Mahir To Borat, I Sue You! 275
An anonymous reader writes "The mockumentary Borat bears more than a passing resemblance to late '90s net celeb Mahir Cagri of ikissyou.org, and he's not amused. Steven Leckart of Wired magazine gives him the third degree."
Frivolous (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wrong, wrong, wrong! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I do not understand Americans (Score:5, Insightful)
He isn't making fun of Turkey, Kazakhstan or anywhere else. He's using this stereotype - which many westerners are too self-centred to realise is a stylised stereotype - to highlight just how ridiculously self-centred and unaware we are. Although the film is set in the US, Borat originally gave this treatment to the UK in the Ali G show. I clearly recall a scene he did interviewing english fox-hunters and protesters, in which he lambasted their opinions - and the hunters' total inability to admit why they were doing what they were doing - and it simply wouldn't have worked as a serious news piece. He mentioned to a protester that in his home-country, people hunted [some animal - bears, was it?] all the time. When she asked, slightly incredulously, why on Earth they committed such barbaric acts, he just looked slightly confused and replied: "Er, for fun. Yes."
A stroke of genius. It was the first time I can recall anyone actually stating it so plainly, and it completely threw everyone! Nobody else could have held up such a stark mirror to the practice of fox-hunting and cut through all the bullshit posturing about country-ways, animal rights and so on. It wasn't funny because he was being backwards. It was funny because he was throwing a fresh, embarrassingly clear light on an issue that nobody from the UK had the balls to admit to.
The fact that there are people shallow and dense enough out there to laugh at his zany throw-back pube-bartering ways instead of everyone's reactions to him tells you more about us than about Kazakhstan. Sadly.
Re:Wrong, wrong, wrong! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bigot (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news today, Swift advocated cannibalism as a solution to poverty in Ireland. What a monster.
Seriously, you're missing the point here entirely. The way Ali G and Borat work is by simultaneously making fun of the ignorant bigotry of the characters themselves, and also taking advantage of liberal tolerance of them. Thus Ali G is in the first place a straightforward parody of middle-class white English kids who ape American gangsta culture, but is also a vehicle by which Cohen can entrap public figures into making fools of themselves: they try to seem tolerant and accepting of what they take for a representative of Contemporary Youth Culture, and end up walking straight into it.
Unfortunately, Ali G ended up being adopted as an icon by middle-class white English kids who ape American gangsta culture and who didn't quite realise that half the joke was on them. Thus, after selling out spectacularly and milking the character for all he was worth, it was time to bring Borat to the fore.
Borat is a more sophisticated caricature than Ali G. He's a mish-mash of Slavic and Eastern European stereotypes, and bear in mind that what with the Iron Curtain and all, stereotypes about Eastern Europe are decades out of date, going back to before the Holocaust made anti-Semitism unspeakable. Stereotypes rooted in a nasty past of peasants and pogroms. Borat is a fossil out of this past. In the name of tolerance to a different culture, the people Borat meets will bend over backwards not to give offence, and then the fun lies in finding out just how far the faux-Kazakh guy can go and get away with it, and how hypocritical we're prepared to be in tolerating Borat's intolerance. And, for that matter, in finding out just how different to our ignorant peasant forebears we Western urban sophisticates really are, beneath the surface.
The only concern I really have is about how it all reflects on Kazakhstan itself. From what I've heard, though, they've caught on that the joke's not on them at all, that it's rather a good joke, and that there's no such thing as bad publicity. At least now we've heard of Kazakhstan...
I haven't seen Borat's film - I'll be seeing it on Friday, and I'm very much looking forward to it. I was never inclined to see the Ali G film, but Borat I think has a lot more potential.
Indeed "Wrong!" -- It is not the Kazakhs... (Score:3, Insightful)
All the Kazakh customs and Borat's behaviors are made up, people in Kazakhstan do know how to use toilets and they do not act like Borat. Heck, Borat doesn't even look Kazakh, he doesn't really speak the Kazakh language, and the village was actually Romanian. But the fact that most Americans Borat met didn't realize that (including you) is the ironic part, that is what Borat character was meant to show. There are plenty of scenes where "civilized" Americans go along and tacitly or explicitly agree with some very racist and anti-semitic remarks. For example when Borat goes into the gun dealer's shop and asks for a good gun to kill Jews with, the owner proudly gives him a nice handgun that looked like its bullets could pierce thick armor!
I was glad I payed for Borat. I would even go and say it is a masterpiece. It has something for everyone: the bleeding heart liberals like me can go and see in it how racists the Americans are, the conservative xenophobes can look at it and laugh at the "stupid" foreigner thus only reinforcing their own position of "we are the best country and everyone else is backwards" -- which I have to say on a certain level is funny in an of itself, and of course, there is plenty of slapstick and "Mr. Bean" type humor for everyone else. The interesting part, as I read in another review, is that Sacha Cohen had only one take for his scenes and most of them were not rehearsed (that's why the "masterpiece" label).
Re:Wrong, wrong, wrong! (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally I don't think he could make his point (if he has one) any clearer.