The Witches

"Witches are women who have subsumed their anger, right?" That's a question Angelica Huston asked her interviewer a few years ago to promote a new film she was starring in. Much of the conversation, it seems, centered on Huston's thoughts on micro-aggressions toward women and the anger that such acts can produce. "Everything about [witches] hurts," she continued, "and every time they look in the mirror they hate what they see. They're so great to play because they're just furious—and everything dreadful happens to them."

That's a nice quote to keep in mind when watching The Witches, the 1990 adaption of Roald Dahl's novel (which was also adapted on HBO this year starring Anne Hatheway and Octavia Spencer) released during a Hollywood crave for such comedy horror. (It was released three years after The Witches of Eastwood and three years before Hocus Pocus.) The witches in this film are indeed angry, but the story doesn't much want us to sympathize with them. They are, after all, out to destroy every child in the world. Huston plays the leader of the witches, and she's disappointed that there are still so many young kids running about in England. (From her name and accent, it sounds like Huston's witch is from Germany.) She devises a plan that gets rid of the children once and for all. It's not clear why they hate kids so much, but they are indeed furious.

Taking place in idyllic locations in Europe (and yet everything is drab at best and hellish at worst), Grandma Helga (played by Swedish actress Mai Zetterling in her final acting role) chomps on cigars as she tells her sweet grandson, Luke (Jasen Fisher), tales of witches. Witches, she tells him, are actually very ordinary, or at least they appear ordinary to everyone else. These are not the witches of the Harry Potter franchise or of The Blair Witch Project, but sort of a hybrid, simultaneously normal and monstrous. They present themselves as regular people, though they all wear wigs; only the pink hue in their pupils can give them away. To add some details to her stories, Helga includes a horrifying anecdote from her youth in Norway in which a witch hunted down a young girl and kidnapped her. What became of the girl is uncertain, even to the audience, but Helga does tell us that her friend started appearing in paintings, getting older as the years went on, until one day she just disappeared. As for the witch, well, "witches never get caught." Despite all the terror Grandma Helga speaks of, Luke seems genuinely entertained by the tales, unfazed as he is inquisitive.  

After a domestic tragedy, Helga decides to move Luke back to the United States. But before they do that, they take a short trip to England, where they'll stay in a hotel on the coast and relax before continuing their journey. The hotel looks straight out of "Mr. Bean in Room 426" from Mr. Bean. Speaking of Mr. Bean, Rowan Atkinson himself plays the manager of the hotel. He's fairly competent at his job, though he doesn't like children, either, scolding Luke for bringing two mice into the hotel and threatening Helga before she outwits him and turns the tables on him. At any rate, Luke and Helga have far bigger problems that an unsympathetic hotel manager, for a large convention is using the hotel for their conference. And this isn't just any ordinary group; they're actual witches instead, secretly meeting to discuss their plan to eliminate every child from England. 

Their leader is the Grand High Witch, who uses the name Eva Ernst. She's the one played by Huston, not long after winning an Oscar and then appearing as Morticia Addams in two Addams Family films. For her really iconic scenes, in which she is covered in grotesque prosthetic makeup, she endured hours and hours worth of getting the makeup on and another five just to get it off; the prosthetics on her hands also made it problematic (her word) to use the restroom. Despite the misery of such filming conditions, she looks like she is having a blast.   

She's in good company, with Zetterling providing an effective performance and the two young boys, Fisher and Charlie Potter as Bruno, the hungry British boy who also finds himself mixed up in all this toil and trouble, doing as good a job as child actors generally did in the early 1990s. But the production elements of the movie are the most spectacular, with Jim Henson's Creature Shop creating a variety of different-sized puppet mice. They look far more interesting to watch than all the CGI mice in the new adaption, and they elevate the film's humor (like when Helga tries to convince Bruno's spoiled, uninterested parents that he's been turned into a mouse) as well as the adorableness quality. How can you not find it cute when Luke in mouse form says, "One of the cooks tried to cut off my tail with a carving knife"? The puppetry really works. This was the final film Henson supervised before his death the same year The Witches was released. Dahl also died in 1990. 

I don't seem to recall ever having watched The Witches as a child, although part of me wants to say that I vaguely remember the scene of Huston's character disturbingly pulling off her face to reveal her true self. It is a film, though, that apparently has haunted an entire generation of children. The director, Nicolas Roeg, wrote in his autobiography that he screened an early version of the film for his young son, who was so creeped out that he ran out of the room and hid, which convinced Roeg to further edit this children's film. What remains the spookiest moments besides the witches themselves are the scenes of the boys turning into rats (even scarier than when boys turn into donkeys in Pinocchio) and the real-life horror of adults harming children. 

For much of the roughly ninety minutes of the film, I couldn't quite decide if I liked it or not. What harms the film is its over-reliance on "...and then..." aspects to storytelling; that is, one thing constantly leads to another and that's it. It seems like something would cause and complicate another thing (it is a tale, after all, of witches turning children into mice), but it instead feels like the stakes aren't there, or at least the movie doesn't care if you care about such stakes. Another disappointing trait is its denouement, deviating strongly from the novel. I initially wrote in my notes that the film had a "peculiar but un-formulaic ending", and then moments later I crossed it out. "Guess not," I wrote. Apparently, they filmed and tested two versions, but the one they predictably went with deeply angered Dahl. 

