Busyness and Exhaustion

A combination of busyness and exhaustion has prevented me from adding to this blog in the last couple of days and will unfortunately prevent me from elaborating on Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Babel, which I was surprisingly impressed with, given my indifference to his previous films. Similarly the gig of the year, CSS at the Point Ephemère will be mentioned only in passing. A shame as it was the best rock show I have seen in a long time and these charming young ladies and gentleman deserve reams of words to be penned about them, not least for their willingness to entertain and allow many of their fans, including Seanachie to join them on stage. Great fun in a great venue, along the lovely, placid Canal St-Martin. More on this later hopefully.

There was also Borat, which I found disappointing, compared to the hilarious majesty of the original TV show. There is a boorishness to the film that makes you pine for the faux innocence of the TV series. And the Kazakhstan sequences shot in the village of Glod in Romania leave a bad taste in the mouth, the locals being ridiculed in an unpleasant way that is as ungraceful as the frat boys that Borat encounters later in the film. The villagers are suing Baron Cohen and I can't say I blame them as the film could very easily have been made without resorting to this cheap, nasty belittling of genuinely poor people. The film hits high notes in the scene where Borat is appalled to discover that 'those men that stuck the rod up my anus are 'homosexual'. Hilarious. And the scene where he tries to kidnap Pamela Anderson is priceless too. But this Borat is a good deal coarser than the original one and a lot less witty, and most of the gags fail to come off, their targets being pitifully easy. Stick to the Channel 4 DVD.