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Borat: The Movie

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morningstar667

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New 'Ali G' Film: More 'X' Than 'X-Men'?

Last night at Cannes, FOX — our little old 20th Century FOX — presented a stealth screening of the funniest, lewdest, coarsest and potentially most gigantic hit of the year.

The title is “Borat,” and if this 88-minute comedy manages to get an R-rating, the world as we know it may never be the same.

The e-mailed invite read:

Kazakhstan Ministry of Information

Present You Invite to special screening of:

BORAT

CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA

FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION

OF KAZAKHSTAN

Borat, of course, is the invention of comedian Sascha Baron Cohen, aka hip-hop interviewer "Ali G."
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More Here:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,196737,00.html
Sounds like erratic fun
 
I'm sure the Kazakhstan government is jumping over themselves in joy over this DVD release! :lol: :D
 
I remember they did allege that Borat was actually part of an international campaign to discredit Kazakhstan.
 
All I can say is...I hope it's a damn sight better than the Ali G movie.
 
Is this movie going to be shown at the cinema? I thought it was directly-to-DVD release. Borat is funny, but not enough to bother watching at the cinema.
 
SameOldVardoger said:
Is this movie going to be shown at the cinema? I thought it was directly-to-DVD release. Borat is funny, but not enough to bother watching at the cinema.
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Yeah but Ali G was funny too, and his movie wasn't.

I fear the Borat movie may share the same fate.
 
But Borat is funnier and much more subversive than Ali G. Remember the time he stood up and played his 'Throw the Jew Down the Well' song in that redneck bar?

So funny...but so sadly disturbing as well, when you realised that the rednecks were quite happy to sing along with this strange foreigner once they'd cottoned on to the fact that he was singing about killing Jews.
 
Who would think - 9/11 conspiracies and the Milgram Experiment!!

It's shockingly funny but Borat's rant about Jews also tells us some uncomfortable truths about ourselves

Naomi Alderman
Monday August 14, 2006
The Guardian

Sacha Baron Cohen's latest film is due for release in November, but the storm of protest has started early. Already the film, in which Borat, a fictional Kazakh reporter, spits out food given to him by Jews on the ground it may be poisoned, and refuses to fly "in case the Jews repeat their attacks of 9/11", has been called "disgraceful" and "disgusting".

I first encountered the character of Borat in a clip from his HBO TV show which has circulated widely on the internet. Baron Cohen, as Borat, stands in front of an audience at a redneck bar in Arizona and announces that he will sing "a song from my country". He then sings, "In my country there is problem, and that problem is the Jew. They take everybody money and they never give it back." The chorus is particularly catchy: "Throw the Jew down the well (so my country can be free)."

I am a Jew. I've written about my community in a way that is critical but none the less, I hope, affectionate. I love the Jewish community with all its flaws and insecurities. And I think that Borat's song may be the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life. It is funny because it is ridiculous, because it parodies the most stupid kinds of anti-semitism, because the viewer is in on the joke. And, like the best humour, it is funny because it is viscerally, nauseatingly terrifying. It contains images every bit as unsettling as Leni Riefenstahl's The Triumph of the Will. It is funny because it is true.

The reason Borat's pronouncements are unsettling, the reason they have drawn protest, is not because we think he really believes them. Baron Cohen is Jewish. He clearly doesn't actually think that Jews were responsible for 9/11. And if he were constantly met with blank incomprehension, shock or disgust whenever he spoke, there would be no joke, and no show.

The reason it is unsettling to hear Borat sing "Throw the Jew down the well" is because of the reaction of those listening. Some sit in mute astonishment and horror. But some join in. Some sing along, smile and stamp their feet. One woman even - unprompted, mind you - puts her fingers to her forehead to make horns when he sings, "You must take [the Jew] by his horns." Borat is unsettling not because his opinions are outlandish but because he reveals how many ordinary people share them.

In fact, through Borat, Baron Cohen is repeating one of the most famous psychological experiments of the 20th century: the Milgram obedience to authority study. In 1961, Stanley Milgram devised an experiment to test human responsiveness to authority. Participants were told to administer increasingly large electric shocks to an unseen person in a neighbouring room. Of course, the unseen person was really an actor, and no shocks were being delivered, but the participants did not know this. As the size of the shocks increased, they heard screams, shouts, banging on the wall and desperate pleas for the shocks to stop. Despite this, 67% of participants, under orders, gave the final 450-volt shock which they had no way of knowing would not be lethal.

