Are you looking forward to seeing the Borat movie? I am, especially after reading Podhoretz’s column. Here’s the part that’s available for public viewing at TWS:
The ‘Borat’ Show
The man who would be Kazakhstan’s man of the moment.
by John Podhoretz
10/21/2006 12:06:00 AM, Volume 012, Issue 07
Borat: Cultural Learnings
of America for Make
Benefit Glorious
Nation of Kazakhstan
Directed by Larry Charles
A cheap-looking and extremely strange movie with an even stranger title–Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan–is opening in a few weeks, and it will make a sensation. Columnists will write op-eds about it. Talking heads will try to dissect it on chat shows. Already, several months before its release, two rather dissimilar institutions–the government of Kazakhstan and the Anti-Defamation League–have issued statements of concern about Borat’s potential to do harm.
Ham-handed responses like those just play into the glorious and very tough-minded comic sensibility that animates Borat. This movie is satire in its truest, most courageous, form. Oxen are gored right and left. America is savaged. The Third World is savaged. Feminists are savaged. Evangelical Christian tent shows are savaged. Frat boys are savaged. Political correctness is savaged. The attitude that says political correctness is humorless twaddle is savaged. This is one of the four or five funniest movies ever made.
The movie follows Borat Sagdiyev, a news reporter for Kazakh television, as he journeys from his small village to the United States and travels around making a documentary intended to explain America to his countrymen. Borat isn’t real. He’s a character invented and portrayed by the British comic actor Sacha Baron Cohen. But most of the people in the movie are everyday Americans who have no idea Borat is a fictional character being played by a British comedian. They believe …
And to get the rest of it, you’d have to subscribe.
Clips and trailers here, though.
Everybody knows the real comedy goldmine is Turkmenistan.
Mr. Cohen better turn down any requests he gets to sing the Kazakh national anthem at kokpar tournaments. Might wind up as the ball.
I have seen previews of the Borat movie. I am not impressed. The guys fake east European accent is not very good. His vowels are are those of a native speaker of English and he flubs some initial consonants. E.g. he pronounces “what” as a native English speaker would, instead of as “vaht” or even “faht” as would real east Europeans (such as my grandparents of blessed memory).
Compare Borat to Eugene Hutz, who played Alex Perchov in Everything is Illuminated, who really is an East European trying to speak English, and who is genuinely funny unlike Baron-Cohen.
Yeah, the accent isn’t too great. Just like in Schindler’s List—totally ruined it for me. Because movies are really just about the accents.
/clueless
Robert – Kazakhstan is not in eastern Europe or any other part of Europe. It shares a border with China…
Dan – When are you coming back to play with your Brit friends?
Borat’s been around for several years. Now every American-Idol watching idiot in sticksville is going to have a Borat t-shirt and what was once funny will be lame.
Robert Schwartz’s comment actually sounds like something Ali G would say. Constructing an entire argument around a dead-wrong bit of information.
Paul–
I’ll be there soon. I’m just working overtime here until I start drinking off the elections, just like everybody else.
I dunno. I wasn’t looking forward to the movie so much until I read Podhoretz’s piece, and now I am. So if it sucks, I’ll never listen to Pod again.
Just rent season 2 of Ali G and watch the Borat skits. If you don’t like it, save your 10 bucks.
It was funny once?
Have you ever seen it? Maybe you won’t like it, maybe you will. Tastes differ. Hell, some people still think South Park is funny.
If I’ve never seen it, it must not be funny.
</monkyboy>
Robert Schwartz’s comment actually sounds like something Ali G would say. Constructing an entire argument around a dead-wrong bit of information.
Emily Litella did it first.
I saw an article a while back from one of Cohen’s writers. He was very disturbed at some of the things people had willingly done for Borat. Boiled down, his point was, “Our hateful Jew-killing jokes are all in good clean fun. But it really creeps us out when you laugh.”
This guy made the news a year or two ago, appearing at a Nascar race (or maybe a rodeo), implying that the people there wanted to kill muslims.
Re. the Borat film (Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan), BBC World have just broadcast a news report on the film’s premiere in London. Check out http://www.chrismerriman.com/index.php/archives/209 for a video clip of it…
What? What do they believe!? God-fucking-damnit!
The clip from the antique store was enough to put me off. Property destruction isn’t funny, and the look on the owner’s face was heartbreaking.
Anybody who says Borat isn’t clever is wrong. Fair enough if you don’t find it funny, but the way that Cohen uses Borat’s apparent innocence and foreign naivity to bring out others’ real views is pure genius. Because borat, Ali G and Bruno all come across as stupid, it’s easy to underestimate the real intelligence of this comedy.