Everything Is Illuminated (2005)
Directed by Liev Schreiber
A young Jewish American man endeavors—with the help of eccentric, distant relatives—to find the woman who saved his grandfather during World War II—in a Ukrainian village which was ultimately razed by the Nazis.
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What critics compared Everything Is Illuminated to
A road trip with an Eastern European in the driving seat and the music of Gogol Bordello playing on the stereo inevitably evokes Liev Schreiber's Everything is Illuminated (and Eugene is based on that film's Ukrainian star, Eugene Hutz) - but in the end Wristcutters: A Love Story is, like the limbo it portrays, a peculiar hybrid of recognisable, second-hand elements that somehow add up to something entirely sui generis - an idiosyncratic piece of magical realism whose characters are literally on the road to nowhere.
This wretched addition to the cinema of magical realism (think: "Pan's Labyrinth" or "Everything is Illuminated") takes such an arch tone by tacitly endorsing suicide that it spends most of its time in narrative freefall.
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Directed by Larry Charles
Characters
Certainly Andy Kaufman had a stellar career doing a similar character without resorting to racial epithets, and Eugene Hutz of New York band Gogol Bordello, an actual Eastern European, plays a similar cartoon character onstage–one slightly modified for Liev Schreiber’s “Everything Is Illuminated”–without it being so offensive.