At the time, Milgram (who was, incidentally, also Jewish) was criticised for these experiments. It was said that they must be flawed or were unethical and thus irrelevant. Over time, they have come to be accepted as revealing a basic truth about human nature: that if someone in authority tells us what to do, most of us will obey blindly.

Baron Cohen's Borat character reveals that the same is true in situations which are far less explicable, even, than being given orders by a white-coated scientist. People will not always challenge racist, antisemitic, homophobic and sexist statements made by a buffoon. More, they will agree vehemently, and join in with comments of their own.

Borat is shocking because we cannot help but imagine ourselves in the place of his hapless victims and because we understand - though not, perhaps, consciously - that we might have acted precisely as they did. We too might have remained silent when Borat suggested"hanging" homosexuals, or nodded politedly at the suggestion that a Humvee is suitable for "running over Gypsies". Not because we fear for our lives if we disagree but, perhaps, to avoid embarrassment. Borat is funny because he is shocking, and he is shocking because he reveals the truth.
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www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/ ... 96,00.html
 
Source

Borat Storms U.S.
Sasha Cohen's mockumentary earned an amazing $26 million while only showing on a quarter of theaters nationwide.

1 Borat, $26M
2 The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, $20M
3 Flushed Away, $19M
4 Saw III, $15.5M
5 The Departed, $8M

Weekend Box Office: High Five! Borat Takes America by Storm

Wowee, wowee, wowee, as Borat himself might say: Though expectations were all over the place -- "It'll be a hit!" "No, it's gonna fall flat on its Kazakh face!" -- Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan blew away even the most optimistic predictions to earn about $26.4 million this weekend. And since it's always fun to massage the numbers so that some sort of record can be announced, the people who think about these things a lot have determined that this is

the highest-grossing wide opening ever for a picture playing at less than 1,100 theaters (The Blair Witch Project did $29.2 million at 1,101 sites). The closest recent comparison in terms of release pattern and style was Fahrenheit 9/11, which started with $23.9 million at 868 venues.
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[Emp edit: Fixing big link]
 
Has anyone seen it?
I'm not sure I can be bothered, having now read every single joke in the film reprinted in the newspapers, along with much adulation, etc.
 
I saw it today and thought it was very funny. The scripted stuff is good and the bits where he plays on the Americans prejudices are, perhaps, less shocking than they should be.

It was actually a lot more scripted than I thought but with the likes of Peter Baynum (writer for Alan Partridge) on the credits this isn’t really a bad thing.

The last poster was right to some extent, a lot of the jokes have been shown again and again in trailers and on TV which is a shame.
 
Ummm... Not sure I understand...

If I blacked up and started doing some Hillarious Sambo talk in front of a bunch of confused Rednecks, surely I'd still be acting like an arrogant racist twat, regardless of the Rednecks' own repellant views.

If a Muslim from some former Soviet state made a film based around doing an "impression" of a well-to-do, Cambridge educated, British Jewish guy, suggesting that such people are stupid, have sex with their own families and abuse children, every newspaper in the country (not just the red tops) would denounce it as unneccesarily offensive and inflammatory.

The "Joke" in Borat seems to be: Look! I'm doing a funny impression of Johnny Native! This idiot next to me thinks I really am Johnny Native! What a chump he is! Ho, ho... I'm going to do some more funny foreign jabber at him now. Look! He's all confused!

Surely this combines the worst elements of the Black and White Minstrels and Beadle's About (neither of which are deemed worth showing on TV any more).

Why is Sacha Baron-Cohen allowed to get away with this shit? Why do people go along with it?

Am I just being terribly stuffy about this? Is it something to do with my age (growing up in the "Right-on" Eighties and all?) Do I just need to lighten up? Is anyone else going to admit they don't get it either?
 
i think he walks on a very thin line, but mostly his point is to "expose" people's real thoughts/feelings behind the mask of hypocrisy. to do so he has to be very un-pc. i find him very intelligent (and funny), but of course this is just an opinion.
 
Wun_oh_wun said:
If a Muslim from some former Soviet state made a film based around doing an "impression" of a well-to-do, Cambridge educated, British Jewish guy, suggesting that such people are stupid, have sex with their own families and abuse children, every newspaper in the country (not just the red tops) would denounce it as unneccesarily offensive and inflammatory.
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That sounds hilarious. Why would it be offensive? It's comedy.
 
