November 13, 2006
"I like your clothings. Are nice! Please may I buying? I want have sex with it."
It's dangerous to just say things like that to people on the street, even if you're playing an evil-but-lovable fictional character. Some guys will beat you up. But we don't feel sorry for Sacha Baron Cohen. Not only is he making a fortune with his Borat persona, but he also got rescued by Hugh Laurie.
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You're right, I don't feel sorry for Cohen, although the guy who beat him up should have been arrested for assault. Whatever happened to telling someone to f--- off? Idiots, both of them.
This incident does highlight how very, very scripted the movie Borat is, though, in spite of it's off-the-cuff documentary feel. I think people get sucked in by that and forget that it's much closer to Spinal Tap -- a mockumentary -- than a real documentary. The vast majority of people would simply not respond to Borat the way most of the movie's cast does. (OK, Alan Keyes was awesome.)
I think Hugh Laurie is my favorite tv actor right now, although Friday Night Lights' Kyle Chandler is running a close second.
Best thing about this post was the linked article. My firefox 2.0 browser rendered the second subheading onward as a 2-word-wide column about a mile long!
In retrospect I find the movie somewhat less funny since I learned that the villagers at the beginning were played for suckers and had no idea how they were being mocked. They've since found out and are devastated. It's one thing to make a person in a position of power the butt of a joke. It's another to do it to people who are so grindingly poor and unable to understand what was being done to them. Not funny.
I don't feel sorry for the villagers of Glod anymore than I feel sorry for the other scores of well-meaning people who were pranked by Cohen as Borat. What makes them deserving of special sensitivity?
(Not that I feel sorry for anyone in the movie. Borat was absolutely hilarious.)
Maybe this incident will be a lesson to Cohen: Pretending to be a possibly crazy man is hazardous without a film crew around.
I know it's in a newspaper so it must be true. But does anyone think this actually happened as reported?
The PR machine for this movie has been the biggest juggernaut I can remember (almost 2-3 months now). I hope its really really funny by the time I see it or I might have to sue Rupert Murdock and Company.
Surely the Sacha talking to the camera or talking to his producer alone was scripted, but I think some commenters might be how much was actually scripted of the Borat-populous interactions.
In retrospect I find the movie somewhat less funny since I learned that the villagers at the beginning were played for suckers and had no idea how they were being mocked.
Yes, and I find it rather amusing that Baron-Cohen and Laurie are the kind of middle-class, Oxbridge-educated mildly left-ish Englishman who love to sneer at ugly Americans who treat the rest of the world with arrogant condescention. In my experience, they're surprisingly thin-skinned when they're the ones being mocked.
According to Wikipedia and IMDB, he went to Christ's College at Cambridge University.
Without your comment, Craig Ranapia, it wouldn't have occurred to me to check on that. Thanks.
That's the first time Borat made me laugh. We can only hope for an encore.
In my experience, they're surprisingly thin-skinned when they're the ones being mocked.
Do you have experience with Cohen or Laurie themselves being thin-skinned?
I don't detect sneering condescension in Cohen's work.
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