That's weird but I was kind of emotional when he showed up as himself. My wife was crying .... we are still discussing to find the reason, but it surely has something to do with our emotional needs ...
It could be because the guy had some nice teachings to pass. That moment when he asked the lady what she thought he should do, and she started to notice his intent, was really beautiful.
shareI am a cold person and even I was touched, specifically at the moment when the girl ran up and hugged him. He did a great job of showing how much he cared about these naive yet kind people and how nervous he was about coming clean, and when she ran up and hugged him it was great to see that most of the people (except for the ones I didn't really like throughout the movie anyways) understood where he was coming from and didn't get egotistical or defensive about it. I'm shocked how much I liked this movie because I was expecting kind of a Borat lite satire and ended up still liking it for completely different reasons.
shareWhile I see the whole film was a satire of religion and spirituality, I liked how it never felt mean.
Borat completely felt mean, but you can understand why'd he mess with people who want to kill gay people, or kill Jew eggs, degrade women, or push their ideas of proper etiquette on others. He was messing with people who think they have this knowledge that many of us don't agree with. But in the long run, I can see what he did wasn't appropriate in the sense that he sought out these people to make fun of and continues to make fun of people in other projects.
Not so in this case though because while they may have started out lost and a few ended up being lost again perhaps, I didn't feel they were being made fun of. Everyone goes through a time in their lives where they hope someone else can give them the answers, whether it is a self help teacher, guru, professor, pope, god, whatever. I may be an atheist now, but I too had years of trying to find what I thought others knew and then realizing that nobody knew anything spiritually. It's all just made up. Everybody can only guess, and hopefully find something that makes them a better person than they were.
I think that deep message kept this satire from being comical to me. I could easily laugh at any religious groups methods or teachings or rather get furious at them for their bs. But I forget that even if it's bs, some of it, in some contexts, are really beautiful and show the best that people have to offer. Love, understanding, respect, empathy, joy-- All that good stuff.
Borat taught nothing of that. He only taught what we shouldn't be like. Not what we can be like if we are true to ourselves.
I got misty too-probably because I was relieved that Vikram was applauded-with the exception of 1 or 2 people that walked out (the Yoga teacher for 1). You could tell he was nervous about what their reaction would be and so was I. Whew! What a relief :)
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