Peter Bradshaw is usuall a bit of a misery guts when it comes to films but he loved Borat:

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan


***** Cert 15

Peter Bradshaw
Friday October 27, 2006
The Guardian


Talent is luck, they say, and right about now, no comedian has more of either than Sacha Baron Cohen. The taxpayers from the sovereign state of Kazakhstan have been lavishly subsidising the publicity for Baron Cohen's new movie with fury-filled full-page government ads in the New York Times, a personal complaint from the Kazakh president to Mr George W Bush, followed by a belated and half-hearted official invitation to Baron Cohen to come visit.

Borat is the hero of this extraordinary mocu-reality adventure: a film so funny, so breathtakingly offensive, so suicidally discourteous, that strictly speaking it shouldn't be legal at all. He is the naive provincial TV reporter supposedly from Kazakhstan, though it is clear that this "Kazakhstan" is a joke cardboard country, a post-Soviet neverland picked at random, as cheerfully as Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, the spin doctors in the political satire Wag The Dog, once picked "Albania" for their diversionary hoax war. Reportedly, Baron Cohen was actually inspired to create Borat by his youthful travels as a student in the then Soviet republic of Georgia. The character coincidentally resembles Alex, the Ukrainian guide with the bizarre mangled English in Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Everything Is Illuminated. Borat is however immeasurably funnier.

Our hero leaves his dirt-poor Kazakh village, and travels to New York with a cameraman and his obese and unreliable producer to make a documentary for state TV. He experiences an epiphany there in his budget hotel-room, whose opulence has already reduced him to tears of incredulous joy. Watching a re-rerun of Baywatch, he falls in love with Pamela Anderson and journeys across the United States to Los Angeles, where he dreams of subjecting her to the Kazakh forcible-marriage ceremony, whose legality he believes will be just as valid in America as at home. Grinning nervously, unable to comprehend anything of what he sees or hears, Borat is an innocent of the guiltiest sort: he is boorish, he is grotesquely misogynist, he is crass. Above all he is an anti-semite, and for cinemagoers who have become used to the unwritten convention that anti-semitism is not represented on screen other than in the period garb of Nazi Germany, it is almost a physical shock to feel the swipe of Borat's contemporary bigotry. The last time I experienced this was listening to Terry Jones's sentimental cleaning-lady in Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life in 1983: "I feel that life's a game, you sometimes win or lose/And though I may be down right now, at least I don't work for Jews." But this really is something else.

One of the first sequences is Borat introducing a TV clip showing one of his community's oldest folk traditions: the Running of the Jew. It is quite incredible, and conceived on an epic scale to rival the chariot race from Ben-Hur. Obviously, Sacha Baron Cohen is himself Jewish and perhaps we should here quickly rehearse the saloon-bar truisms: only Jewish people are allowed to tell Jewish jokes, if these comedians wanted to be dangerous why don't they take on Islam - yes, yes, quite ... but is Sacha Baron Cohen really allowed to do this? Is anyone? It is a sensational provocation, a 19th-century anti-semitic cartoon gigantically reborn in the 21st century, in which anti-semitism is alive and well all over the world, in places where they have incidentally never heard of the liberal west's carefully nurtured distinction between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism. It goes beyond satire into pure anarchy, pure craziness. And it's also very funny.

From the way it is shot, some of Borat's encounters could be staged. I certainly hope that Pamela Anderson's final encounter with Borat happened with her connivance. But the best moments, and that's pretty much all of them, have the unmistakable look of real people really being astonished and horrified by Borat. He hits a comic goldmine simply by going up to male New Yorkers on the streets and trying to kiss them on both cheeks. One screams abuse; another skips away, zig-zagging, hunching his shoulders and flapping his arms at the elbow like a 10-year-old evading a wasp. It is sublime.

Baron Cohen really shows his class when Borat is a guest at a Texan rodeo. He fearlessly strides into the centre of the ring with his mic, loudly praises his hosts' "War of Terror", leads wild cheering when he expresses the hope that Iraq is bombed so that even the lizards are killed, but then with magnificent effrontery allows his audience to suspect they've been duped by singing a transparently absurd "Kazakh national anthem" about potassium production to the tune of The Star-Spangled Banner. The sheer miasma of wrongness and unease that washes over the crowd causes a young cowgirl demonstrating horse-riding techniques to lose her concentration and fall off her horse at the end of Borat's song: a brilliantly surreal moment.

