Claudia and I took in three movies in a row on Saturday. Every year or two we go crazy at the movies like this. We saw wildly different movies. The Ardman Studios animation “Flushed Away” was first. It was light, witty and entertaining. Next we saw Sweet Land a movie filmed in Minnesota and about Minnesota just after the Great War.
My Mother had an aunt who once taught High School German until the war but who had to switch to Spanish afterwards because German was taken off the curriculm after 1918. It was a sweet movie with very little dialogue from its taciturn Norwegian farmer who marries a German woman who speaks no English. She comes to America on his Norwegian parents’ recommendation. She is not treated well in Minnesota.
The movie was based on the very real anti-German sentiment stirred up by the war. After church I talked to an older couple who we’d seen at the movie the day before. The wife’s Grandmother had been a German bride to a Norwegian famer and the hostilitiy was such that the mother-in-law wouldn’t let her daughter-in-law inside her home.
The third film was Borat. It was crass and funny. If you are over sixty and reading this blog don’t go see it. If you do you will see simulated (I think) public pooping and a couple naked, ethnic men wrestling in the 69 position. While these men are the stars most of the humor is supplied unintentionally by people who were conned into being filmed with the “foreigner” “Borat.”
The plot in a nutshell: Borat is visiting America to film a documentary for his hopelessly backward, goat romancing, people back homen in Kazakhstan. Although only scheduled to shoot his movie in New York City he falls in love with Pamela Anderson after watching Baywatch on his hotel television. He then sets out with his director and his chicken on an unplanned roadtrip to find the woman of his dreams. Much to his credit he only does this after discovering that his unpleasant wife has been raped and or eaten (I can’t remember which) by a wild beast.
Various innocents are now suing the comedian for conning them into signing releases which permit the movie makers to show them in the movie. I don’t blame them.
