Borat and Mamma Mia

While home visiting the family in November, I took my mom to the movies. We got there too late for whatever film it was we had planned on seeing. So we just randomly picked another one. I picked it actually. I liked the poster.

Borat. That’s what I picked. From the poster, I thought it was going to be an interesting sort of international picture that my mom and I would talk about for days and days. I wasn’t completely wrong. We are still talking about Borat, but our conversations don’t look much like I’d thought they would.

I suppose the majority of the audience knew what they were in for. They were mostly in their twenties and prepared to laugh at offensive jokes.

Borat is offensive from the first scene. You know that kind of humor that makes you laugh, but you feel a little guilty about laughing so you hold it in. I did hold it in for a while. But soon I was laughing with all the tweny-year-olds, laughing so hard my legs flew up to my chest and my stomach got a workout. My mom was stone cold.

Watching a movie you find endlessly funny with someone who is looking around to see if she knows anyone there because she would “just die” if her friends saw her is pretty surreal. Sometimes it makes you laugh even harder. The absurdity of it all. Sharing Borat with my mother, who would have ever guessed?

A few minutes into it I was worried we might have to leave. To be honest, my mom was a good sport. She stayed for at least the first thirty minutes. We had to leave when the fat guy was running around naked and Borat fell face first into his balls. That was really just too much.

The Lives of Others

If you haven't seen this movie, you must. "The Lives of Others" is a film about moral integrity and justice. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who wrote and directed the film, achieves what films rarely do; he develops a plot that appears simple and allows the story itself to reveal the complexity of human emotions and morality.

Set in East Berlin in 1984, the story is of an agent of the Stasi named Gerd Wiesler, played by Ulrich Muhe, who has a knack for identifying the enemies of the State. Fulfilling his Orwellian function, Wiesler is sent to spy on (or enter) the life of a couple, a writer and an actress. His mission is to find evidence of a conspiracy even though there is no reason to suspect that there will be any evidence. Indeed it is because the suspects have neither said nor done anything suspicious that the Stasi suspects them.

As Wiesler, a broken man whose life is the Stasi and who truly believes that the work he does is for the good of the country, listens in on their conversations about art,music, books and humanity, he becomes engaged in their lives. It may even be their innocence and goodness that most intrigues him. He learns from them. He begins to care for them and to care about what happens to them. The news of a friend's suicide is the turning point for all three main characters. The writer, Georg Dreyman (played by Sebastian Kock) plays Beethoven's "Appassionata" and tells his girlfriend, Christa-Marie Sieland (played by Martina Gedeck), that Lenin once said if he were to continue listening to this music he would not finish the revolution. As Wiesler listens in, observing how they comfort one another in their grief over their lost friend, a tear rolls down his cheek. Can anyone who has heard this music really be a bad person? asks Georg.

This is what makes the film so wonderful. Good and bad are not black and white. And the topic--that of the government invading the lives of its citizens even without reason and for the purpose of finding or fabricating evidence of a conspiracy--is one that should send a warning to US audiences. The torture of prisoners, the brutal interrogation tactics, the wiretaps and cameras watching every step, the fact that the government decides who is an enemy with or without proof, the censorship of art and artists. For those who value freedom and believe that by relinquishing some freedoms we will remain free, this film shows just how dangerous it is to give too much power to the powerful and just what it means to lose one's freedom.