Word: countrymen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...With Borat, however, and Borat, my ethical reservations wilt beneath the giddy pleasure this film gave and gives me. It's the laugh that keeps on laughing. Accompanied by his obscenely obese producer Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian), Borat has come to the U.S. to make a documentary for his countrymen about the world's most powerful nation. He is a mass of homegrown superstitions (he brings with him "a jar of gypsy tears" to prevent AIDS) and prejudices (against Jews, whom he has apparently never encountered). Checking into a Manhattan hotel, he is accompanied by the manager into the elevator...
...Most of the movies so-called victims, however, ask for it. The film's running gag is that Borat, like all of his supposed countrymen, has a childlike fear of Jews (a joke, of course, since Cohen and most of the film's primary perpetrators are Jewish). In his home town, the annual event is the Running of the Jew; and when he and his team travel across the U.S., they decide to drive (in an ice cream wagon) because his producer "insisted we not fly, in case the Jews repeated their attack of 9/11." While in the South, Borat...
...Mexico border." Having won about 36% of the vote, he hardly has a robust mandate. But he has smartly stayed calm about his opponent's postelection outbursts, perhaps realizing how raw the memories of decades of PRI-engineered election fraud are in the minds of his countrymen. Calderón last week praised the electoral tribunal for "eliminating the insidious doubts" about his victory that he says López Obrador has planted. Still, when Calderón takes the presidential podium, he will face the more daunting task of eliminating Mexico's doubts about the future of its democracy...
...different shades of the cathedral's stonework: "It has taken seven centuries to produce this imperfection, which echoes the equally fascinating imperfection in our heads." But it's not merely a more optimistic spin that sets La Bella Figura apart. Rather, it's how intimately Severgnini discusses his countrymen - he makes you feel as if he's introducing you to old friends. Even though La Bella Figura poses as an introduction to the Italian mind, it's as much an introduction to the author, proving that he's just as contradictory as his countrymen. If he saw an elderly lady...
...Fouad Wehbe sucks on his houka pipe at the Rawda coffee house around the corner from my apartment on Sharia Pakistan in Damascus, the irony of his current plight is not lost on him. Last year, Wehbe, 26, joined thousands of his countrymen on the streets of Beirut to call for an end to Syria's domination of his homeland, and threw a heady, vodka-fueled "Liberation Festival" in his Hamra apartment when they officially withdrew. Then, last Thursday, the graphic designer, his parents and brother paid a cabdriver $2,500 to drive them out of Beirut to the heart...