I still haven’t seen the film. Looks as if I’ll have to wait till the weekend. Rod Dreher loved it. He couldn’t help thinking of a family funeral twenty years ago:
One distant relative of mine, an old man I had never met, drove in from far away... He was as country as a brown egg. After the funeral, the out-of-town relatives gathered at my folks' house, and I began serving coffee. This old coot, whose name I can't remember, said, "So, yer a college boy. They got many n--gers down thar at LSU?" I froze, and said something like, "They have all kinds of people there," and moved on. It would have done no good to have chastised this old man, and everybody's emotions were on edge anyway, given that it was a funeral. So I chose to overlook his remark, and that was the right thing to have done.
I suppose I would have made an easy mark for Borat, because if confronted by a bumbling, bigoted foreigner, I probably would have put on a rictus smile and tried to endure him until I could get away, for the sake of keeping the poor foreigner from feeling bad.
And he's intrigued by reports that Sacha Baron Cohen is to star in a re-make of Diner des Cons. A very droll movie. There was a none too successful West End stage version, as I recall: See You Next Tuesday. A rude title that foxed a few people.