Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. All you have to do to get in on the action is pick three films that relate to the week's theme and write a little bit about them!
This week on Thursday Movie Picks: Fish Out of Water movies. Which is VERY convenient for me, since I just watched one for another project! So why don't we start with that one...
Witness (Peter Weir, 1985) Harrison Ford received his only Oscar nomination (CAN YOU BELIEVE?!?) for playing Philadelphia cop John Brook, forced to hide out in Amish country after he gets shot trying to protect a young Amish boy who witnessed a murder. Weir and cinematographer John Seale cast quite a spell here, making Amish country feel like a lovely place to live, even if they don't have electricity and believe themselves to be superior to everyone else. The scene where the whole community comes together to raise a barn for a newlywed couple is just magnificent in every way. That the film is so good with the quiet drama that comes in Amish country makes its facility with the thriller elements that dominate the first and last twenty minutes even more impactful. PLUS: early screen appearances from Danny Glover, Viggo Mortensen, and MISS Patti LuPone herself!
...but most good Fish Out of Water tales are comic as opposed to dramatic, so....
My Cousin Vinny (Jonathan Lynn, 1992) MARISA TOMEI FOREVER, BITCHES! Look, My Cousin Vinny isn't some masterpiece of cinema or anything, but it's still funny as all get-out thanks to director Lynn's knack for staging (he also directed the comic masterpiece Clue) and the inspired comic stylings of the Oscar-winning Tomei as Mona Lisa Vito, stealing the film right out from under the nose of Joe Pesci (who is no slouch in the comedy department here). A rogue's gallery of great actors in key supporting roles take the rote city-slickers-in-the-sticks courtroom drama of the script and make it indelible with go-for-broke line readings that just kill. You're probably reciting some of them right now.
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Larry Charles, 2006) One of the best movie-going experiences of my life was seeing Sacha Baron Cohen's masterpiece mockumentary with my sister in a packed theater two weeks after it opened. Some films are just meant to be seen with the largest, most diverse crowd possible, and Borat is the king of those. That one viewing has colored all subsequent viewings of this for me. If you were somehow living under a rock in 2006, here's the deal: Baron Cohen went undercover in disguise as Borat, a reporter from Kazakhstan purportedly making a documentary about America, on a road trip from coast to coast, meeting with different people, attending various events, and getting an unwitting picture of America and Americans at their best and worst (but mostly worst). To say the film's timing was perfect would be an understatement: we NEEDED to laugh at ourselves in 2006, and boy did Borat ever deliver that in spades. Since most everything in the film was real (all the non-celebrities, and even most of the celebrities, had no idea it was Baron Cohen under that mop and ridiculous mustache and crazy accent), Borat almost is an actual documentary about the state of American social mores in the mid-00s. Baron Cohen's unbelievably committed, completely fearless performance is a hilarious master class in improv, but the film is so much more than that. This is social satire at its most brazen and biting, a ruthless takedown of American imperialism and exceptionalism that will probably never stop being relevant and ahead of its time.
