited from the back-page ads of the local alt-weekly.
The movie's set piece has Borat? wearing an American-flag shirt and looking like Saddam Hussein plugged into the wall?entertain a Virginia rodeo with his Kazakh version of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Borat's introductory declaration of support for America's "war of terror" gets an ovation, his fervent wish that George Bush "drink the blood of every man, woman, and child in Iraq" a slightly less enthusiastic one. The crowd starts booing, however, when they hear him sing, "Kazakhstan is the great country in the world?all other countries are run by little girls." (Borat manages to complete this anthem; a report in The Roanoke Times suggests that Baron Cohen and his crew had to be hustled out of the place before they were lynched.)
It's almost anticlimactic when Borat wanders into a Pentecostal church and, in the presence of a Mississippi congressman and justice of the state supreme court, is baptized in the spirit. "Does Jesus like me?" he cries, his impassioned babble lost in the mass glossolalia and the strident "Kazakh" fiddle music arising on the soundtrack. To what faith does Borat subscribe? It's an interesting, never answered question. At one point, he's told to shave off his mustache so that he doesn't look Muslim?"just Eye-talian." But there's no suggestion that Borat is Muslim; his only religion seems to be anti-Semitism.
Borat is not just blatant but proselytizing; his statements precipitate the latent anti-Semitism around him. (The most outrageous example, not in the film, is the widely circulated TV bit in which Borat incites the patrons of an Arizona bar to join him in singing a Kazakh folk song, "Throw the Jew Down the Well.") Small wonder the Anti-Defamation League has expressed concern. The organization deemed it unfortunate that Borat is identified with an actual nation?as though the joke would work if Baron Cohen were passing himself off as a TV reporter from Upper Slobovia?but that's a displacement. Their real anxiety is that by satirizing anti-Semitism, Borat will legitimize it.
It's a measure of Baron Cohen's dexterity that he plants his alter ego on both sides of the Jewish Question. "Kazakhstan"? actually shot in Romania?is a nightmare Eastern Europe where peasants bunk with livestock, torment Gypsies, and stage a trad- itional "Running of the Jew," chasing giant-fanged puppets through their muddy village. But as a native of this barbaric shtetl, Borat is also a non-Christian other who?by virtue of his primitive nature?ridicules the hypocrisy of the dominant social order.
The ADL identifies Baron Cohen as an "observant" Jew. (I'm not sure what that means, but it seems less revealing than the subject of his Cambridge dissertation, namely the role of Jews in the American civil rights movement.) In any case, this comic has a distinctively Jewish sensibility. As sociologist John Murray Cuddihy notes in The Ordeal of Civility, his classic account of newly enlightened Jewish thinkers assimilated into the modern world, Marx, Freud, and Claude L?vi-Strauss were all similarly obsessed with "the raw, the coarse, the vulgar, the naked" and exposing the way in which these things were sublimated by the civil "niceness" of Western culture. So too, Borat (who might add the superstitious, the stupid, the sexist, and the xenophobic to that list).
Indeed, the man who invented Borat is a masterful improviser, brilliant comedian, courageous political satirist, and genuinely experimental film artist. Borat makes you laugh but Baron Cohen forces you to think.
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How many DVD sets have there been so far, coopsgirl?
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It's great to know about all the great modern actors that participated in the documentary -- here's some of them:
HOLLYWOOD - Late, great movie icon Marlon Brando is to be honored by his friends and peers as part of a new two-part documentary to air on TV in May.
James Caan, Al Pacino, Martin Scorsese, Angie Dickinson, Edward Norton and Dennis Hopper will join family and friends to reminisce and pay tribute to the On the Waterfront star in Brando.
The revealing documentary will also feature never-before-seen footage of Brando at work and play, and a series of rarely seen in-depth interviews with the actor.
It will also look at Brando's involvement in civil rights and features interviews with Native American leaders and Black Panther officials, whom the movie legend worked with and befriended.
But the real highlight of the documentary, which will air on the Turner Classic Movies network on May 1 and 2, will be an interview with Sacheen Littlefeather, the Native American actress who took the stage at the 1973 Academy Awards to reject Brando's Oscar for The Godfather.
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Here's one of the best reviews about this offbeat film:
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
As Borat Sagdiyev, a visitor from Kazakhstan, Sacha Baron Cohen is a balls-out comic revolutionary, right up there with Lenny Bruce, Andy Kaufman, Dr. Strangelove, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Cartman at exposing the ignorant, racist, misogynist, gay-bashing, Jew-hating, gun-loving, warmongering heart of America. Borat will make you laugh till it hurts, and you'll still beg for more.
Borat, subtitled Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, sneaks up on you. Or it will if you're not part of the cult spawned when HBO premiered Cohen's Da Ali G Show in 2003, and Americans first encountered the inspired British comic who hid behind a series of alter egos. His gangsta journalist Ali G tricked politicians (Newt Gingrich, Boutros Boutros-Ghali) and pundits (Gore Vidal, Andy Rooney) into embarrassing and revealing interviews. His Bruno, a gay fashion commentator with a Nazi fetish, claimed to be the voice of Austrian youth. And then there's Borat, the smiling, shamelessly offensive TV reporter from Kazakhstan who takes pride that his sister is "the number-four prostitute in all of country" where a ritual -- "the running of the Jew" -- is celebrated every year ("There you go, kids, crush that Jew egg before it hatches"). Kazakhstan is the ninth-largest country in the world, but Cohen is counting on the fact that most Americans know squat about it or him. For the record, Cohen, 35, is nothing like Borat, Bruno, Ali G or Jean Girard, the gay French Formula Un driver who kissed Will Ferrell full on the lips in Talladega Nights. Cohen is a Cambridge scholar from a middle-class and devout Jewish family. Their son, the second of three, wrote his history thesis on the role of Jews in the American civil-rights movement. Not since Little Red Riding Hood have the unsuspecting been duped so hilariously by a big, bad wolf in sheep's clothing.
