Word: comicality
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...find sources for Baron Cohen's comic method in a lot of places. He's a great fan of Peter Sellers, and one Sellers role in particular hovers over everything Baron Cohen does - Chance the Gardener, the blank slate in Being There who provokes all those around him to expose themselves in some way. And then there's the other comic who was routinely described as a performance artist: Andy Kaufman. For starters, Borat owes a thing or two to Latka, the Ruritanian innocent that Kaufman played on Taxi. More important, Baron Cohen's approach calls to mind those Kaufman...
...movie's main problem was that many found it an unnecessary addition to the canon, with the primary plot strenuously exerting itself to achieve familiar challenges and triumphs. Only the unrelated, subsidiary scenes with Scrat the squirrel and his foxy new inamorata Scratte showed any comic pizazz. (These scenes were created by a different story team.) With the speed of Road Runner, the karma of Wile E. Coyote and, this time, the romantic obsession of Pepé Le Pew, Scrat is a walking, stalking lexicon of characters created by the immortal Chuck Jones. Blue Sky, the Ice Age studio, should...
...small town that seems to be under the curse of a female ghost and is certainly teeming with oddballs. It's the old story of the city slicker out-crazied by the remote rubes. Unfamiliarity with Malaysian film conventions may leave you wondering whether the tone is comic or melodramatic or simply extraterrestrial. No matter: enjoy the gorgeous neo-primitive imagery and the inexplicable shenanigans. We'll bet that even Malaysians were pleasantly baffled...
...never see them, but they're with you every time you fly. They record where you're going, how fast you're traveling and whether everything on your airplane is functioning normally. Their ability to withstand almost any disaster makes them seem like something out of a comic book. Known as the mysterious "black box," these flight-data recorders are actually not black but orange - and when a plane falls from the sky, they're sometimes the only thing that can help authorities discover exactly what happened...
...films it echoes, including Allen's own. It's common for reviewers of his recent work to cite an early triumph like Bananas or Annie Hall and find the new ones lacking. Whatever Works is different: it has that young-Woody fizz with a mature comic romanticism; it's been aged in wit. If Allen has a decade or two of films left in him and if he makes a really excellent one years from now, people will say, "It's terrific, but it's no Whatever Works...