This isn't to say that it's a bad film. While I would hesitate showing it to very young children, most kids (and adults) would probably like it, whether in 1990 or 2020. It's good, if perhaps overly creepy, fun. The witches might not gain our sympathy, but even in the most unsightly scenes, you can't look away. 

Happy Halloween  

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Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

Fourteen years after Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Sacha Baron Cohen as the Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev is back in a surprise film made in secret over the year. There had been hints that Cohen was up to something throughout the past few months, but now we have our answer in this biting satire. For the past decade-plus, Cohen has mostly shifted away from this sort of thing that made him famous and instead focused on mainstream films, some of which he's good in (Hugo), some of which he's not so good in (Les Misérables), and some of which you probably forgot he was in (Sweeney Todd). (He also appears in this year's The Trial of the Chicago 7, though his performance is less interesting than the others in the ensemble cast.)   

Why is Borat back in the spotlight? He is tasked by the Kazakh government with repairing the damage he did with his previous film by offering a bribe to the leaders of the U.S. government (yes, those ones). (Though I've never been to Kazakhstan, I doubt it's anything like the Kazakhstan depicted in this film. The scenes taking place in Kazakhstan were filmed in Romania, and Cohen's "Kazakh", for example, is actually Hebrew.) Once reaching American shores, he is disturbed to discover that his teenage daughter, Tatur (played by Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova), has snuck into a crate and now must join him in his mission. Their journey puts them on a path across the U.S., predictably meeting a large span of people, including an Instagram influencer, anti-maskers, and a QAnon dummy duo.   

After making Bruno in 2009, I recall hearing Cohen mention in interviews that his days of doing these kinds of mockumentaries were over because people would recognize him and nobody would fall for his pranks. The latter is definitely not true, as Cohen has continued releasing such works as recently as a few years ago with the Showtime series Who Is America? For this story, however, Borat knows that people will recognize him on the street, so he often disguises himself, often in beards and cowboy hats. Once in the U.S., Borat enthusiastically wants to meet the "magnificent new premier" of the United States. When this doesn't work, he compromises and settles for the "vice premier", "Mikhael Pence". That brings Borat and his daughter to an annual conservative meeting where Pence is giving a speech (about how prepared the government is for the coronavirus, which is such a devastating remark that no further comment is needed). Dressed in a Trump fatsuit and somehow sneaking past security, he interrupts Pence's speech to try and give him his daughter. Alas, Borat is unable to present his daughter as a bribe to the vice premier. Borat feels he is out of options until Tutar comes up with the idea that they should go for the next big thing: "America's Mayor", Rudy Giuliani. The scenes with Giuliani are the ones that have created the highest amount of attention and controversy, especially in recent days. 

Giuliani has defiantly said he didn't fall for Cohen's trick. From the looks of it in every possible way, this appears to be a bizarre claim to make. Incidentally, Giuliani's client, Mr. Trump, similarly boasted that he didn't fall for Cohen's prank when he was interviewed by the comedian in 2003 (with Cohen playing another one of his characters, Ali G), though Cohen pointed out that it took Trump a lot longer than most to figure out what was going on. Giuliani has also argued he did nothing wrong. Aside from the ethics of trying to sleep with a journalist who just interviewed you and cheating on your girlfriend, this is technically true. Giuliani, for the record, has been married thrice before, including, as Cohen reminds us and Giuliani (possibly to his face), once to his second cousin. 

What works in Borat 2 is essentially what has always worked in these kind of prankumentaries by Cohen: exploiting a toxic and peculiar combination of American politeness, ignorance, and racism to expose a dark side of society many would rather not discuss. I did not rewatch the first film in preparation for this one, but it seems that the "subsequent moviefilm" focuses not simply on anti-Semitism, but also combating sexism, racism, and authoritarianism. Anti-Semitism does show up, though. Tutar tells her father that she has used Facebook to discover the "truth" about the Holocaust, essentially that it did not happen. (Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have been frequent targets of Cohen's in recent years.) 

What doesn't work in Borat 2 is that there's dual discomfort in the awkwardness he presents. For one, my tolerance for cringe humor is much lower in 2020 than it was in 2006. Additionally, these days viewers are far more cognizant of how a character like Borat plays to our xenophobia; the character is like a leftwing version of South Park. Additionally, there's nothing Cohen can do to shock us anymore. On an episode of Da Ali G Show in 2004, Borat went to a bar in Arizona and sang a song called "Throw the Jew Down the Well" to a supportive audience that merrily joined in. Here, as Borat in disguise, he crashes a right-wing "March for Our Lives" rally in Olympia, Washington and sings a song about chopping up journalists "like the Saudis do." There's nothing surprising if the audience hoots and hollers to that, given the present political climate. 

