Guest’s comedy makes it hard to play the prediction game without embarrassment, yet we will shamefully persist. Two shoo-ins for a best-actor nomination emerged in Toronto: Forrest Whitaker’s alternately charming and terrifying portrait of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the fictional “The Last King of Scotland” and Peter O’Toole’s elegant, heartbreaking turn as an aging actor in Roger Michell’s funny, touching “Venus.” This year’s “Crash”–a movie that split the critics between gushing fans and vehement detractors–may prove to be “Babel,” the latest star-studded exercise in gloom and doom from talented Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu (“21 Grams”). Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett headline a movie that cross-cuts between stories set in Morocco, Mexico and Japan. To those who went for it, this was Important filmmaking; to those of us who didn’t, it was merely self-important.
But none of these films created a media sensation like the British faux documentary “Death of a President,” a cautionary tale that uses the speculative assassination of George W. Bush to ponder the loss of civil liberties in the age of terrorism. The media frenzy, in fact, proved more interesting than the film itself, which offered no insights its liberal audience didn’t already know, and which was far less incendiary than its critics, who denounced the film sight unseen, could have suspected. For my money, a more slyly political film–and easily the most hilarious movie of the year–was the jaw-dropping “Borat,” in which the fearless Sacha Baron Cohen, as the blissfully clueless Kazakh TV journalist Borat Sagdiyev, conducts a ribald tour of America, leaving no prejudice un-exposed and no constituency unoffended. One can safely predict there will be no Oscars in store for this brilliant exercise in bad taste, which is all the more reason to love it.
