Larry Charles to direct Borat movie

Features
October 24, 2006
Beat the Press
The Borat media frenzy begs the question: Will reporters ever quit rolling over for studios?
By Lewis Beale

I was talking to a 20th Century Fox publicist last week about Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, and the conversation wasn't about its alleged anti-Semitism or the way it picks on America's rubes and racists. No, I was wondering if actor/co-writer Sacha Baron Cohen was actually going to do interviews as himself rather than in character, as he's been doing for the past several months. The publicist wanted to know why I asked, and I responded that interviewing Cohen as Borat held absolutely no interest for me.

"It's shtick," I said. "And as a journalist, I'm not interested in promoting shtick. I'd really like to know why he chose Kazakhstan as Borat's home, why all the Jewish stuff is in the film and if he thinks that in many cases, the object of his satire is akin to shooting fish in a barrel."

Said flack was amazed I wasn't interested in a Borat interview; everyone else was dying to query the Kazakh buffoon. (If you don't believe me, read this. And watch a Borat "press conference" here). Which leads to my point: the toadying, craven entertainment press once again shows how it might as well be in the pay of the studios. Someone once said that the term "entertainment journalism" is an oxymoron, and these days, that's more often true than not. The competition for "stories" (I use this term loosely; it's really just a feeding frenzy for access) has become so intense that just about everyone has become a suckup.

Here's the thing: the film industry is a multi-billion dollar enterprise with a global reach. The images it puts out not only define how we see ourselves, but how others see us. Not that you'd know this from most entertainment "reporting," which is obsessed with celebrity, box-office gross and the vapid coming and goings of studio heads and power agents.

Back in the early '80s, when I broke in as a stringer for the Los Angeles Times, things were a lot different. The entertainment section ran stories about how the Mob was reaping millions from Deep Throat; the ways in which the cocaine epidemic was affecting Hollywood; and how the paranoid M.I.A. movies of the period (Rambo and all those cheesy Chuck Norris flicks) were presenting a distorted image of the Vietnam War's aftermath.

Can you imagine stories like those in any arts section in 2006? It's not just that editors and writers seem to be uninterested in real reporting (under the mistaken assumption that readers don't care), there's also the fact that slowly but surely, they've allowed the PR machine to dictate what they write, and even how it gets played.

Don't believe me? Just check out the outlets who will willingly sign legal documents stating that the piece being written, or the photo being shot, can only show up in the publication, Web site, etc. that the interview was scheduled for. In other words: You want the interview, you have to promise you won't sell it to another outlet. You want the photo, you have no resale or syndication rights. In some cases, you have to promise specific placement before you get the access you want.

I don't know of any other beat reporters -- whether they're covering sports, politics, business or what-have-you -- who are forced to sign away their rights. But on the entertainment scene, well, you want disheartening, check out any junket where the Webbies, TV stations, second-tier papers and other alleged journalists blithely troop up to the sign-in table and happily affix their John Hancocks to these documents. It's truly, utterly disgusting (don't even get me started on the sycophantic autograph-seekers, picture-takers and gift bag freebie sluts).

Luckily, I work mostly for outlets who refuse this sort of blackmail. And even though their stance has occasionally cost them stories they haven't backed down. In the last several months, I've had two run-ins of this sort: an interview with a B-level actor was cancelled when the paper I was writing for refused to guarantee a cover, and photos of a 20-year-old semi-unknown were not allowed when the same publication would not sign away their rights. Good for them; it's nice to know there are still some papers with ethical standards.

Which leads me back to Borat. Interviewing an actor in character has as much relationship to real reporting as the Oakland Raiders do to a good football team. It's blatantly crawling up the ass of the studio and giving it a big rimjob. You want to do it? Great. Have a fine time. But don't ever call yourself a reporter, my friend.

INTEGRITY

----------------

oh give me a fucking break.

What? That isn't true? Don't be naive.

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2006/10/boratG241006_228x371.jpg

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/img/galleries/borat251006/borat2G_350x271.jpg
"I have brought here with me my 11-year-old son, his wife and their new-born baby, who I am hoping to sell to singing transvestite Madonna," he said.

and their review

A little warning: There's some anti-Semitic banter (from Baron Cohen if you please) and male nude wrestling.

...earlier this week, 20th Century Fox slashed the number of theaters in which it plans to open Borat domestically to 800 from more than 2000, saying that Middle America has yet to become aware of the character. The film opens on Nov. 2 in the U.S. (and the U.K.).

Are these the same fucks that buried Idiocracy, or was those fucks at another studio?

I'll be honest with you, kingfisher, I hadn't heard of Borat until recently.

This summer, a guy in my fantasy baseball league starting posting stuff in his "Talk Smack!" balloon like "Throw the Jew down the well!" The other managers and I went wtf, and started calling him out in the comments section. He backpedaled and said it was from "Borat". Hell, his team's name was "Borat's Ballers". I didn't know what it meant.

