Larry Charles to direct Borat movie

-- bo janglin (wt...), November 13th, 2006 10:06 AM. (dubplatestyle) (later) (link)

we should hang out

http://www.playfuls.com/news_0003273_Borats_Face_Punched_in_NY_by_Joke_Victim.html

No, it's before your time, sonny.

i say 1. the dudes playing dice in atlanta and 2. the people (not the politicians) at the revival church

I don't know why exactly but HAHAHAHA.

xpost

thats cause they're from newton where people know how to be magnanimous n shit

i say 1. the dudes playing dice in atlanta and 2. the people (not the politicians) at the revival church

-- geoff (gffcnn...), November 14th, 2006.

One of the points my wife (who is not American) raised is that for the most part Borat reveals Americans to be very nice, tolerant, patient people (the ones that aren't out to hang homosexuals, anyway)

You can put me in with the "laughed all the way through but still kind of let down" crowd.

The Slate article on the anti-Semitic content was pretty OTM in my opinion. I just found the anti-Semitic caricatures of throwing money at shape-shifted-Jews-as-cockroaches and the grainy footage of the "running of the Jews" so over the top and unrealistic that they fell flat in a film which was lauded for exposing real-life bigotry lying below the surface of American culture. Borat's other displays of bigotry seem so subtle in comparison that the anti-Semitic parts just weren't funny. They came off as fucked up in a way that "but SBC is Jewish!" can't explain away.

And while the "Whorat" entry is written in a totally douchebag way, I agree with most of the sentiment behind it. I really hated the ways that the lines between staged and OMG-REAL were blurred. To me, the HBO Borat (as well as Ali G and Bruno) works so well because the formula is consistent. SBC plays a character that catches his subjects off-guard and we all get teh funny.

All of the shit that had to be inserted into the film to give it a weak semblance of story weakened the whole thing in the end. Is it so hard to find three frat boys who will say embarrassing things on camera that you have to rent an RV for them to do it in and coach them on their idiocy before the cameras start rolling? How much harder would it have been to hire a real prostitute and invite her to the dinner party and have her accompany Borat out on the town afterward?

I confess to having a huge stick up my ass for the last couple of years about this type of "staged reality" on talk shows and reality shows and possibly expecting too much from a full-length Borat project. And while I respect the need to one-up the HBO segments for the jump to the big screen, I just found all the Larry Charles "wacky story line" shit to be so out of place to me. SBC gets teh funny so perfectly and originally without it.

Side note: I am very fascinated by the fact that the one group of subjects in the film which the press has not been able to track down is the group of Mortgage Brokers. And not only because this was the segment at which I laughed the hardest. The fact that the crew’s cameras were fixed on the doors which the Producer and Borat ran in through mixed with the fact that this group hasn’t yet been in the press with a lawsuit or complaints, (unlike almost everyone else save for a few random NYCers???) leads me to believe that they were in on it. However, it’s hard to believe that they paid a ballroom full of extras and only went that far with the joke. Also, after working in event services in major hotels for the last few years, I wouldn’t doubt it if the real-life hotel in question made enormous concessions to the real-life association in exchange to but the kibosh on the whole thing in order to save face.

I'm with you there! It's an amazing punchline for an amazing sequence, and I've been wondering about it myself.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/sacha_baron_cohen_the_real_borat_finally_speaks

I feel like folks still aren't getting how this works; they have them sign a release form after the fact.

I understand that part.

But I've been around enough association dinners to know that the INSTANT an unexpected camera crew enters the premesis, they will be asked to leave. It's the fact that they had footage of the dinner prior to the interruption and that the camereas were fixed on the very door that the two burst in through BEFORE they did so (mixed with the fact that the hotel/ association have not been in the press unlike the rest of the subjects) that leads me to believe it might have been staged. A shot following the two down a corridor and then into the ballroom (think: the camera angle in every chase on COPS ever) would make much more sense if it were a real dinner that suffered a real interruption.

But there's definatley at LEAST three hundred people in there. Its amazing that no one has been able to get a hold of a single one of them.

srsly?!?!

jesus, glad i didn't click that link yet

He seems like a horrible choice for this assignment though, wrt his own history of profiting from deception.