I feel a bit of guilt in admitting that I still found myself laughing (a lot) at a character and idea I just called xenophobic, or at least borderline xenophobic. I don't know how to reconcile the fact that a character I find, regardless of its good intentions, to be problematic is still one who makes me laugh. It's something the left is often unwilling to talk about. I find Larry David funny, but his show Curb Your Enthusiasm contains every kind of offensive -ism you can name, and yet because he is who he is, liberals won't call him out for it. If it were Larry the Cable guy and not Larry David telling those jokes, there would be an uproar. 

But David and Cohen still make me laugh. The laughter I get from Borat is similar to seeing an old friend for the first time in a decade; there will likely be lots of laughter, even though it will be less frequent after about forty-five minutes, but eventually you might have to reconsider your friendship if he's not willing to evaluate his offensiveness. In essence, times have changed since I saw that friend fourteen years ago; I have changed. What do I do if my friend hasn't? At any rate, as problematic as it is, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is probably the funniest film of the year, a year in which there was little humor, in films or elsewhere.

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A West Wing Special to Benefit When We All Vote

In my mind, A West Wing Special to Benefit When We All Vote (aka the West Wing Reunion) is not the West Wing reunion we wanted or needed. Why? Because everything is so different now that the universe of The West Wing seems way too fantastical. So much time has passed since the show went off the air in May of 2006 that such a reunion seems misguided. I once mentioned the show when writing about House of Cards and the shows' differences in 2014. (How simpler a time 2014 was, even before we knew about Kevin Spacey.) "The West Wing might be what we want our political system to be," I wrote. "House of Cards might simply be what it is." The reality, though, is that Frank Underwood was nothing compared to the current mess we've been in for some time now. 

The West Wing was a series that served as a civics lesson, reminding viewers that we're all on the same team and we want the same things. How naive that all feels now. The past few years have shown that we are, in fact, not on the same team. If the Obama years showed us that so many people in the United States are still quite racist, the Trump years have showed us just how authoritarian many Americans are. Thus, in the midst of a pandemic that has left more than 200,000 Americans dead and an economy in the tank, with almost daily reminders of injustice against so many people, who would possibly be in the mood for another glib center-left lecture from West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin and company? 

It might have worked had Sorkin, writer Eli Attie, and the cast reunited for an update on where these characters are these days fourteen years after their fictional administration ended. Instead, the cast has reunited to recreate on stage (COVID precautions and all) an episode from season 3 in 2002 called "Hartsfield's Landing." The episode is named after the small town in New Hampshire called Hart's Location, one of the three small towns in New Hampshire that are the first to declare their results of the election around midnight. In the episode, the main drama is that China is threatening to act aggressively if Taiwan tests its Patriot missiles it purchased from the U.S. The subplot is a feuding press secretary C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney) and aide Charlie Young (Dulé Hill) going at it with pranks. President Jed Bartlett (Martin Sheen) is feeling the weight of all this pressure from China's saber-rattling, with two different games of chess with his speechwriters, Sam Seaborne (Rob Lowe) and Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) serving as some stress relief. 

It's a bit challenging to critique their acting because these are all performances we've seen before. Needless to say, it's a joy to see them again. These are some of the finest actors recreating some of their finest work. Sheen, in particular, is fantastic in one of his best roles of his legendary career. Sterling K. Brown is the newbie in the cast. He plays Chief of Staff Leo McGarry, who was played on the show by John Spencer until his death during the final season. Brown is a renowned actor, winning Emmy Awards for his work on The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story and This Is Us. But his performance as Leo is much less inspired than Spencer's, coming across as flat and unnatural. That never happened with Spencer.

Aside from the acting, this version of the episode just feels...awkward. The opening preamble by Bradley Whitford (who plays White House aide Josh Lyman) describing the project's inception and aims is surpassed in weirdness only by similar monologues from the other cast members. The gist of their speeches can probably be summarized as "if we can get just get one more new voter...", which (spoiler alert), they probably won't. As a friend pointed out, the people who watched The West Wing are not the people who aren't going to vote in elections. Fans of the show, though, are certainly going to have a reaction to this reunion, most of which will be positive. Some have called it a "home run". 

I am not one of them. This was not a home run, but a missed opportunity, dripping with Sorkin's misunderstanding of reality. I was a fan of the show as much as anyone, but we are lightyears away from how the world worked back then. Sorkin, Attie, and the others could have addressed this. The West Wing often worked as a reaction to the real world, with the show starting in the late 90s as Hollywood's wishful thinking of what a more ambitiously and proudly liberal Bill Clinton could have been. (Clinton, whose presidency doesn't exist in the West Wing universe, for some reason shows up here, as does Michelle Obama, Samuel L. Jackson, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.) Most of the show's run existed during the horrible years of George W. Bush, and while the show didn't spend every episode providing hypothetical alternative universes to how a Democrat might have handled some of the events of the time, it did take that route occasionally. And while the show ended before Barack Obama became president, many noted at the time how similar the fictional presidential race between Democrat Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits) and Republican Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda) mirrored the race between Obama and John McCain.  

It would have been captivating to have seen Sorking get Bartlet, Lyman, Cregg et al post-presidency reacting to whatever similar event might be going on in their universe. Instead, this reunion is a painful remind that we're a long way from 1999-2006, and, in some ways good and in some ways bad, we're never going back.

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