I had exactly what the the title of the movie is: a Déjà Vu. Denzel Washington sure had wasted his talent with the type of Hollywood’s action crap that you still know what goes on when you wake up twenty minutes before the film ends. The hero character is not even a Denzel role, but more like a Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone. I should have known better than to pick a film based on my favorite actor without taking a sneak peak at the preview.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is both ridiculously funny and ridiculously sad. Two guys (one skinny, one fat) wrestle naked against each other in homosexual-suggested positions is ridiculously funny. Get recommendation from a gun shop owner on which weapon to best kill the Jews is ridiculously sad. Support Bush’s War on Terror and yearning for the president to “drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq” is ridiculously funny. Eat cheese made from a woman’s tittie is ridiculously sad. Or should it be the other way around? Bush is sad and tittie is funny. Love it or hate it, Sacha Baron Cohen’s shameless humiliation will make you laugh, even when he washes his face with toilet water—the kind of stupidity that only comedian could pull off. Then again, humiliation should not be in your dictionary if you’re a comedian.

Caught Wanda Sykes’s Sick and Tired on HBO the other night, and she cracks me the hell up. Lesser profanity and lighter-handed on racism than Chris Rock, but she is on point with her comic reliefs as a stand-up comedian, especially on her sarcastic references. For example, check out a clip of “Men Aren’t Dog.” Further on men, she wishes that she could rip our eyeballs out and shove them up our butt to let us see for ourselves what an asshole we are. I have to give that one to her, but her view on “getting old” that still stuck in my mind. As we’re aging, we just “don’t give a fuck.” And “‘I don’t give a fuck’ just flies out of my mouth,” she continues, “Even if I don’t say it, I think about it.” As for her presentational skill, she is calm, cool, and effortless throughout the show. I’ll definitely looking forward for more of her work.

It’s about time Martin Scorsese takes us back to the mean street. The Departed, a remake of Hong-Kong Infernal Affairs, is bloody enjoyable. Both Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon were giving their fine performances as lead roles; Mark Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin were superb as supporters. Jack Nicholson is my man, but when it comes to gangster’s boss, I have to go with Robert De Niro. Nicholson has his versatility and beastivity (The Shining), but he’s too much of a lovable man to play a top-dog character. The man’s facial expression, however, is still on the money, especially when he imitates the rat. With top-notch acting, brain-blowing glory, and foul-mouthing language, Scorsese has created an entertaining gangsta shit since Goodfellas.

Hans Petter Moland’s The Beautiful Country recaptures the heart-wrecking experience of the boat-fleeing Vietnamese. With his understated charisma, Damien Nguyen—who plays an Amerasian escaping Viet Nam to find his American G.I. father—takes us on a boat ride that would leave our soul shattered, especially for those that had been through it. The hardest scene to watch is when Binh drops the body of his little brother Tam—plays by Tran Dang Quoc Thinh, an adorable little boy—into the sea. With the support of sexy Bai Ling, badass Tim Roth, and compassionate Nick Nolte, The Beautiful Country is a magnificent epic filled with bone-crushing emotions and striking visuals.

In Laurent Cantet’s Heading South, Albert (Lys Ambriose), a waiter at a tourist hotel in Haiti, confesses what his grandfather used to tell him: “the white man was an animal.” And today (1970 is when the film took place) their dollars is even more poisonous than their weapons. He went on, “Everything they touch turns garbage.” If Viet Nam is the white men’s “heaven on earth” (as I have been told), Haiti is the white women’s paradise. Single, old, white female can throw their dollars around and get the best sex from young, handsome, black Haitian—the exoticness they can’t get from the black Harlem brothers, according to one of the characters in the film.

Heading South revolves around the love triangle between two old white females and a young gigolo. Ellen (Charlotte Rampling) is a 55-year-old, French-literature teacher at Wellesley who spend her summer time at the hotel pimping young boys. Brenda (Karen Young)—a forty-eight-year-old, divorced, woman—returns to the hotel three years after she got her first orgasm from a fifteen-year-old Legba (Ménothy Cesar). She is obsessed with him not because she loves him, but she loves the way he looks at her. Something that no else, not even her ex-husband, had looked at her the same way. And of course, Legba is the sexy guy that made these old women falling head over hill for him. He got the pimp juice, the six-pack, and the seductive smile.

