IC Forum Archive

zebadayus · Posts: 672

Gnar Rock wrote:

I just saw Borat tonight...and dude there were way more rednecks than I wanted to see. Those frat guys in the RV and those dinner party fucks made me never want to step foot in the south, ever.

My friend, these people are all over the USA, nay, the world. Not just the south.

Also, defending my southern home right here.

James · Posts: 1735

Sasha Baron Cohen = all the nails in the universe, being dragged down one giant, monolithic chalkboard

Smug overgrown student bastard

James · Posts: 1735

ALT: Sasha Baron Cohen = Chris Morris for the cataclysmicly retarded

DeusJester · Posts: 1388

James wrote:

Smug overgrown student bastard

As much as I am probably going to find this movie hilarious (I see it in 50 minutes, yeehaw), I think I agree with you.

GcDiaz · Posts: 1057

James wrote:

Sasha Baron Cohen = all the nails in the universe, being dragged down one giant, monolithic chalkboard

Smug overgrown student bastard

OK, so you don't like the guy. Not really telling us why.

I wonder if anyone even remembers watching him on TV before he made his characters.

Mr. Business · Posts: 1530

I saw this on Friday afternoon. I had a few chuckles.

I feel like maybe I've seen those Alabamians that he bumped noses with before. I have a few guesses about where they live.

Lick Meth · Posts: 154

George wrote:

I saw a preview screening of the movie last week. It's hilarious - far, far better than the crappy Ali G HBO movie. It's actually directed by Larry Charles, the brilliant Seinfeld writer.

The Ali G movie is a real guilty pleasure - and I'm not afraid of admitting my enjoyment of it.

---

Onto the Borat project, then: I haven't seen the film yet, so I can't comment personally, but I was a little displeased after hearing about a few scenes being cut for their "extreme content" - not the 'uncut' rubbish that usually ends up on an assortment of comedy DVDs every year, but in the racial jokage of the scenes.

One of the scenes sees Borat explaining (to a doctor or someone) that, yes, he has had sex with his sister, but when asked whether he has had sex with his mother, he proclaims, in disgust, "no! That is sick." The other scene (I haven't seen these, I'm paraphrasing from an account of a former Fox UK employee) sees Borat staying with a Jewish family. The following scene has Borat, alone, in the bedroom, when he suddenly sees some cockroaches. He then professes to the camera that "the Jews are shape-shifters" and proceeds to throw money at them.

Also worth posting is the infamous "throw the Jew down the well" song, from the TV series, scary due to the fact that Cohen is, you guessed it, Jewish. I think the main strength of the Borat project over Ali G is that he can use the guise to get others to profess thoughts or opinions that they wouldn't normally say openly. It's a very obvious ploy, but it's still rather fascinating, if the humour isn't to your taste (translation: I like it/it's not bad really/Chris Morris is overrated).

extralife · Posts: 3316

How in the hell is Sasha Baron Cohen "smug"?

extralife · Posts: 3316

Lick Meth wrote:

The other scene (I haven't seen these, I'm paraphrasing from an account of a former Fox UK employee) sees Borat staying with a Jewish family. The following scene has Borat, alone, in the bedroom, when he suddenly sees some cockroaches. He then professes to the camera that "the Jews are shape-shifters" and proceeds to throw money at them.

That scene is still in the movie, and it's about as hilarious as you might think it would be.

softlogic · Posts: 140

extralife wrote:

How in the hell is Sasha Baron Cohen "smug"?

Anyone who can get away with the stuff he does will be, and frankly, is entitled to be smug to a certain extent.

I still haven't seen this but I am eagerly anticipating it, though I do worry a lot of people aren't really going to "get" it and that may cause Cohen more trouble than he might be used to. But I dunno. Have any groups been picketing outside of theaters and such?

BalbanesBeoulve · Posts: 2126

Is nice. I like!

and so did a whole lot of people

108 · Posts: 2600

kinda hoping this movie gets released in japan uih

klikbeep · Posts: 485

108 wrote:

kinda hoping this movie gets released in japan uih

Good chance of that -- it just pulled $26.4 million from a lousy 837 theaters.

