G.O.R.A.

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🎙️ EPISODE 293: 08.24.2020 *Review starts @ ~ 15:46 This movie doesn't deserve the amount critical thought I'm about to put into this because it doesn't any amount of thought, critical or otherwise. It's a film void of all humanity in search of the mighty goof: in this case, a painful, two-hour long gay joke. It's writer and star Cem Yılmaz deserves the brunt of it, a Turkish stand-up comedian. His Wikipedia lists this film first as the thing he's "best known for," defying the definitions of all three of those words.

We only have so many hours in the day, in our lives really. I had been on a nice run of late with these randomly generated titles, from the tight familial Indian melodrama A Death in the Gunj to the solid action-packed South Korean thriller The Man from Nowhere to the stellar and stark Blind Shaft out of China. I fully deserved this hell. When you play the game of chance, be prepared to eat bigoted shit.

I am not a humorless man.

I feel the need to shout that. The thing about gay jokes isn't that they are so cutting and offensive, but that they're so completely unfunny. They act as little windows into the souls of the men and the cultures who create them, and it's not super cool in there. It's not worth my time to dissect it and I actively feel bad giving it any kind of platform by simply acknowledging its existence here. So, you know, stop reading. Right now. Click one of the three links above to learn about an actually good movie. Thank you...


Ummm, you're still here? Fine....

This movie begins wanting to take the piss out of Americans and American movies but it knows it's deference to the genre it's spoofing so it's a with a wink (in this case, Star Wars, other sci-fi etc., although it eventually directly 'satirizes' The Matrix and The Karate Kid and other films in the dumbest, most thoughtless ways possible as well.) Most of the movies jokes, if not all, are done with a wink, and that's unfortunately part of the problem because 60-85% of this movies "jokes" are gay jokes. You can't really wink your way around those. This whole thing is just a vessel for this particular actor/writer and is comedian buddies to do 'go there' and nearly nothing in it is funny and maybe that's a cultural thing or something. Conversely, also because of their culture, they cant show any 'normal sex' (ie, hetero baby!) or nudity so they just play all their horniness chips on "hahaha being gay is fucked up and funny as shit right?" Nearly every character except for our main dude and a completely random Bob Marley impersonator is outwardly gay/fey or it's insinuated that they're gay or they're trying to blackmail them by outing their gayness. The first couple gags, I was willing to overlook but jesus christ it was relentless. Like, they could've just played this earnestly as a Star Wars spoof (the Turkish Space Balls?) and maybe just had two gay jokes and it would have been so much more enjoyable, because I liked the look of this quite a bit.

When in the final minutes, our hero breaks the fourth wall to try and make some asinine point about Hollywood and American movies, I truly wanted to scream. Just the fucking dumbest shit imaginable and completely unearned. The only reason I'm not bestowing this with the vaunted ZERO SCORE is because A) the aesthetics were tight in a "really shitty but trying our best" kinda way, and B) out of deference to the 'cultural divide' which some part of me feels worth recognizing. But, please: AVOID AT ALL COSTS.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 293A - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 294A ⫸

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