Borat

What does it take to slap seen-it-all movie audiences out of their complacent stupors? If you want to move people or make them vomit from laughter, you have to come at something from a skewed angle or stage some elaborate stunt to jostle the jaded and make ’em think.

Better yet, why not do both and stage public bouts of nude man-on-horribly-obese-man wrestling? Welcome to Borat, a litmus test of extreme-cringe comedy that takes one joke — the fan-favorite fake-foreigner buffoon from TV’s Da Ali G Show bumbles his way across America — and sustains it beautifully for 90 minutes, the dictionary definition of a miracle. Sent to “the U.S. and A” to make a documentary for Kazakhstan TV, Borat Sagdiyev (Sacha Baron Cohen) glimpses a rerun of Baywatch and decides he must make Pamela Anderson his wife. Everyone together now: “High five!”

That’s the plot in 35 words or less, but this skeletal story structure is simply an excuse to journey through our nation’s heart of dimness and fool unsuspecting passersby with the character’s limitless inanities. You can just picture director Larry Charles (a Curb Your Enthusiasm veteran) coming up with new — and dangerously volatile — ideas every time they cross state lines. What would happen if this good-natured but woefully misguided visitor sang a bastardized version of the national anthem at a rodeo full of angry rednecks? What if he baited a Winnebago full of misogynistic, drunken frat boys? Or openly masturbated on Madison Avenue?

It’s not as if Baron Cohen and Co. have cornered the market in gross-out humor or gonzo fearlessness (unlike the new Jackass film, no one here is getting gored by angry bulls), but it’s what they do with this pranksterism that makes this film more than just another exercise in can-you-top-this? shock value. Anyone can hand a dinner-party hostess a baggie of his own feces or risk getting arrested several times over; Baron Cohen’s genius lies in how he uses the faux-ignorance and more offensive aspects of his East European caricature to expose others’ intolerance. When Borat spews ass-backward xenophobia and anti-Semitism, we know Baron Cohen (who is Jewish) is kidding. The rodeo cowboy who openly advocates murdering homosexuals, however, or the gun salesman who hands over a .45 when asked, “What gun is best for killing Jews?” aren’t aware that the joke is actually on them. For all of the questionable, thick-accented digs Borat makes at foreigners, the film’s sharpest barbs are aimed squarely at the dumb-ass, dark underbelly of the U.S. and A. And even if you don’t give a shit about cultural commentary, you still get to bask in the glory of statements such as “My wife’s vah-jeen, it hangs like the sleeve of a wizard.”

Taking taboo humor beyond its limits is one way to get someone’s attention; hard-core sex in every shape and stripe is another, and John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus has it in spades. Dysfunctional romances replace the rock operatics of 2001’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but Mitchell’s soapy tale of horny New Yorkers who frequent an anything-goes salon feels just as giddy and subversive. What’s shocking isn’t that Mitchell and his cast of semi-amateurs are engaging in graphic displays of oral sex, analingus and unsimulated copulation so much as the way the sex amplifies the intimacy of the piece; it’s porno, certainly, but with a sense of purpose. All that boning doesn’t salvage a group-huggy third act, but by the movie’s climax (snicker), you’re drawn into the lives of these characters to the point where you almost forget you’re watching one man sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” into another man’s asshole. Almost.

Genre convention, rather than good taste or puritanical mores, is what’s under attack in Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola’s arch look at the iconic French monarch. As Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not in It” plays over a shot of Kirsten Dunst chomping on pink bon-bons, you sense that Coppola is trying stage a royal revisionist coup on the historical biopic. Except the post-punk period piece never arrives, and what you get instead is a New Romantic–era music video writ large. The anachronistic ’80s soundtrack soon seems gimmicky, and any connection between pre-revolutionary France and late-twentieth-century materialism is never established. You can’t fault the film for not looking good — long live cinematographer Lance Acord, who can do wonders with lens flares and pastel palettes — but the director’s attempt to humanize or contextualize such an iconic figure only begs the question: What’s the point of shaking things up if it’s not clear where you’re going or where you’ve been?