Product: Dodgeball/Borat Bonus Preview Disc (2004)
Rating: 5.0
Most amusing
Saw this movie while bouncing along the jet stream on an Airbus from Paris to Hong Kong. The thoughtful designers of the latest Airbus give even us peons in coach our own screen. Therefore I saw this as a long-term Fearful Flyer (with the additional *frisson* that we flew over the very scary border between Iraq and Iran). It is to this film's credit that it took my mind over my completely hypothetical sorrows.On a deep level, this movie is a powerful social critique of an America in which (1) no-one ever really "grew up" and (2) the most retrograde and barbaric high-school pecking orders remain as a result.Ben Stiller plays what the Yuppie has become, a complete a-hole of the sort that has littered Mt Everest with detritus as members of this caste "achieve" the Dream by trashing the roof of the world.He is confronted by the left behind, a lost America of love in which people ate a plate of ham and eggs and looked out the window.One knows that a neo-Capraesque resolution is more or less fore-ordained and one watches with pleasure as it is jokingly arrived at.The film makes a joke of the Hitler Jugend culture which pervades America while not speaking its name, a culture of systematic sexual and racial humiliation which uses organized sports mostly to make people feel terrible about themselves.The next step would be a remake of the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner but the "serious sports" genre died out in the 1970s to be replaced by movies in which the "loser" doesn't get so much as to set himself apart (as does the runner) but is essentially co-opted, like Rocky, into the immortal System.To its credit, this movie makes the System a joke. But the next step would do far more violence to sensibilities than this.