Agnostics rejoice!

You and we atheists have a new poster boy! And he is rather cute.
I'm not a huge fan of his, but I commend him for saying so publicly. We need more atheist, agnostic celebrities out there.

A Woman in Berlin

A Woman In Berlin is an adaptation of the anonymous diary of a German woman during the fall of Berlin in 1945. It's a good film, but it does not have the bitterness and the starkly brutal tone of the book. The book could be an apocryphal German version of the diary of Anne Frank, except that it was written by a journalist and the voice is that of a pretty decent writer. She has nothing but bitterness and scorn for the German men who were nowhere to be found when Berlin needed defending, while that stupid Führer of theirs was hiding in the bunker like a coward. I must confess that watching German citizens of that era suffer for 2 hours gives me a slightly pleasurable frisson of schadenfraude. A small little sense of revenge that nurtures the soul. The movie is conceived to do the opposite. But here are these people, good upstanding citizens of the Nazi regime, devastated by their own government. They believed in it, hook, line and sinker. So there. They deserved that and much more as far as I'm concerned.
Considering what the Nazis did to the Soviets, I think the Russians were relatively restrained. Basically, the Russian army had orders to rape every German woman, if possible. As we know, rape is a horrible strategy used to vanquish and humiliate the defeated. The Russian army raped more than 100,000 German women. So much for purity of race.
When the book came out in 1953, Germans were outraged because they saw it as staining the honor of German women (which were basically trying to survive), and no German man wanted to see himself in the mirror as an impotent (in every sense of the word) loser; so the author, duly enraged at this unbelievable but not unsurprising reception, forbid its publication until after her death. I recommend the book much more than the film.

Harry Potter and The Palace of Indifference

Or, in a nutshell, I don't give a flying fuck about Harry Potter. I have never read the books and have never seen the movies. Even on airplanes I can't muster the attention to follow the capes and the brooms and the forced British gloom for more than two seconds. Can we call it a day with him, please?

Brüno

I laughed much more with Borat, perhaps because it was the shock of the new, but also because Borat is a sweet boor, whereas Brüno is a clueless vapid idiot. He is Teutonic. Heavy.
The movie follows the same formula as Borat, except it feels a little more tightly constructed. That is, it's on a steady escalation of comedic horror. In Borat I laughed liberally (I almost cried, my tummy hurt from laughing); here the laughter stuck in my throat. As it sometimes happens to me with Curb your Enthusiasm, I found the comedy much funnier in retrospect. One is too appalled to laugh in the moment, but then it tickles your funny bone a day later. In fact, I'm still gaping in amazement at some of the stunts. Brüno is bitter funny, and much more satirically funny than it is silly funny.
This is funny with a vengeance.
Sasha Baron Cohen's aims are clear. He makes fun of three major themes. The vapid idiocy of fashion; the vapid, dangerously idiotic hunger for celebrity; and the idiotic homophobic obsession. If he can factor in some outrageous anti-pc stuff, why not?

(MAJOR SPOILER ALERT! I think you can read this and it won't affect your enjoyment, but if you really want to be surprised, you may want to stop here. See the movie and then come back to this page).