The fascination of Borat's comedy situationism, his theatre of cruelty, is that its hero is deeply unsympathetic. Ali G had a kind of goofy charm, but Borat is just so horrible, with a deplorable quality mitigated only by his ineffectuality. Borat 2 must surely now be in the works: perhaps a face-off with a rival TV star from the hated neighbouring republic of Uzbekistan? (Will Ferrell? Jonathan Pryce? Stephen Merchant?) Like Freddy Krueger, that living nightmare on bad taste street, Borat will surely be back. Fools don't come unholier than this.
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http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/C ... 47,00.html
 
http://www.imdb.com/news/wenn/2006-11-09/

Turkish Man Insists He's the Real Borat

A Turkish man is convinced that he was the inspiration for comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's character Borat and is demanding an apology and profits from the surprise hit film. Mahir Cagri, 44, a freelance journalist, became an internet celebrity after posting a personal website in 1999, featuring unintentionally amusing photos of himself playing ping pong or the accordion or sunbathing in skimpy bathing suits. The title character in Baron Cohen's new film Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan was first developed for British TV programme Da Ali G Show. The movie topped the US box office over the weekend with $26.6 million. On the commentary track to the DVD of Da Ali G Show, Baron Cohen claims Borat was influenced by someone he met in southern Russia.
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So who's funnier? Borat or Mahir? I think Mahir is the real deal.
 
US students sue over Borat film
Two US students are suing a film studio claiming they were duped into appearing in spoof movie Borat starring Sacha Baron Cohen as a Kazakh journalist.
The unknown plaintiffs are seen making sexist and racist remarks in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

Legal papers said the two men "engaged in behaviour that they otherwise would not have engaged in".

Spokesman for 20th Century Fox Gregg Brilliant said the case "has no merit".

The men are identified in the film as two fraternity members from a South Carolina university.

'Humiliation'

They are not named in the case "to protect themselves from any additional and unnecessary embarrassment".

According to legal documents, a production crew took the pair to a bar to drink and "loosen up" before taking part in a documentary they were told would be shown outside the US.

The film "made plaintiffs the object of ridicule, humiliation, mental anguish and emotional and physical distress, loss of reputation, goodwill and standing in the community," the papers stated.

British comedian Cohen appears in the film as an apparently naive reporter whose enthusiastic offensiveness either leaves his US interviewees in shock, or persuades them to reveal a little too much of their own prejudices.

As well as Fox, the two men are also suing three other production companies.

The film is currently at the top of the box office charts in North America and the UK.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/e ... 136944.stm

Published: 2006/11/10 15:26:05 GMT

© BBC MMVI
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Some Celebrity Gossip about Sacha Baron Cohen's fiance.

Some more:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/film/fishing-for-trouble/2005/08/04/1123125846263.html

... The only thing about her [Isla Fisher] of any prurient interest is that she is engaged to marry Sacha Baron Cohen, better known as Ali G.

They have, in fact, been engaged for three years, but they have yet to set a date for the wedding. For two years she has studied Judaism, in preparation for conversion. She thinks they will have a traditional Jewish ceremony, complete with glass-stamping. ...
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http://www.somethingjewish.co.uk/articles/854_staines__massive_wed.htm

No doubt when she's worked out to make chicken soup, matzo balls and latkas properly, they can finally get hitched.

Nice. Very nice.
 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6153420.stm

Cohen defends 'racist' Borat film
16 November 2006

Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has defended his controversial creation Borat, saying he is a tool to reveal racism.

Baron Cohen dropped his alter ego for the first time since the Borat film was released, for an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

"The joke is not on Kazakhstan," he said. "I think the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist."

The film has topped the box office for a second week in both the US and UK.

The film, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, has a naive yet enthusiastic Kazakh reporter meeting with people across the United States.

Prejudice 'absurd'

It has upset some because of Borat's anti-semitic, sexist and racist comments. A pair of US students are suing the film studio, 20th Century Fox, claiming they were duped into appearing in the film.

But Cohen - a practising Jew - said the film ridiculed what people were prepared to believed about other cultures.

"Borat works essentially as a tool," the former Ali G star said.

"By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice, whether it's anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism."

He added: "I think part of the movie shows the absurdity of holding any form of racial prejudice, whether it's hatred of African-Americans or of Jews."
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Not so clear cut if you actually were Kazakhstani, or a recent immigrant from some other far flung corner of Eastern Europe, perhaps?

