Letters to the Editor
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I don't think
the feminists, the yard sale owner, the frat bboys or the rodeo attennders were wasps.
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Borat
I watched a pirated copy on DVD last night. It seemed like a fitting way to see the movie. Maybe there was a problem: I couldn't very clearly see the shit in a bag or the distended testicles through the strobing effect. But I was sadly disappointed. It just wasn't that funny. The context for the comedy was unclear. It's only funny if you believe you're watching an actual Kazack reporter interviewing real bread and butter Americans. His "victims" were a rather motley and ordinary bunch, and the impersonation itself was too familar after Balki and Perfect Strangers (anyone remember that?) I was waiting for some good ribbing of anti-Semites from a fellow Jew, but I barely even got that.
I did laugh at that naked wrestling scene, but that's an easy laugh, like putting a party hat on a cat.
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it just didn't work for me....
OK, what's wrong with me? I saw it on Saturday and didn't crack a smile even once.
And I'm in an excellent mood since the election!
Perhaps I just didn't buy the whole documentary premise. Borat's alone sans passport, sans money, sans hope, sans bear, sans rooster. Why doesn't he ask for help from the video crew taping his trek?
Speaking of which, just *how many* cameras and crew does he have with him, especially in the scene when he and the other guy flee the bed and breakfast in the dead of night? At least Christopher Guest's mockumentaries maintain the illusion that what we're seeing is one-camera real. Guest doesn't hit us with multiple angles and stuff that.
Borat knows how to run a VCR and an iPod (and presumably television gear since he's a TV personality), but *doesn't* know how to use a toilet? Come on! That was too, too forced.
A bunch of OTT stuff like that -- and the absence of any likable character save for Borat's eventual bride -- kept me from being engaged. Borat's an idiot, his friend's an idiot, the American's Cohen dupes are idiots.... No fun whatsoever.
It's probably not helped by the fact that I never could stand the intense sadism of CANDID CAMERA.
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Borat as Premeditated War Propaganda
If we were not fighting in Afghanistan, if Moslems were not wondering if they can co-exist with Westerners,and if Westerners were not thinking the reverse, and if the Jewsih/Palestinian battles have not been going on for 58 years than a Jew playing a stupid person from one of the 'Stans might be funny---but I doubt it.
In Rolling Stone MAG Cohen talks about Nazis as if they were still in power, but what he fails to mention is that the Nazis used the exact same medium---the movies-- to protray stupid Jews in a manner not unsimilar to how he protrays Borat. Likewise US pictorially illustrated "Japs"/"Nips" during WWII in what would now seem to be down-sized versions of Borat.
All are/were sickening offensive bits of War Propaganda.
What is truly sad is that Cohen is a bright and educated fellow and knows that it isnt by chance the he played Ali G and Borat. People want to dehumanize or at least make barbaric their enemies.
As for a reader's comments that Jews make fun of themselves... self-deprecating humor is different than making fun of a group you are trying to understand. Just like Archie Bunker, it is ok for Americans to laugh at but if shown to people from other countries they may think him just mean and stupid.
What if some Brit made a movie riducling the Jews or the Irish what would happen? Come to think of it didnt the Brits make lots of tv shows and movies ridiculing the Irish? Seems to me they've been battling each other for a few years.....IS THAT WHAT WE WANT WITH ARABS AND CENTRAL ASIANS?
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High Five. Pause. Not!
If you watched the original Ali G. shows, you marvelled at Cohen's ability to do guerrilla comedy in three such different personas. Better still, none of the segments went on too very long, and so your squirming (or occasional boredom) was not intense. I was actually glad there weren't that many per season; his shtick was a one-trick pony, repeated three times per episode.
The Borat movie is not half so dazzling, brilliant and original as reviewers are saying. have they bothered to watch the show? The movie is actually not much more than a compilation of Borat skits very much in the style of those on the Ali G. show, loosely strung together to make a picaresque, with the added ingredient of gross-out humor to attract fans of road trip/American Pie movies. That latter strategy is perhaps the deftest aspect of the film, its writing and marketing.
The movie, like those built out of SNL skits, does not hold together well, nor does it sustain its humor. It feels very badly padded. The entire nude wrestling sequence, about 10 minutes perhaps, was utterly pointless. Wow, people fleeing an elevator with a fat nude man in it, that's original. Wow, nude fighters being evicted from a banquet. Deeply imaginative. And a black bar to cover his "chrum"--cute.
The antique store episode was another example of wasted film. What was the point--to set up the pubic hair joke? Lovely.
We also more than got the point in New York. People on the subway resisted his attempts to kiss them hello, ditto on the streets. It went on too long, and I was actually--as a born New Yorker--starting to hope someone would deck him. The whole movie lasted too long; you can't make this kind of sketch satire work as a full-length movie, or Cohen didn't, anyway. You're undermining a key ingredient--brevity that
leaves you wondering how he got away with it. After a while, in the movie, you stop caring.
Any one of the best sequences, the frat boys, the dinner was like a segment of the show, which I watched some episodes of before and after. The show did Borat much better.