The "King in the Castle Courtroom" dodges another lawsuit bullet! High-five!

Click to enlarge.

Click HERE to read the New York Times article.

If I had a dollar for every time I was "randomly accosted and touched" when I lived in New York City--or here in Chicago, for that matter-- I'd be loaded...and I mean that in the financial, not the inebriated sense! A short ride on the subway during rush hour will guarantee a very specific kind of physical intimacy with strangers that in nearly any other time and place would be wholly inappropriate unless you had dinner together first. I have stories for days of the many strange and personal-space-violating experiences on the subway: like the time that a seemingly-blind panhandler was feeling her way through the crowded N train, and then tried to feel her way through my purse. I yanked it back, and she screamed "B**CH!!!!" in my ear for awhile. When someone else helped her to move along, she sweetly sung, "You smell good!" as she stroked my hair. Maybe a better illustration of special city closeness would be the time a Wall Street-type squeezed himself into the already sardine-packed E train and since he couldn't reach a pole or overhead bar to hang on to, he just grabbed me around the waist until he could maneuver himself towards something made of metal that was actually bolted into the floor. Seriously.

When my sister & I saw Borat, we were disgusted and horrified by the vulgarity of the "humor"... which of course means that we loved it. Sure, when it was over I turned to her and said, "Any innocence I had before this movie began is now gone, and I am forever scarred from this disturbing experience" but I said it in between bursts of laughing so hard I was crying. The very next night she took my brother-in-law to see it, though his opinion was a bit different than ours (we're used to that). 

I ended up buying Borat when it came out on DVD and had even more fun watching it with Charissa, who had yet to see it. Her reactions were priceless and could have been a spin-off slapstick comedy on their own merits. Mostly it was her saying, "This is so wrong!". Good times!

My point here is that not everyone thinks movies like this are funny, and not everyone agrees with the judge's ruling to dismiss this case (or any of the other eleventy-hundred that have been brought against the producers of the movie); but what was funny to ME about that 13-second scene this recent dismissed case involved was that the guy started running erratically down the sidewalk at top speed when Borat reached out to touch him. It was a totally unexpected reaction for the most part, unlike anything I've ever seen, which is exactly why I had such an appreciation for the entire movie. Stranger things happen to me (and I have seen stranger things happen to other people) than just random touching, and the reactions I've had (or have seen people have) never involved bobbing and weaving through the crowd. A punch in the face, maybe, but for the most part people just keep right on-a walking, which is one of the many reasons I love big, crowded cities. Absurd things happen all of the time, even when you're keeping your hands to yourself.

I couldn't find the sidewalk scene on YouTube, but this video has a bunch of other (what I think are) funny clips from the movie. Probably not something you should watch at work because if his accent doesn't get people's attention, your laughter (or gasps of horror, depending on your reaction) will:


Maybe because our dad has been running hotels for his entire professional career and we spent A LOT of time in them as kids, one of the scenes in this clip-fest that made my sister & I laugh the hardest (which starts 18 seconds from the beginning) is when Borat checks into a hotel, takes an elevator for the first time, gets in his crappy room and is so impressed with the fact that it has furniture in it that he sits down and says, "Wa Wa Wee Wah! King in the castle, King in the castle! I have a chair!"