Threenie Tuesday Movie Review: The Dictator

Time for another Threenie Tuesday movie review! Unfortunately I got caught up doing other things yesterday afternoon and didn't get to the theater in time to catch a 7-ish showing, so only one this week.

I caught the new Sacha Baron Cohen film, The Dictator. I've not seen any of his previous films, though I have watched a bit of Da Ali G Show, so I kinda-sorta knew what to expect. Most people will remember the hype surrounding Borat, and a little bit with Bruno and Ali G Indahouse. Shock value can be a powerful thing if you're trying to get people attention or make a statement, but its effectiveness depends on people's sensitivity to it.

By now it seems that most people are somewhat at peace with Sacha Baron Cohen's own brand of offensiveness. Either they've become desensitized or don't care anymore, which seems to be happening a lot to entertainers these days. For example, did you know Marilyn Manson put out a new album this month? Didn't think so. People found out that he's not really as scary as he seem onstage or in his music videos. Actually, he comes across as a pretty nice, humble guy in interviews. All the controversy and mystique just sort of dissipated over the past decade. (Of course in Manson's case, there's also the fact that his fans all graduated high school and moved on with their lives.)

In order to properly critique The Dictator, we need some way to evaluate all the supposedly shocking content. The cast of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia have stated that they let humor be their guide in deciding whether a bit is too far or not: it all comes down to, "Is it funny?" It's not the most objective consistent criterion I've heard (I'll talk about that some other time), but it's good enough for now I guess.

So, is The Dictator funny? Sometimes. Admiral General Aladeen, Baron Cohen's principal character, is a rather ridiculous (what else) caricature of the Middle Eastern war criminal. He's crude, selfish, narcissistic, and most of all, bigoted, which is the main characteristic from which the humor is drawn. This is Baron Cohen's strategy: heinously racist, sexist, and otherwise politically incorrect comments are spouted at audience stand-in characters by some inane bastard whom nobody could ever take seriously.

It's so bizarre, yet it sort of works. I didn't catch myself getting personally offended by anything said or done. The only time it came anywhere close was when Aladeen made a comment about Filipinos, but the joke was too moronic to mean anything to me.

One of the most disappointing elements of this film was the amount of body humor it used. Not sexual humor (actually some of that was kind of funny), but honest-to-goodness pee and poop gags. These can be incredibly funny in the right context, but in this case it was just crude and predictable.

In general, there were very few surprises in the movie. The plot (not that it mattered) was stock Adam Sandler fare, the characters (not that they mattered other than Aladeen and the one girl) were irrelevant, and the political commentary (which was the best hope for this film to be anything but a juvenile gross-out flick) was no more insightful than anything you can find on a 14-year-old's Facebook page. I found this to be rather disappointing since Da Ali G Show makes me cringe with anticipation, pity the guests, and generally just laugh my ass off. Baron Cohen can be the epitome of facetiousness when he wants to be, and I can respect that. I caught glimpses of that in The Dictator, but for the most part it's pretty dumbed-down.

I plan to watch Borat in the next week in order to form a more contextualized opinion. However, I believe that a work should stand on its own, unless the necessary background is clearly identified (take the Family Guy Star Wars episodes, for instance). In that respect, I cannot recommend The Dictator. If you just want to be entertained... I don't know, watch cat videos at home or something.

6.7/10

Threenie Tuesday Review: "The Pirates! Band of Misfits"

I hadn't set out to make this a reviews blog, but entertainment seems to be my main source of subject matter these days. It happens during times of boredom. I've found myself having video game dreams several times in the past couple weeks. Hopefully something else will come along soon.

The theater (that is, cinema) in my town gives a significant discount on Tuesdays. It used to be $2 per ticket (earning the title, "Twoonie Tuesdays"), but they upgraded their projectors and upped the price to $3. Still a good deal, so it's a good time to see a bunch of movies in one day. This is the first of my Threenie Tuesday review series. Fingers crossed.


The first movie I saw tonight The Pirates! Band of Misfits, the newest feature film by Aardman Animation, the company responsible for Chicken Run and the Wallace & Gromit cartoons. It wasn't a particularly interesting film, not nearly as clever as anything else I've seen from Aardman.

The premise was innocently silly enough to get my interest: the Pirate Captain (that's his actual name, as far as the movie is concerned) and his motley crew of... well, pirates, set out to win the Pirate of the Year award by being... the best pirates of the year. Piracy here is treated like it is in a lot of children's entertainment: a noble profession full of glorious, misadventurous amusement. The "bad guy" is (do you really care? I'll say it anyway, just in case) ***SPOILER ALERT*** the Queen of England, whose motivation is clear from the start of the film: she hates pirates.

Now, I understand how cliche it is to go on a rant about declining values in children's entertainment, the corruption of our youth by the media. That's been covered by much louder, dumber people than me, and I see no reason to add to the noise. Besides, children's entertainment has been screwed up for a long time. Have you ever heard a nursery rhyme or fairy tale? There's really very little room for values to decline here.

I will say, though, that this film has the unfortunate, but not uncommon, problem of not knowing who its target audience is. Big mistake, especially for a comedy The theater in which I saw it was far from full. There were a few young adults other than myself, but mostly it was parents with young kids. The kids were not laughing. They didn't understand most of the jokes, which is honestly a blessing. It was humorous enough to elicit a few chuckles from us twenty-somethings, but no more than any other slapstick comedy could. It was too juvenile for the adults, and too mature (if you can call it that) for the kids. If they had zeroed in on the kids' humor and made it more innocent, or tried to appeal to the adults and make it really irreverent, the element of genuine humor wouldn't have been so sorely absent.

Beyond that, the usual marks of the Aardman style were definitely missing. The characters were underdeveloped and underutilized, giving the audience little reason to invest in the action or gags. The antagonist in particular was not nearly despicable enough for me to care, especially in comparison to the terrifying Mrs. Tweedy from Chicken Run. Overall the dramatic tension ranged from medium-low to very low.

Maybe at some point I'll devise a rating system for my reviews. For now, I'll just say I didn't like it.

I also saw the newest Jason Statham vehicle, "Safe." I have thoughts on that too, but I've done enough blogging for one day. I'll post my review of that in a couple of days.