With Haitian’s gorgeous beach, well-crafted story, and convincing performances, Heading South is emotional, erotic, and political as well—not to mention both the soul- and physical- baring scenes. After all, money can’t buy love. You can only get what you paid for. But then again, money still rules. If you have cash, why need love?

Watched Little Man last night. The film is a typical Wayans Brothers’ standard; therefore, you should know what to expect. You just have to leave your senses at the door before walking into the theater. It’s not a bad thing to do when you just need some mindless chuckles. Especially after a long and hard day at work, you just want to laugh away without having to think much. As tasteless as the jokes are—when Vanessa (Kerry Washington) kisses “Little Man” Calvin (Marlon Wayans) on his tummy, he pushes her head down further—they speaks out what most men think but never share. On a parenting note, I am not sure how the film is passed for PG-13 rating, when the content is filled with sexual comics.

Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion takes us inside the final performance of a live radio show that lasted for thirty years. The Fitzgerald Theater, in which the musical show takes place, will be demolished and turn into a parking garage. With emotion, joy, and a bit of mysteriousness, the strength of the film is in its subtlety. The camera gives us enough time to get to know the characters without slowing down the paste. Many big stars are in the film including Vassar’s alumni Meryl Streep (an oldie but goodie), Virginia Madsen, Woody Harrelson, Kevin Kline, John C. Reilly, and Tommy Lee Jones, and they all done a fantastic job of not only acting but singing as well. I enjoy both the heartfelt performances as well as the whimsical comedies they brought to the production.

I was planning on writing a review for Paul Greengrass’s United 93, but I didn’t get to watch the entire film. I had to walk out of the theater halfway into the movie or else I would have thrown up. The jerky camera work was torturing. The subject matter alone is sensitive, and the unprofessional, homegrown filming style makes it impossible to bear. Do we really need a poor-quality motion picture to remind us the darkest day of America? Here is what Manohla Dargris, film critic of the New York Times, has to say:

Sept. 11 has shaped our political discourse and even infiltrated our popular culture, though as usual Hollywood has been awfully late to that table. Yet five years after the fact and all the books, newspaper and magazine articles, committees and scandals later, I think we need something more from our film artists than another thrill ride and an emotional pummeling. “United 93” inspires pity and terror, no doubt. But catharsis? I’m still waiting for that.

Mia Goldman who is a Vassar alumna presented a preview screening of her debut Open Window to the Vassar community last Wednesday. Goldman wrote the script, directed, and edited her own work. The film, which will hit the theaters in September, is based on Goldman’s personal tale regarding to a woman’s struggling to recuperate after being raped and beaten. The sweet life with her fiancé and everyone around her turns sour after the incident as the victim tries to deal with her drama.

Although the subject is heavily intense, Goldman throws in a few appropriate jokes to lighten up the atmosphere. The chemistry between the actors—Robin Tunny, Joel Edgerton, Cybill Shepherd, and Elliot Gould—is wonderful, but the storyline is not so moving. The pace is 97 minutes long, but it seems much longer. The problem is that the film tries to get a message across instead of delve into the art. A great example is when Izzy (the victim) explained to the psychiatrist why she didn’t report to the police. Her reasoning was that she made a promise to him not to tell anyone so that he wouldn’t kill her. She went on and explained that she saw some humanness in his eyes when they exchanged a few lines, even though he slapped her, threatened to stick a screwdriver into her head, made her blew him, and raped her. If I could remember correctly, the psychiatrist responded with something like Izzy had begun a relationship with the rapist. Now that is something interesting. Unfortunately, the film never came back to that topic again.

Other then that, I don’t see Open Window as being distinctive from other sexual-assaulted films. Victims were raped, humiliated, and remained silence trying to deal with it. From a male and a foreigner viewpoint, I find it ironic because America is one of the most voiced countries in the world. We express ourselves freely and blatantly from politic to sex to anything else. Yet when it comes to rape, we’re having a hard time fronting it. If Open Window is based on a true story, I am sure the guy who raped her would be watching it, patting himself, and saying, “Damn! I did her good.”