From Ali G. To Borat – It’s STILL Not Funny…

I first saw an Ali G. show years ago.

I laughed.

I didn’t laugh much, but I did laugh once, as I ‘got’ the joke, and then something spectacularly simple happened; I no longer found it funny. Sacha Baron Cohen was, and continues to be, a one trick pony; 1 ) lie to people, 2) subject them to a false premise conducted by somebody pretending to be even more stupid than he really is, and 3) watch them get initially frustrated by the sheer idiocy put on display, before 4) they finally grow annoyed as they realize that this is nothing but a cheap offensive waste of their time.

That was Ali G then, and that, today, is Borat.

Needless to say, since Sacha is such a one trick pony, he can never quite play the same place twice, such is notoriety. Thus, having pretty much beaten a dead horse to shreds across the ocean, he now comes to Amerika – where the audience has not yet been vaccinated to his particular brand of social offense.

It might be interesting to dwell on the possible motivations inducing a one trick Zionist comedian hack to choose a real nation, and in fact, a nation whose population is mostly Islamic to be the home of the idiot character he portrays – when a fictional nation would have served just as well. One wonders if the extra toxicity was necessary, but that is an issue deserving of a whole article in and of itself.

Of course this tendency on Sacha Baron Cohen’s part is not new. It is certainly no coincidence that his previous idiot of a character was called Ali.

It might also be interesting to wonder how an American media might react to the inverse situation; that a Muslim actor make a movie in which he plays a stupid, rude, crass, offensive, creepy, clumsy, buffoon of a Jew with the likely name of, say, Cohen.

The charges of antisemitism, I suspect, would in sheer volume drown out the cacophony of the wars raging in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Those charges of antisemitism would be leveled not only at the actor, the producers, the studio responsible, the director, but also, I suspect, at those viewers who pay to watch this offense and who laugh, and laugh, and laugh…

As though this were funny.

And yet – no such charges are spoken against Sacha Baron Cohen, or at Everyman Studios, or Four By Two, or Gold/Miller Productions, or One America, or 20th Century Fox, or Larry Charles – or the 837 theaters that screened the movie, or the audiences that have paid upwards of $70 million to enjoy the vicious venom of a vicarious racism.

How did we get here?

Wargames

[after playing out all possible outcomes for Global Thermonuclear War]

Joshua: Greetings, Professor Falken.
Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua.
Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

Strangely powerful movie, having just re-watched it. It’s lost none of the power it had when I was a teenager and saw it for the first time. Granted, it was cheesier in retrospect, but the main idea is both powerful and on the dot, and the main sequence at the very end – when Joshua is going through all the possible scenarios is heart wrenching when considered in context.

I wonder if this is what Gardner might have meant by moral fiction?

Homework.

Bush Assassination : Watch The Film!

“Set in October 2007, the 90-minute drama uses a mix of archive footage, computer generated imagery and documentary techniques to portray Bush’s assassination and America’s reaction to it. Death of a President, which will also headline the Toronto film festival, will be seen first in this country on sister channel More 4 before being repeated on the main channel.”

Yup.

Read the rest right here.

Censorship

My name is interdict.

I bask in the radiance of custom, and I cloth myself in the cloak of tradition.

I am a headache short of a full-blown migraine. I am a sword’s sheath, although sometimes others might look at me and see only a prophylactic.

I call myself inoculation, but they call me spermicidal. Some rise to my defense; the good ones, those who understand piety, and perhaps even, those who have been led to identification with despair.

It is I that comes across the dangerous gnosis, and it is I who protects the meandering masses from its perils. I take upon myself the cross of decadence and lust. I am the last bastion of an endangered cleanliness, one worthy only of the very best detergent advertisements.

I am unchanging and unyielding.

Like the last remaining hexagram of an I-King destroyed, I am a token of that which has yielded. Yielded, and yielded once again – a yin by brute force, quite formidably unchanging.

Once a year?I let something by, and, invariably, the force is consuming. Millions of tickets are sold, and the people rush to the film festivals. With a flare worthy of the grandest of arts the movie titles are enhanced, transformed, and subsumed into a form far more flirtatious than their original counterparts had the temperament to be.

Am I testing the people?

Or am I giving in to them – or perhaps – supplying them with a morsel?

It matters not. I see how they react. They rush. They are a stampede of lemmings, and they perform their motions with about as much grace as the metaphor would allow. They are a heaving, a pushing, struggling slobber. They rush to see what I, in my wisdom, have let past; the nipple made supreme.

My power is a drunkedness. I lay myself to waste.

I carefully sift through what reality attempts to offer, a reality that the mass does not have the breaking burden of having to do battle with. I bargain with it, a diabolical negotiator working for the preservation of the good, and that which must, at all cost, remain true. The narrative itself is subject to my prognosis, a prognosis achieved at great personal expense. It is only by great strength of will, and with the support of a sanctioned authority that I can withstand the corruption to which I am exposed.

There is no word I am more intimate with than pyhric.

From The Mouths of Boxers…?

Saw some of the new Muhammad Ali movie….and this is a direct quote from the script. I have no idea if Muhammad Ali ever said exactly this, but judging from what I’ve heard him say when confronted by reporters recently at the so-called Ground Zero of the former WTC, I wouldn’t be surprised. The man seems to have a way with words.

Check this out. This is obviously in relation to the Vietnam War, which he wanted nothing to do with.

“I ain’t burning no flag, and I ain’t running to Canada. I’m staying right here.