Borat is such a mind-blowing comedy classic in the making (seeing it once is just not enough) that Cohen's cover will surely be blown after the movie opens. But during the time it took Cohen to put Borat's journey on film with director Larry Charles (he debuted with Bob Dylan's Masked and Anonymous, a title that would also fit snugly here), people lined up, signed releases and bought the scam: that Borat, with his **** patch of a mustache, his unwashed gray suit, his butchered English and his blatant bigotry, really was a roving Kazakh citizen doing a documentary on American culture.
OK, not everyone bought it. The government of Kazakhstan was appalled at seeing its country depicted as a place where men treat women as slaves, screw their sisters and swill wine made from horse ****. No wonder the Kazakh scenes were shot in Romania. "Not too much rape -- and humans only," Borat helpfully tells a friend as he leaves his village for America, carrying "a vial of gypsy tears to prevent AIDS." Cohen makes primo slapstick out of all the silliness, but it's his merciless knack for Swiftian satire that gives Borat its remarkable staying power. There's something cathartic about laughs that stick in your throat.
Don't be fooled by how this demonically devious mockumentary looks (as wonderfully tacky as an $18 million budget will allow) or how it's organized (clever masked as haphazard), the film doesn't waste one of its eighty-nine minutes. The script that Cohen wrote with Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham and Dan Mazer tells us that Borat has a hidden agenda for coming to America. He's seen Baywatch and wants to take the "virgin" Pamela Anderson as his bride. When Borat catches his fat producer Azamat (Ken Davitian) jerking off to photos of Pam, he engages the hairy beast in a naked ****-to-mouth wrestling match that could set back screen nudity for decades. If you don't upchuck, the scene is uproarious and kicks off Borat's journey across America in an ice-cream truck (don't ask) to find his muse.
Will Borat get his "sexytime" with Pam and have his hoped-for "romantic explosion" on her stomach? I'll never tell. And I don't have to, because the core of this movie -- its raison d'etre -- is who and what Borat encounters along the way. No aspect of prejudice, hypocrisy, arrogance and stupidity is overlooked.
At a rodeo in Virginia, Borat is greeted with cheers when he tells the crowd, "We support your war of terror," and then hypes them up more by longing for the day that "Premier George W. Bush will drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq."
At a gun store he asks the owner for the best gun for killing Jews and is told that a 9mm or a 45 will do just fine. He settles for a live bear. Terrified at having to sleep overnight at the home of a kindly Jewish couple, Borat believes that two cockroaches crawling under the door are the Jews transformed. To make them go away, he throws money at them. And so it goes, with Borat's antics extending to a frat-boy boozefest, a Pentecostal church rally, a classy dinner party down South in which he is taught the formal art of toilet training and a confab with feminists who seem startled by the well-known fact in Kazakhstan that the brain of a woman is the size of a squirrel's. On the debit side, the attempt to snatch Anderson at a book-signing feels staged, as if the movie had suffered a brush with Hollywood. But the brush is quick and far from fatal. Cohen's total immersion in his character is a wonder to behold. If Oscar voters have any sense, they recognize his performance for what it is: a tour de force that sets off comic and cosmic explosions in your head. You won't know what outrageous fun is until you see Borat. High-five!
PETER TRAVERS
(Posted: Oct 27, 2006)
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60 years old, huh?
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Awww the scenes in the pancake shop were the best... I don't recall many portrayals of American women as successful, independent enterpreneurs in 30's films.
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Ah, wonderful schedule allieharding.
Lubitsch and Tati would make for a very lovely Sunday evening
And some film-noir leading up to the TCM underground just sounds like too much fun!
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So, Bartlett, how long did you say it took for them pills to work?
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Well time will tell.
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I think your confusing it with "WHO LET THE DOG'S OUT!!!"
ROFLMAO
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And the best part is -- we still have the rest of the month to go!
Go, Gene, Go!!
Borat: Cult film?
in General Discussions
Posted
I see David Germain liked it, too
Selected home-video releases:
'Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan'
One of the most crude, crass yet beloved overseas observers of the glorious nation of U.S. and A. blusters his way into your homes. Reprising one of the alter egos he created on "Da Ali G Show," British comic Sacha Baron Cohen delivered a $100 million hit with this uproarious assemblage of sketches, documentary-style encounters and moments of cultural ridicule. Cohen plays the clueless, buffoonish Borat, a Kazakh TV journalist traveling across the United States to report back on the nation and its people to his homeland ? and hopefully, to wed Pamela Anderson in the process. The DVD includes five deleted scenes plus a montage of deleted footage, along with coverage of the publicity tour Cohen did last year, always maintaining the Borat persona. DVD, $29.98. (20th Century Fox)