Critics say that Baron Cohen picks easy targets, which is true, but really, most of them deserve to be made fun of and in Brüno he is careful to pick not so easy targets. Everything is extremely heavy handed, but I found the bit with Ron Paul to be the only one that was unfair. To his credit, he offsets the easiness of the targets by putting himself on the line of danger like no comedian ever has. Hell, picking an actual terrorist leader from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade is not exactly an easy target. And the humor stings with brilliant irony. Brüno asks this guy to kidnap him because he wants to become famous. The terrorist is appalled. He says he doesn't like this. But the other kind of kidnapping and terror are okay? So if someone asks for a kidnapping, it's suddenly not kosher? What is terrorist kidnapping if not celebrity for terrorists? Way too smart.
In his search for fame, Brüno goes to the Middle East, or as he calls it, Middle Earth, to try to broker peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. At one point as he sits between one Israeli ex-Mossad agent and a Palestinian leader, he says he doesn't have all day and would the Egyptians please give the Jews their pyramids back. He confuses Hamas with Hummus. He sashays around an ultra-orthodox part of Jerusalem wearing Hassidic cut offs (all the costumes are hilarious), and almost starts a riot against him. By the same token, he sits in the middle of an Arab café making goo goo eyes at a very macho, mustachioed Arab. Equal opportunity mayhem.
Baron Cohen is a master of metaphor. Using Mexican laborers as furniture in California is devastating shorthand for the commonplace and hypocritical abuse of the illegal workforce in this country. As he sits on top of a Mexican he has devised as a human bench, and has Paula Abdul sit on top of another, he interviews her about her humanitarian concerns. And she answers!
Sasha Baron Cohen is utilizing comedy as it was intended: to seriously upend the existing order, to unmask human folly. He has the mischief of a giant, out of control, Puck.
As for the homosexual part, well, people are grossed out about sex between men, so he proceeds to show absolutely everything that is possible for two men to do with their anal orifices as a total slapstick routine. It is outrageous, but by putting it, so to speak, on the table, he is divesting it of its powerful mystique. Not only that, I think he is making fun of what straight people think that gay people do all day, which is to have orgiastic sex at all times. There is a fantastic bit where he goes to see a medium and asks about his former lover Mili, "von Mili und Vanilli", who he hopes is "on the VIP section in Heaven". The charlatan he consults tells him Mili is in a place with green trees so Brüno asks if he can kiss Mili and he proceeds to mime, with the precision of Marcel Marceau, an entire and very inventive sexual act between males that includes everything that you can possibly imagine, and if you didn't know about it, you will learn. But what is he really making fun of? Gay sex, or the conman who makes money by telling people he's talking to the dead?
It would have been fun if he interacted with some actual gay people, but by this omission, and instead by going hunting with deep woods rednecks and showing gay converters (clergymen who will cure your gayness), he makes the point much more powerfully. Think of anybody gay you know and they are the model of urbanity and good citizenship, compared to these appalling people. We are clearly hating the wrong side.
With Baron Cohen everything has to be a piece de resistance. In Borat it was his naked wrestling sequence. Here he ups the ante so that almost every sequence feels like that, but there is one sequence in an extreme fighting arena which is as gutsy and righteous as when Borat goes to the rodeo and speaks of Bush. Baron Cohen likes to whip rednecks into a frenzy with their own passionately held convictions and then yank the rug from right under them. And so he does this time, again in a marvel of concentrated metaphor. Protected yet separated by a cage, he starts a fight with his ex-lover Lutz which ends with them actually French kissing and making love in front of a frenzied crowd of homophobes, who start hurling abuse and beers and chairs at the cage.
I can't think of a more suitable image for the absurdity and the ferocity of gay hatred in this country.

Food, Inc.

See it and barf.
It doesn't really tell you something you don't know, but it does so cogently and convincingly.
That 1 in every 4 children now has diabetes. 1 in 2 or 3 if the child is poor.
That 3 or 4 companies control all the "food" we eat.
That farming has become hell for animals and humans.
That the "regulators" who work at the FDA are former lobbyists for the food industry.
That everything you eat and even stuff you don't has corn in it.
That a lot of what you eat has stuff it shouldn't have in it.
That the reason for the massive e-coli outbreaks is that cows are fed corn instead of grass.
That basically when we are eating beef, we are eating cow manure (I find the disclaimers of food companies to cook the meat to within an inch of charred, the height of cynicism. They are the ones who should not be providing us with extra ingredients like e-coli. It should not be our responsibility to kill those germs).
That those angelic companies like Tom's of Maine that you think are righteous are actually owned by Colgate, like Ben and Jerry's is owned by Unilever.
But I learned that the reason why junk food is cheap and broccoli isn't is because the government subsidizes corn and soybeans, but not other crops.
I also learned that all those Mexicans y'all hate so much are here working in subhuman conditions in meatpacking plants and other industrial hellholes because they used to be corn farmers back in Mexico who stopped making a living after NAFTA dumped cheap American corn on Mexico. I know that it is the workers that get arrested and deported, not the businesses that hire them illegally. But then Food, Inc is a cornucopia of outrage and it is important that you see it at your local multiplex. Ha.
I read a review of Methland in the New York Times, a book that explores the life of an agricultural town in Iowa that has been devastated by the meth epidemic. Why? Because its citizens are now working for industrial farms, and their labor is so dehumanizing, they'd rather cook up meth in their kitchens and set fire to themselves in a drug induced haze. I wish this connection had been made in the movie.
This is an activist movie, so it's interactive, if you so desire.

The height of marketing chutzpah:
Some house guests of mine bought a two liter bottle of Canada Dry Ginger Ale with Green Tea and Antioxidants. This is an unintended corollary of the good work of people like Michael Pollan, who are trying to teach Americans how to eat healthily and ethically. The corporations steal his nutritional mantras and apply them to their crap. So now you can guzzle Ginger Ale that may cause your teeth to rot and your kids to have diabetes and delude yourself that you are getting nutrition out of it.

By the way, I'm writing a letter to Coke asking (as a consumer, I'm sure they will listen) them to make Coke with sugar cane, as opposed to high fructose corn syrup. It's tastier and it is a little better for you. Mexican Coke is made with sugar and it is less cloying and much better than the local one. As far as I could tell from the labels of Coke in France, they use sugar cane too. I'm sure it is because both Mexico and France are trying to protect their agricultural interests. You can try Mexican Coke it if you live near any Mexican bodega.