Letters to the Editor
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Careless
If you were actually paying attention to the words you are writing, you would have picked up your mistake that it is Jackson, Mississippi, and not Jacksonville.
I thought they taught Geography up north!
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Rodeo
I'm from West Virginia and I've never heard of rodeos here. Be interesting to see where this is supposed to be.
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Some things will always be taboo
This is the kind of movie (and Cohen is the kind of performer) that constanly congratulates itself for being so daring and politically incorrect. But the fact is, there are sacred cows that even Cohen wouldn't dare disturb. Would he make a character that was a Jewish stereotype, instead of an over the top anti-Semite? Would he appear in black face, hamboning and speaking in jive? No, of course not. Because then people would (correctly) denounce this kind of stereotyping. People can play at political incorrectness all they want, but they won't ever actually cross those kind of lines.
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Wrong, Freddie
The only real requirement for effective satire is that it say something interesting about its subject, sacred cows not withstanding. As such, an effective satirist should be able to take any character or archetype and make a good point about the subject; the fact that you do not care for how it has been done does not diminish its value.
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the kazakhstan ads are not new
Kazakhstan has been running multipage ad sets in the times for months and months... maybe longer. I doubt it's in response to the film; it seems to be a long-standing promotion.
-daily ny times reader
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Somebody Is Unfamiliar With Sacha Baron Cohen
"Would he appear in black face, hamboning and speaking in jive?"
Mmmmm....I think you need to watch HBO or get a hold of Sacha Baron Cohen's DVD of the first two seasons of "Da Ali G Show."
Booyakasha -- Respect!
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Selective editing
This type of thing doesn't impress me much. If these people had tried to trick a hundred people and only five fell for it, they would only show the five who fell for it to make themselves look successful. Also, you don't know what fraction of those people were plants.
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Collateral Damage?
I too read about the woman who lost her job due to Borat. The details were that after she booked him on the show and he turned out to be what he was, her boss lost confidence in her abilities, then let her go.
Now I'm not saying I wouldn't have fallen for it too, BUT if her job was to book guests, and she booked Borat, without finding out who he was, was her boss wrong to have lost confidence in her?
People mess up on the job all the time and people get fired for it.
I don't see how this incident can be soley laid at Sascha Cohen's feet.
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An Un-P.C. Post That Will Offend All Sides, Equally.
I tried to start watching Sacha Baron Cohen's Ali G, where Borat and Bruno first appeared, when it first came out, watched a couple of episodes and found it was variations on the same joke over and over and over. Not nearly as shocking as it obviously prided itself on, particularly because it was yet another one of these supposedly non-P.C. shows that tries too hard to offend "both sides" (tackling, say, gun nuts one instant, feminists the next) like some rigid comedic adherent to the Fairness Doctrine, thus eventually losing all true "shock" or "edge" appeal. Every time you hear the phrase "equal opportunity offender," bank on a thoroughly predictable performer (the most extreme case is Carlos Mencia, who often helpfully tells his audience how "un-P.C." he is, just in case they don't get the point, and would habitually use the phrase "I offend everybody, gays, latinos, old people, etc." even if he was making a commercial for Campbell's Soup). All this "equal opportunity offender" crap is getting to be as dated as a Milli Vanilli record.
God, how refreshing if there really was a truly radical comedian out there, instead of a bunch of boys who fear if they don't play both sides by pretending to offend both sides (conservatives can laugh at the feminists, liberals at the gun nuts, blah, blah, blah), they'll lose money. I've heard Cohen compared with Andy Kaufman, but the last thing Kaufman was interested in in his best work was trying to appease his audience with "equal opportunity offenses." When Kaufman was "on," the audience usually wasn't sitting comfortably back laughing at the dopes on screen; they were too busy wondering if Kaufman was making the audience itself look like rubes for watching. Kaufman blurred the line between where he ended and his public character work began; with Cohen, most audiences sense that he takes off Borat after the show like the guy who plays Ronald McDonald takes off the big shoes and red wig when he gets home from work.
Essentially, Cohen's schtick is the old "Candid Camera" show trying really hard to be edgy. Funny about the first three segments of the first show, increasingly dull after that. Thing is even "Candid Camera" varied its formula more than Cohen does, and you start to wonder if his audience, watching the same trick over and over again, isn't also the butt of Cohen's "look what I can make dumb Americans do" game. ...Hey, on second thought, maybe Sacha Baron Cohen IS Andy Kaufman.
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Doesn't Impress?
Hey azathoth, though I do agree you've nailed the dynamic of how the movie was made, isn't whether you found it funny or enjoyed seeing it a better criteria for judging it?
I could use your argument to dismiss anyting: "Yeah, they hired a bunch script writers and some pretty people to act, then shot the scenes over and over again til they got it right, and just showed those scenes"
-any movie made
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Lost job?
Umm... If the woman is a news producer, and she's gullible/uninformed enough to book a "guest" like Borat, shouldn't she be fired? I have a hard time feeling sorry for someone who was clearly NOT doing her job. It's the same as lazy producers who fall for Howard Stern gags. Isn't news supposed to be about fact-checking?
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Maybe some of us are not convinced his satire is "complex"
Give anyone enough official-sounding credentials and the average citizen is easily swept up in it all. Let's see, one of us is in on the scam, knows where we're headed, and practiced at what we do. The rest of us work for a living and get caught off-guard when someone shoves a mike in our faces and occasionally say stupid things when we're flustered. (How often do you see the 'man-in-the-street' come off as polished when a local newscaster asks for a comment? This kind of set-up has all the sportsmanship of shooting fish in a barrel.)
It's why I love the Daily Show but usually skip the middle, where they interview some unsuspecting guest and the interviewer behaves boorishly. I'm not happy there are seemingly stupid, racist people, but the numbers tell me there have to be some. Rather than make average citizens the butt of nationwide jokes in the name of unmasking prejudice, how about affecting a sense of peace of community instead? "Look, I found a racist!" isn't news. Investing your life and chritable donations might not always be news, either, but at the end of the day it's something to be proud of. SBC is a one-gag comic, and it wears thin fast...except, of course, among people who haven't yet learned that you don't really prove anything by being being a jerk.
SZ keeps getting back to this point; however, she excuses it each time she finds something that made her laugh...as if saying so long as she finds it funny the mistreatment of others is excusable behavior. Pray tell, why is SBC any more sophisticated than Candid Camera? (Yes, I'm old enough to remember Alan Funt.) At least those folks were let in on the joke after the gag was played, allowing for "a good laugh was had by all." SBC's style is a lot more like a drive-by shooting, encouraging us to blame the victim (the fired producer, for instance) for the crime of having been "stupid enough to fall for it." Well, to this middle-aged man that sounds a lot like, "She was asking to be raped, look at what she was wearing." And to me, that doesn't sound like something I wish to be a part of. At all.