I totally agree. In many situations, all he’s doing is making polite people uncomfortable, and I don’t find that particularly funny. When you’re trying to be gracious, and someone does something outrageous, you can either continue to be cordial as best you can, which may be awkward but is not insulting or likely to cause a confrontation, or you can accuse the person of playing a prank (i.e., call them a liar) which is incredibly confrontational and insulting. I doubt anyone thought, “Just as I suspected, Kazhaks are really idiotic, grotesque, compulsive rapists!” More likely it was, “Oh God, this guy is crazy, how quickly can we get him out of here?”
I don’t have a problem with using a persona to encourage people to expose their awful personal beliefs, but many people were just made to feel uncomfortable, and it was neither funny nor shocking, I just got contact embarrassment from it.
That said, I almost fell on the floor laughing at the naked wrestling. I wish he would lay off the prank humor and do more scripted stuff, because he can be funny as hell.
I don’t think they’re as bad as the frat guys, but to me, the above is why I didn’t feel too sorry for the people at the dinner party. I was rather proud of them that they treated him so hospitably, but come on. NOBODY on earth thinks it’s proper to bring a bag of poop to the table. And nobody’s so backward they don’t know what a toilet is for. Someone living in a hut could be told, “do your business in there” and they’d get it.
I thought the entire movie was hysterical, even the horrible naked wrestling. If the people filmed took Borat at his purported face value, then their biases were indeed exposed.
Watched it on DVD 3-4 months ago. I hadn’t seen any of Cohen’s work , but I’d heard and read such good things about the movie and Cohen I had reasonably high hopes, all of which were painfully unfulfilled.
I’m not particularly averse to potty humor, and I’m sure I laughed at some point in the movie, but I say that only because it’s statistically improbable for me not to laugh at least once during any movie. I do remember thinking the lots of the gags felt forced and pointless. By the end it was prett painful to watch.
While watching, I hadn’t considered the staged vs real question, and just assumed any interactions were more or less real, with an absurd amount of dull footage left on the editing room floor in an attempt to find the “funny” bits. The only part I questioned was the Pam Anderson segment, and by that point I was hoping it was real, because I was sure some security guy would have the pleasure of beating the snot out of Borat.
Neither Cohen nor Anderson will speak to the issue, but the Anderson bit absolutely had to have been staged. In the first place, being in show biz herself she probably recognizes him, and in the second, as you mentioned, one of her bodyguards would at best have beaten him unconscious and at worst popped a couple of caps in his ass. (Supposedly Anderson and her boyfriend, Kid Rock, got into a major argument over the movie- he didn’t like it at all.)
With this thread alone, SBC has managed to achieve what he set out do do - provoke. Good humor/satire/irony is dangerous and provoking. It might provoke our senses of dignity, morality, honesty or whatever, but it stirs emotions. SBC is a troll, in the best sense of the word and it doesn’t matter if all of us in this thread end up agreeing with him or denouncing him - the fact that there’s a debate is enough.
The guy is, to my mind, a genious. Not because I think he’s funny, but because he manages to troll, without being annoying about his trolling. We’re talking about the issues he raises, not his trolling.
There was a woman on the IMDB boards a few months back that was convinced, convinced I tell you, that the wrestling scene HAD to be CGI. She just would not accept the notion that two people would subject themselves to those circumstances.
In the real-life Kazakhstan, BTW, there are practically no Jews, and those that are there, the locals probably classify as “Russians.” Cohen gives the impression Kazakhstan is a place with a history of both significant numbers of Jews and significant anti-Semitism, like one of the Eastern European states of the former Jewish Pale. Which shields him from charges of defamation – because imputing anti-Semitism to the Kazakhs is too preposterous to be a slur; it would be different if Borat were from, say, Belarus or the Ukraine.
I heard that interview. It was great. SBC was not in character; he seriously and intelligently discussed what he was trying to do and how he did it. Terry Gross obviously admired his work a great deal - “fawning” would come close to describing the tone. I thought he was a really smart and well-spoken guy, but I’d still never see the movie. I don’t want to pay money to crawl under my couch for an hour and a half.