You wanna send me to jail? Fine, you go right ahead. I’ve been in jail for 400 years, I can be there for 4 or 5 more…but I ain’t going no 10,000 miles to help murder and kill other poor people! If I wanna die, I’ll die right here, right now…fighting you – if I wanna die. You my enemy, not no Chinese, no Viet-cong, no Japanese. You my opposer, when I want freedom. You my opposer when I want justice. You my opposer when I want equality. Want me to go somewhere and fight for you? You won’t even stand up for me, right here in America, for my rights and my religious beliefs. You won’t even stand up for me right here at home!”

In case you’re wondering what he said at the WTC, here it is; when asked how he felt about the terrorists belonging to his chosen (Islamic) Faith, he replied with “How do you feel about Hitler sharing your’s ?”

Yup. Whoever was aiming for this guy’s head seems to have totally missed ;)

Amen.

Links : .

More Muhammad Ali Quotes
Ali Audio Clips
The Other Side’s Argument – If you read this, read to the end…

Potter, My Ass. Watch The Ring Trilogy!

Forget Harry Potter. Harry Potter has always seemed like a complete rip-off of the Books of Magic by Neil Gaiman & John Ney Reiber. I am not qualified to make such a statement since I haven’t read the Potter books, but the main character, as well as the basic premise of the series does seem like a Gaiman/Reiber-Lite. Something I simply can’t get excited about.

However, I didn’t log on to throw pies at people. I was Hobbit-Searching ;) And I have Hobbit-found!

Go to the official Lords of The Rings movie web site and feed yourselves on the trailer. It’s available in several sizes and resolutions, if you have the bandwidth, go for the full screen version. It looks absolutely stunning.

I first read the books years ago. Went straight from Hobbit to the Rings Trilogy. Devoured the damn thing. Gandalf is easily a mythical figure, and goes through an amazing character-arc. Amazingly enough, so do the rest of the characters – all brilliantly written, the thing is a goddamn epic. A real, spine-tingling, hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck, book.

Save your cinema buck, watch Lord of The Rings – all three of them. You will be a better person for it, unless Peter Jackson, the director has totally mauled the books, which I do not think, judging by what little I saw, that he did.

Understand this, though. There is true darkness in the trilogy, and the evil characters don’t just splash and dash around yelling at victims and kicking bumbling lackeys, no – this is not a Disney Disaster – the bad guys in this one go for the spiritual jugular, and intend every bit of it. Even Gandalf has to pay a price, a price I was horrified at when I first read the story as a child. Like all true faerie stories, things come at a price, and there is, invariably, much suffering and grief, and heroes don’t giggle at the end.

At the end, they’re grateful enough to be alive, and are confronted with the task of healing the wounds of those left in the wake of a great battle.

As I said, it is epic.

Cultural Dialogue, My Ass…

Alright, for those not in the know, I live in Egypt. It is currently the month of Ramadan. All over what can be called Arabia, there are, among others, sincere people who are trying to use this time to get closer to the roots of their religion.

Family gatherings are more common, and there is, at least, an attempt at piety.

Showtime Arabia – or Big Ass Imported TV, has a modified logo – with a ‘Ramadan Karim‘ text attached to it. Showtime are interested in portraying, apparently, an appearance of mutability, and of cultural respect.

So…

How does that explain that, on Showtime, as I type out these words – at a time of night which in Ramadan approaches that of So7our. The last meal before the day before, the time of the intention of fasting – there are two naked lesbians on my TV screen?

I mean, where’s the logic in that?

Let’s be clear. I am not built of the strongest religious fibre. I have no issue with nudity, and welcome it fairly well most of the time. However, I am particularly prone to cultural breaches, and arrogant hypocrisy.

So, to re-phrase:

What the FUCK do Showtime fucking Arabia think they’re doing? One second they have a Ramadan Karim Modified Logo on their channel, and the next I’m watching a nudist-fuck-fest? Whose Ramadan, exactly, are they observing? This particular vision of Ramadan, this particular juxtaposition of taste, this feeble notion of complimentarity, is an oxymoronic insult.

I can, at worst, extrapolate paranoid scenarios; Showtime Arabia knows damn well what it’s doing. They present the modified logos and the Arabic programming (‘Secrets of Arab Stars’, interviews, etc…) to entice viewers to watch, and then, when they’ve got the family, along with children in front of the damn set, then – later, during So7our – while people are digesting, they slip in their cultural junk. If not for the intent of pollution the Arabian mindset, then at the very least, to make it more prone to this species of junk.

At best, I can imagine an intention that deludes itself into thinking it is good. There is an attempt here to construct something, a meme. A meme I recognize, because others have tried to create it too. I call it an attempt at a meme, rather than a proper meme, because it is so collapsible. Anybody who knows anything about it knows that it self-destructs.

To explain – I recall an article in some French paper, or something like that. Months ago, the headline, and that’s all I need to read, said something about ‘Gay Moslims’ – and how they were ‘mis-treated’.

So, let’s get clear on this, there are issues of terminology and propriety at stake.

1. A person, can, and may – be a Moslem.
2. A person, can, and may – be Gay.
3. A person cannot be both.

It’s like, for lack of a better example, saying you’re a White Negro.

Okay?

It simply doesn’t work. You may be one, you may be the other. But twisting the religion beyond it’s intent, in fact, in contradiction to its express intent, and wanting to appropriate its name is simply not on.

The problem with people like that is not how they choose to live, they may live as they choose. They are not, however, free to represent themselves as part of a group which no longer condones them.

So, Showtime – this is the point.

You want to show porn on the damn Movie Channel? Fine. Do it.

Do not, however, push the ‘we’re with Arabia during Ramadan’ schtik, you’re going to piss off all the wrong people.