Ashura · Posts: 735

Guide to What's Real and Fake in Borat:

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2006/11/10/guide_to_borat/index.html

Adilegian · Posts: 124

Gnar Rock wrote:

I just saw Borat tonight...and dude there were way more rednecks than I wanted to see. Those frat guys in the RV and those dinner party fucks made me never want to step foot in the south, ever.

I make a point not to get angry over the internet, so I'll touch this point once.

Learn what the movie was trying to tell you.

This type of comment is precisely the same caliber of ignorance that those boys from USC-Columbia were slurring as Cohen got out of the RV. It's an insipid, coarse, unreflecting ignorance that breathes so easily because it thinks it's accepted.

I'm from South Carolina, and I'm very well educated. My family is from South Carolina, and I can drive fifteen miles west to get to the farm where my grandfather lives, the land for which his father bought back in 1925. It was the first actual land owned on my father's side of the family. I—as well as many others—have deep, abiding emotional attachments to "rednecks."

We're human, too, and we are not properly represented by the worst among us. I just want you to understand that you're enacting the exact same bigotry as seen in the film. For a little perspective:

A little perspective wrote:

I just saw Borat tonight...and dude there were way more Jews than I wanted to see. Those Jews running the bed and breakfast made me never want to step foot in the south, ever.

Do you see?

I like how those folks at the dinner party comported themselves. They remind me of my extended family, and they remind of a particular family (also Southern) with whom I ate dinner every Sunday after our worship service. Few people are capable of being handed a loose satchel full of the giver's shit—at a dinner table, no less—without becoming immediately indignant. The hostess only aggressed against Cohen when he brought a prostitute into her home, implying that he would like to have sex with that prostitute in one of the hostess's bedrooms.

I think she reacted quite gracefully, taking the whole affair into account.

It's extremely fashionable to rag upon the worst aspects of the South, and I expect this is how we are paying for the sins of our ancestors. Jaded as I am—having been presumed ignorant in other parts of the country because of my accent, despite my education and breadth of international experience—I am still amazed that only the worst about the South is acceptable material to consider.

Speech clinics have appeared in SC, GA, and TN over the past fifteen years. Why? Because Southerners have found that they are hired for lower positions than they're qualified for, or they are hired at lower pay than someone else, because we are presumed ignorant according to the way we speak. It's not as though these bigotries lack real-world effects.

I expect that's one of the reasons why no one has jumped on Gnar Rock for that ignorant blast already. The South is presumed okay to mock. The one area that I would have liked Cohen to have gone in that film—and which he didn't even brush—would have been to reveal the total miasma of ignorance in America.

On the other hand, I can also see how the movie portrays the South mostly in a positive light. (I should clarify that by "the South" I mean the states typically regarded as "the Deep South," e.g., Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana. Texas is Southwest, and the general culture there differs enough from the Deep South states to merit being regarded separately.) Casual New Yorkers, in public space, told Cohen that they would beat him up or kill him because he tried to kiss them under the pretense of a cultural gap. Consider how small a thing that is to wrecking a person's antique store, showing a woman a photograph of yourself showing off your son's penis, or handing a woman a sack full of your own excrement in her home at her dinner table in front of her friends. I think most of the Southerners in Borat were damn well-mannered.

Yet you would collect them under the canopy of ignorance and incivility displayed by three drunken frat boys from USC-Columbia.

You have shown the exact sort of behavior that movie mocked. Grow up.

Autokrator Lovestick · Posts: 56

Yeah! Put that carpetbagging jew pinko in his place, Adilegian!!!

Ashura · Posts: 735

Most of the things filmed for this movie were not actually happening where they were protrayed. Read the above article for more information.

extralife · Posts: 3316

Dude, Southerners are always well mannered. That's another stereotype about it. Clearly they act as such in order to get close to us northerners before hanging us or shooting us under the pretense of invasion.

Adilegian · Posts: 124

extralife wrote:

Dude, Southerners are always well mannered. That's another stereotype about it. Clearly they act as such in order to get close to us northerners before hanging us or shooting us under the pretense of invasion.

It's true. Since the last war didn't work, we're trying to make you come to us.

But don't tell that I told.

the vinculum gate · Posts: 2868

adilegian, quite a few southerners are redneck pieces of shit

i mean, i'm from kentucky. i've grown up in the worst of it. all southerners aren't rednecks, but they sure as hell aren't saints either.

