Warning: There are spoilers in this review.
Sacha Baron Cohen—British comedian and star of the Ali G Show, as well as the movies Bruno and Borat—has worn out his welcome.
In The Dictator, directed by Larry Charles ( Bruno, Borat, Seinfeld ) , Cohen makes a mockery of the First Amendment. Having run out of Ali G characters to adapt to feature-length films, Cohen invents a sexually ambiguous Saddam Hussein-like dictator, General Aladeen of Wadiya, who travels to what he calls "The Devil's Nest of America" ( a.k.a. Manhattan ) for a UN summit where he gets secretly expunged by his right-hand man, Tamir ( Ben Kingsley, Ghandi ) , and replaced by a "simple" Wadiyan peasant.
While in the United States, Aladeen—the Wadiyan Golden Globe-winning star of You've Got Mail Bomb—falls in love with Zoë ( Anna Faris of Scary Movie ) , a Jewish woman who changes him from a democracy-despising dictator to a freedom-loving one. After Aladeen marries the feminist liberationist, Zoë announces the opening of women's centers on Good Morning Wadiya while Aladeen continues developing nuclear weapons on the side with his pal and engineer, played with some comic relief by Aasif Mandvi.
Don't miss the celebrity cameos by Edward Norton, who gets paid to receive fellatio by a Chinese businessman Chang Lau ( Bobby Lee of Pineapple Express, Harold and Kumar ) and an appearance by Megan Fox as a high-class hooker who ranks among Aladeen's celebrity sex partners—a list that also includes Lindsay Lohan and Bryan Cranston ( of TV's Breaking Bad and Malcolm in the Middle ) . Saturday Night Live's Fred Armisen appears as an anti-Aladeen restaurant host in the fictional Little Wadiya, Queens, N.Y.
In the action leading up to Cohen's teachable moment about U.S. hypocrisy, Aladeen turns, The Free Earth Collaborative—Zoë's pro-feminist, anti-racist organic produce store—into a well-oiled machine so that she can win back her contract with the Lancaster hotel, where Aladeen will stop his double from signing a new democratic constitution for Wadiya. While turning the grocery store into a mini-dictatorship glorifying their passionate manager, Zoë, Aladeen haphazardly saves the day by delivering a customer's child on the floor of the store. Here, Aladeen and Zoë bond romantically for the first time—with their hands elbow deep in the woman's cervical cavity.
Writers Cohen, Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer resort to gross-out humor only to make a moot comparison of the United States to a dictatorship where 1 percent of the population controls the wealth and banks get bailed out by the government who are in the pockets of the corporations.
Inside Job, Too Big to Fail and other films have covered this topic. We don't need Noam Chomsky to tell us that you can't wage a war on a political ideological held by terrorists or that the conglomerated media is a pundit press with policies that dictate entertainment value over investigative journalism. We are living it, and The Dictator is basically infotainment. What the film does do well is reiterate an issue echoed by the Occupy Movement, which counts for a pretty small population of citizens actively engaged in lobbying their government. Consider that less than 40 percent of registered voters turn out at the polls for general elections.
Aside from the clever politically incorrect jokes you'd be too embarrassed to repeat without fear of decapitation, The Dictator expertly remixes popular American songs into Arabic-sounding tracks with vibrato voices and a sitar in place of other instruments. For example, there are Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On," sung by Mohamed Amer, and R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" reconfigured by MC Rai, who also had a song in the movie Rendition, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Meryl Streep. The Dictator is a Paramount Pictures release. It opens Wed., May 16.
Preview:
Bernie stars Jack Black ( School of Rock ) as the flamboyant Bernhardt Tiede II, the prime suspect in the murder of crotchety Texan widow Marjorie Nugent ( played by Shirley MacLaine ) . The movie is based on a true story that took place in Carthage, Texas, in 1997. Matthew McConaughey—who will star in the upcoming stripper movie Magic Mike—plays District Attorney Danny Buck Davidson. Director Richard Linklater ( Before Sunset; Dazed and Confused ) was inspired to write Bernie after reading an article in Texas Monthly by Skip Hollandsworth ( the co-writer of this film ) .
Although there were suspicions by the men in a local coffee shop that Bernie was "a little light in the loafers," the socially conservative Carthage residents defended him despite the overwhelming evidence that Bernie not only murdered Mrs. Nugent, but donated money in her name to citizens in need. Among other signs of his sexual preference were 50 videotapes of men performing "explicit acts" confiscated from his home by the police. Bernie was so well-liked by the townspeople that no one believed he committed the murder.
The real Bernie was known for putting on a good funeral, if that is any suggestion of his guilt. He would cruise around town in his Lincoln Continental wearing colorful Tommy Hilfiger outfits and apparently showed no interest in women besides his travel buddy and sugar momma, Mrs. Nugent. The opportunity to see Black try to steal the show should be worth the price of admission. It opens Friday, May 18.
Film notes:
—Natalie West ( TV's Roseanne ) and Gaby Hoffmann ( Field of Dreams, Uncle Buck, Sleepless in Seattle ) star in Nate & Margaret, a new film by Chicago-based queer filmmaker Nathan Adloff, premiering at Gene Siskel Film Center Friday, June 8-12. West and Adloff play two halves of a modern-day Harold & Maude-type duo—the difference being that Nate is gay. Adloff co-starred in the Shumanski Brothers' Blackmail Boys, which features Chicago Mumblecore director Joe Swanberg as a closeted anti-gay evangelist who gets blackmailed by two young lovers who need money to get married.
—The popular Gay men's film series More For Gay Men Movie Night screens Just a Question of Love, the unforgettable French drama about a lab student and his supervisor who fall in love over petri dishes and microscopes. It shows at Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted St., on Friday, May 18, at 6:30 p.m.
—The only exclusively bisexual movie night in the city will screen Bedrooms & Hallways, Monday, May 21, at 7 p.m. at Center on Halsted. The movie night takes place every third Monday of the month.
—Acclaimed Chicago-based queer filmmaker Ky Dickens ( Fish Out of Water ) will hold a fundraiser for her new documentary, Sole Survivor, at Vertigo Sky Lounge, 2 W. Erie St., atop the Dana Hotel, 6-9 p.m., on Tuesday, May 29. The film follows commercial-aviation disaster survivors such as Jim Polehinke, co-pilot of Comair Flight 5191 that crashed in Lexington, Ky., on Aug. 27, 2006. Sole Survivor documents Polehinke adjusting to life without the use of his legs and the case being made to exonerate him of the charge that the plane crashed solely due to pilot error.