NOW, I've heard of the guy, but I wouldn't blame the studio for not giving it a Braveheart IV kind of opening.

Obvious and Idealistic, as that sentiment may be.

Fish in a barrel and a little too self-satisfied for my taste, but kind of great nonetheless.

Me = Capt. Obv.

-- Pleasant Plains /// (pleasant.plain...), October 27th, 2006 5:38 PM. (Pleasant Plains ///)

wait, back up... you fantasize about baseball?

Anonymously fund over-the-top promotion campaign for all wierd movies I fancy.

If I ever become a Crazy Billionaire To Do List Item #360:

Purchase Hellicopters and invite friends over for "Hellacopter Races."

Sure I do. For example, in my outfield, I have a +1 Paladin in left, Miss April 1992 Cady Cantrell in center, and Creedence Clearwater Revival in right.

we all know she can't catch worth a shit, but can she bat?

Hollywood film company Universal is offering £22 million for the worldwide rights to the film Bruno, based on a flamboyant gay Austrian fashion reporter.

the facial expressions are better than the jokes

Hollywood film company Universal is offering £22 million for the worldwide rights to the film Bruno, based on a flamboyant gay Austrian fashion reporter.

-- kingfish prætor (jdsalmo...), October 28th, 2006.

fixed.

Borat beware: Accept an invitation by a top Kazakh official to find out what the country is really like and you could be in for a nasty surprise.

"I'd kill this impostor on the spot," said Eltai Muptekeyev, who makes his living in Almaty by posing for photos with a blindfolded falcon clinging to a thick leather glove on his hand.

...

Even the nation's most liberal political voice had bellicose words for Borat.

"If it happened in a country where rules are more strict than ours, there would have been a government decree to destroy Borat," said Zharmakhan Tuyakbai, leader of the opposition National Social-Democratic Party.

"Even if we set aside his (offensive) personality, he should certainly bear responsibility for his offensive words."

But some Kazakhs were starting to see the humor.

Aigul Abysheva, a third-year linguistics student at Almaty State University, said she at first was "disgusted" by Borat's jokes, especially by his "chain of importance" _ where dogs and horses are higher than women.

"But then I realized he was making fun of ignorant people, no matter where they come from," she said. "The real target of Borat's movie is a couch potato who believes that Kazakhs drink horse urine."

But Galymzhan Zhakiyanov, a Kazakh opposition leader, said it was only natural that Cohen should ridicule his country.

"Instead of fighting Borat we should look at other circumstances that have harmed our country's image," he told the zonakz.net liberal news Web site.

"If human rights and freedoms were not being violated, if Kazakhstan did not become famous for its corruption scandals around the world, then Sacha Cohen would've chosen some other country for his jokes."

"Our way of thinking is mostly European," said Tuyakbai, the opposition leader. "For 70 years we lived in a totalitarian state, and successfully transformed our society in just 15 years of independence."

His tone changed when the conversation turned to Borat.

"If I see him, I'll hit him in the face," he said.

by J. Hoberman

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is funnier than its malapropic title—the audience with whom I saw the movie wasn't laughing so much as howling—and even more difficult to parse.
Eyes wide, face fixed in an avid grin, Sacha Baron Cohen's ersatz Kazakh TV reporter, the ineffably oafish Borat Sagdiyev, goes looking for America. It's a documentary of sorts. The road trip—he's afraid to fly "in case the Jews repeated their attack of 9-11"—takes him from New York to Los Angeles (where he hopes to bag Pamela Anderson) by way of Mississippi, and well beyond the boundaries of taste.

America, the "greatest country in the world" per Borat, first appears as a subway car, where the friendly Kazakh introduces himself to passengers and, as is his custom, attempts to double-kiss the men. Predictable agitation is trumped when Borat's cheap suitcase drops open to release a live chicken.

The alert viewer may glimpse director Larry Charles among the startled commuters, but by and large, Baron Cohen's lumpen performance art—replete with all manner of public display and daredevil idiocy—is skilled at concealing its tracks. In the most spectacular example, Borat's bedroom tussle with his heavyset "Kazakh" producer (Ken Davitian), caught masturbating with a picture of Pamela, escalates into a naked chase down the hotel elevator, through the lobby, and into a banquet of the local mortgage brokers' association.

Not simply a jackass, Borat (like Baron Cohen's earlier creation Ali G) specializes in one-on-ones with unwary professionals, snared by their willingness to humor a hapless foreigner and desire to appear on (even Kazakh) TV. Stooges range from a self-identified humor consultant ("Do you ever laugh on people with retardation?" Borat wonders) to a car salesman (asked if the automobile is outfitted with a "pussy magnet") to a pair of pols, former Georgia representative Bob Barr and perennial candidate Alan Keyes. What did they know—and when did they know it? Keyes realizes something before our eyes when, after a long, faux-naive account of a Gay Pride rally, Borat says, "Are you telling me that the man who tried to put a rubber fist into my anus was a homosexual?"