I'm not sure I get this, using one racial stereotype to expose another, thing, at all. :(
 
I've seen it now - it's alright, doesn't live up to the hype.
 
Borat sued again - this time by Romanian villagers ...

Residents of a remote Romanian village have filed a $30 million claming they were misled into taking part in the Borat film.
Residents of the impoverished settlement of Glod – whose name, literally, means mud – stood in for Kazakhs in the opening scenes of Sacha Baron Cohen’s movie.

But they complain they were told they were taking part in a documentary about poverty that would fairly depict their lives.

‘Nothing could have been further from the truth,’ the lawsuit said. ‘The project was intended to portray the villagers as rapists, abortionists, prostitutes, thieves, racists, bigots, simpletons and/or boors.’

The legal action was filed in New York on behalf of two of the villagers, Nicolae Tudorache and Spirea Ciorebea. Mr Tudorache, who lost his arm in an accident, has previously spoken of his humiliation at having a dildo in the shape of a fist attached to the stump of his missing arm. Only when English reporters visited him, did he find out what it was.

Gregg Brilliant, a spokesman for 20th Century Fox, said villagers were paid above the usual rate and that the movie ‘was never presented to anyone in Romania as a documentary’.

The movie has been a box office hit, earning more than $90 million so far in the United States alone.

This is the second lawsuit to hit the film-makers, after two students who made racist, sexist comments sued, claiming the crew plied them with drink.

Posters showing comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in a skimpy posing pouch have been banned in Israel on the grounds of decency.
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Link



...having a dildo in the shape of a fist attached to the stump of his missing arm...
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That'll be a fist then. I've got a dildo in the shape of a garden shed.
 
Why is Sacha Baron-Cohen allowed to get away with this shit? Why do people go along with it?
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Because he's Jewish, but if a non-Jew makes fun of Jews in a similar manner he's called anti-semitic.
Can you say double standard?
:roll:
 
British diplomats do not defend Borat
Martin Rosenbaum 27 Nov 06, 11:58 AM

Borat Sagdiyev may be a fictional Kazakh TV journalist, but it seems that he's been causing real problems for British diplomats in Kazakhstan.

Foreign Office officials discussed how to put themselves 'at arm's length from the character a bit more' to avoid any 'hint of us defending him.' This followed British diplomats in Kazakhstan reporting back about the Kazakh government's 'serious concerns about the Borat character'.

Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev may have treated Borat as a joke at his press conference last week with Tony Blair - 'The film was created by a comedian so let's laugh at it, that's my attitude' - but it clearly hasn't always been a laughing matter in British-Kazakh relations.

The fact that it has been a touchy subject throughout the past year is made clear in documents released to the BBC by the Foreign Office under freedom of information. This stems from the period Borat has been a TV character, prior to the hit film coming out this month.

The British Embassy there reported that the 'Kazakhstan Government has serious concerns about the Borat character. His site is banned by Kazakhstan telecommunications operator.'

One diplomat told London: 'I've been asked about Borat in almost every press conference I have done here.'

A Foreign Office official advised: 'My concern here is to put us at arm's length from the actor a bit more and for there to be no hint of us defending him - while pointing out of course that we have a free media.'

Officials drew up a 'press line' as follows: 'We do understand your concern. However, the aim of this comic act, as I understand it, is not about discrediting Kazakhstan, but about revealing the prejudices of certain people. Borat is an entirely fictional character that no informed person would see as a representative of Kazakhstan or a Kazakh journalist. Media in the UK operate in a free and unobstructed way.'

The Kazakh Ministry for Foreign Affairs (MFA) complained vociferously last year about Borat's appearance at the MTV Europe Music Awards. The British Embassy then reported home: 'There have been constant grumblings about Borat, but it looks like the MFA's patience has finally snapped.'

The information released constitutes only part of what Foreign Office officials have been saying to each other about Sacha Baron Cohen's portrayal of Borat. The Foreign Office refused to release other documents because it 'would be likely to prejudice relations between the United Kingdom and Kazakhstan'. :shock:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/opensecrets/
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This reminds me slightly of when people in Norfolk (I live in Norfolk myself) used to get rather shirty about Alan Partridge. (Or at least the local paper got shirty about him. Actual people didn't seem all that bothered.)
 
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