I heard the Gene Simmons interview, too. It was a complete and utter trainwreck, horrifying. He has, without a doubt, the most severe Narcissistic Personality Disorder I’ve ever encountered and, being a psychologist, I’ve seen some good ones. Now THAT, even Borat couldn’t fake.
Watching it for the second time you notice that they never actually show him naked and interupting a conference. They show him running around on stage and falling through empty tables and security surrounding them, but all the shots of a conference being interupted and edited well into these scenes.
I’d be more with you if, after all that tolerance and understanding, you weren’t so harsh about the one person who really was blameless:
I liked Luenell.
I’m not going to pretend I liked the movie, but I think you’re missing the boat on what was being critiqued here. This wasn’t about whether these were “good people” or “bad people,” or whether they “deserved it,” and I don’t even think you’re supposed to be liking Borat. He’s just making simple, vivid points. He’s showing you how misogynistic frat boy culture really is. He’s showing you murderous homophobia with a smile. He’s showing you what happens when a black sex worker shows up to an “etiquette” party - do they pull up a seat for her and make her feel welcome? I don’t think so. He’s showing you how smoothly the “godly” deflect requests for help.
Do I like Sasha Cohen? No. Did I like the movie? No. Do I think you’re right that the personal costs to make his points was too high? Probably. But then again I can’t think of a movie in the last ten years that has done as good a job at pointing to the hypocrisy and hatred running under the poliltically correct surface of American culture. Probably not so much because this is a great or even good movie, but more because so few try.
People who kill gays practice murderous homophobia. That was just a garden variety homophobic redneck shooting the shit with a foreigner.
I wouldn’t stay at any party where lower class obvious sex-workers showed up, regardless of race. It’s illegal and it’s awkward and many are involved with street drugs and then there’s the matter of he had just brought shit to a dinner table.
(The only reason I mentioned Luenell’s race above, incidentally, was because I was irked by the unnecessary inclusion of the Secession Dr. sign when, as mentioned, that home was nowhere near Secession Dr. and it was clearly trying to start the whole “rich white southerners=bigots” which just isn’t necessarily so (and I’m not rich so I’m not even defending my own, but while they may not all be Virginia Durr and her brother-in-law Hugo Black (who owned a home in that section of metro B’ham, incidentally) they’re also not all wearing white fedoras and string ties and answering to Cap’n while slapping Sidney Poitier in their hothouses.
I’m guessing you didn’t see American Pie 2- it does exactly that. (Or was that American Pie 3: American Wedding?)
Well you may be more comfortable with that rhetoric than I am.
Your whole characterization of her was shitty. The reason you don’t like the critique is because your attitude is the same as theirs - that it goes without saying that etiquette doesn’t apply to her and her feelings really aren’t important. That was the point. You just happen to agree. I bet 90% of Americans would agree. Remember she wasn’t the one who provided the poo - she just showed up there and when she did all pretense of etiquette went out the window.
That scene’s edits suggest that it was filmed in more than one take, so I vote staged.
As for the film as a whole, it was not as funny for me as it was for many; it was mostly a cringey experience for me. What put it in perspective for me and made it a movie that, on balance, I recommend, was the outtakes. In most of the outtakes on the disc, “Borat” is simply humiliating an individual in a very personal way: the infinitely patient cheese guide; the astonishingly forbearing masseur. Seeing that he chose to omit the personal episodes from the film as a whole made me realize that most of the bits he included were more political than personal. The film has an agenda, which sets it apart from, say, the *Jackass * franchise. And while there are plenty of people who insist a filmmaker with an agenda is a bad filmmaker, I enthusiastically disagree.
It’s always been known that the Anderson episode was staged, as was the intervention of the big black woman (the “prostitute”). I’ve read that none of the other parts were staged, though they were certainly carefully edited.
I love Sasha Cohen as Ali G, but some parts of this movie made me uncomfortable, and I’m not talking about the gross wrestling scene-- that was sort of a hit to the solar plexus, physically uncomfortable–, but the parts where innocent bystanders were given a hard time. The nice old Jewish couple come to mind, as do the people at that tv station.