How does Baron Cohen keep a straight face? If ever there was a movie that demanded a documentary devoted to its making, it's this one. (Press notes assert the filmmakers were reported as terrorists and trailed by the FBI.) That both Barr and Keyes are right-wing moralizers suggests something about the Baron Cohen agenda. It's hardly coincidental that the antique store he trashes specializes in Confederate memorabilia. Interviewing "veteran feminists" or Atlanta homies, Borat baffles them with his chauvinist stupidity. But picked up by a van of South Carolina frat boys or chatting with the owner of the Imperial Rodeo, he has alarmingly little difficulty getting them to articulate the idea of reinstituting slavery or making homosexuality a capital offense.

Baron Cohen has gleefully involved the government of Kazakhstan in a campaign against Borat—showing up at the White House on the day President Bush hosted Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev. But his target isn't really an imaginary version of Nazerbayev's nation (nor its enemies, the "evil nitwits" of Uzbekistan); it is rather the domain of the "great warlord Premier Bush," red states in particular. "I think the cultural differences are just vast," the Mississippi matron hosting Borat for dinner at her Magnolia Mansion (on Secession Drive) confides to the camera while her guest is away from the table. Those differences become unbridgeable when Borat returns with a stool sample, and then with the arrival of his indescribably inappropriate date—recruited from the back-page ads of the local alt-weekly.

The movie's set piece has Borat— wearing an American-flag shirt and looking like Saddam Hussein plugged into the wall—entertain a Virginia rodeo with his Kazakh version of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Borat's introductory declaration of support for America's "war of terror" gets an ovation, his fervent wish that George Bush "drink the blood of every man, woman, and child in Iraq" a slightly less enthusiastic one. The crowd starts booing, however, when they hear him sing, "Kazakhstan is the great country in the world—all other countries are run by little girls." (Borat manages to complete this anthem; a report in The Roanoke Times suggests that Baron Cohen and his crew had to be hustled out of the place before they were lynched.)

It's almost anticlimactic when Borat wanders into a Pentecostal church and, in the presence of a Mississippi congressman and justice of the state supreme court, is baptized in the spirit. "Does Jesus like me?" he cries, his impassioned babble lost in the mass glossolalia and the strident "Kazakh" fiddle music arising on the soundtrack. To what faith does Borat subscribe? It's an interesting, never answered question. At one point, he's told to shave off his mustache so that he doesn't look Muslim—"just Eye-talian." But there's no suggestion that Borat is Muslim; his only religion seems to be anti-Semitism.

Borat is not just blatant but proselytizing; his statements precipitate the latent anti-Semitism around him. (The most outrageous example, not in the film, is the widely circulated TV bit in which Borat incites the patrons of an Arizona bar to join him in singing a Kazakh folk song, "Throw the Jew Down the Well.") Small wonder the Anti-Defamation League has expressed concern. The organization deemed it unfortunate that Borat is identified with an actual nation—as though the joke would work if Baron Cohen were passing himself off as a TV reporter from Upper Slobovia—but that's a displacement. Their real anxiety is that by satirizing anti-Semitism, Borat will legitimize it.

It's a measure of Baron Cohen's dexterity that he plants his alter ego on both sides of the Jewish Question. "Kazakhstan"— actually shot in Romania—is a nightmare Eastern Europe where peasants bunk with livestock, torment Gypsies, and stage a trad- itional "Running of the Jew," chasing giant-fanged puppets through their muddy village. But as a native of this barbaric shtetl, Borat is also a non-Christian other who—by virtue of his primitive nature—ridicules the hypocrisy of the dominant social order.

The ADL identifies Baron Cohen as an "observant" Jew. (I'm not sure what that means, but it seems less revealing than the subject of his Cambridge dissertation, namely the role of Jews in the American civil rights movement.) In any case, this comic has a distinctively Jewish sensibility. As sociologist John Murray Cuddihy notes in The Ordeal of Civility, his classic account of newly enlightened Jewish thinkers assimilated into the modern world, Marx, Freud, and Claude Lévi-Strauss were all similarly obsessed with "the raw, the coarse, the vulgar, the naked" and exposing the way in which these things were sublimated by the civil "niceness" of Western culture. So too, Borat (who might add the superstitious, the stupid, the sexist, and the xenophobic to that list).

Indeed, the man who invented Borat is a masterful improviser, brilliant comedian, courageous political satirist, and genuinely experimental film artist. Borat makes you laugh but Baron Cohen forces you to think.

introduced to U.S. audiences in the music video for Madonna’s 1998 single “Music”