Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

In his review of Borat, I remembered David Edelstein saying the film made him cringe. I felt the same way. During its 85-minute running time, my emotional response was one of “disconnected embarrassment,” an oxymoron befitting the film’s contradictory approach to its material. The film caricatures the idea of “the foreigner” in the form of a low-brow, but mainstream narrative; it is designed to appeal to passive male adolescent movie-viewers. And the film fails, compared to the more consistent & better structured Talladega Nights featuring equally outrageous but more family-friendly performances by Cohen & Will Ferrell. At least this Nascar-culture caricature has a palatable touch of burlesque. Borat fails in tone, a cohesive structure and in its intentions.

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The Bridges of Madison County (1995)

Meryl Streep plays, Francesca, a midwestern farmer's wife of Italian descent & plays it well.

I don't care for the shoddy contemporary story-frame, in this framed narrative, involving Francesca's children. It is likely an artifact of Waller's book that unfortunately remained in the screenplay adaptation.

This film is very similar to the story in David Lean's "Brief Encounter," and also brings to mind the general structure of Sydney Pollack's "Out of Africa."

What's most striking about the film: if one were to assume that illicit love letters & stories of forbidden romances could attain the status of art or artwork, the story of the love affair in TBOMC could be used to argue that certain artworks are indeed ahead of their time; for Francesca's family could not have reconciled her infidelity, no matter how moving her portrait of the romance, until some time has passed.

... Could Art be Infidelity plus Time?