Autokrator Lovestick · Posts: 56

oh goddamnit thread delivers

Adilegian · Posts: 124

the vinculum gate wrote:

adilegian, quite a few southerners are redneck pieces of shit

i mean, i'm from kentucky. i've grown up in the worst of it. all southerners aren't rednecks, but they sure as hell aren't saints either.

I'm not arguing that they are saints. Gnar Rock lumped the dinner party together with the USC-Columbia frat boys. I'm attacking that sort of sweeping generalization, which was the very subject of the film's satire.

Many of us are ignorant, yes, though I wouldn't call any of us pieces of shit. I know many Southerners who would have reacted just as vitriolically to Cohen's attempted kiss as those New Yorkers did. The truth is they're scared of what they don't understand, and I could never fault anyone for that.

I loved this movie, and I think it's a joy because it tries to show something true about who many of us are. There's only one potential pitfall. The genre is satire, and the tone is fittingly ironic, and many people (I don't specifically mean anyone on IC by this observation) are content to take it as coldly as it's been portrayed.

Satire's like a surgeon who believes in the hippocratic oath. He cuts flesh--enacts the ritual of a wound--in order to heal. The end of satire is compassion, and it tries to convey compassion by means that are not compassionate at first sight. If it's only taken as comedy, it's useless.

When I saw Borat, I watched the scene on the New York subway and thought, "Oh my God, this confirms everything that scares me about big cities, of which New York City is the holy of holies!" And there's where it works medicinally: it brings the bile of a parochial assumption to the surface, airs it out, and lets me try to understand how I got that sore in the first place.

If I were born in the South in the early 19th century, would I hold my same views on racial equality? If I were born in New York City, would I hold my same fear of city blocks of concrete buildings?

The easy answer is, "Of course not," but the honest answer (I think) is, "I don't know." If someone as familiar and close to my experience as I am can be rendered so mysterious by changed circumstances, why should I presume to be afraid of someone else whom, but for some changed variables, I might have been?

I don't think I'm intrinsically better than bigots, because all the emotions that feed into bigotry ride inside us every day. Am I developmentally better? Well, that's hard to say, too. I have friends who are black, Jewish, Hispanic, Catholic, and prose writers (lol literary burn), and I enjoy them very much. How will I react, though, if I encounter something very far beyond the ken of my experience?

And this is where I think Borat turns everything on its head. "Bigots" become "those people," against whom we can safely band in contempt. I can guarantee that those three USC-Columbia boys are about to learn the hard way how it feels to be "those people," because they have to live all their lives as branded men. They're about to learn (and probably have already learned) that a reputation for incivility turns otherwise civil people uncivil, and fast.

George · Posts: 1656

Holy shit, Borat's appearance on Jay Leno is pure genius. On youtube, watch Borat with Jay Leno parts 1 and 2, and Borat with Martha Stewart.

His appearances on Conan and the Daily Show are good too, but this was amazing.

Kappuru · Posts: 492

I'm going to college in the 'deep south' and generally a lot of people I run into at work (I am a waiter) are ignorant. Ignorant, rich, white people. Not to say that there aren't ignorant black people too.

The south has more idiots, but the north has more assholes. It evens out.

dhex · Posts: 2963

km · Posts: 171

dhex wrote:

If I were born in New York City, would I hold my same fear of city blocks of concrete buildings?

yes.

also, you people put gravy on breakfast and that's fucked.

Dude, you misspelled awesome.

Gnar Rock · Posts: 176

Adilegian wrote:

extralife wrote:

Dude, Southerners are always well mannered. That's another stereotype about it. Clearly they act as such in order to get close to us northerners before hanging us or shooting us under the pretense of invasion.

It's true. Since the last war didn't work, we're trying to make you come to us.

But don't tell that I told.

It's not working.

BalbanesBeoulve · Posts: 2126

http://youtube.com/watch?v=yOpWLP0Wacc

This is pretty good. Regis handles Borat well, when most other hosts get overwhelmed and overshadowed by him.

zebadayus · Posts: 672

So Vinc where did you grow up? I assume not in Louisville. Did you move there to get away from the small conservative town that was choking the life out of you?

I really like the South, I really like the North, I really like the East, Midwest, West, and I like Borat.

showka · Posts: 994

I felt sorry for the frat guys. I don't know why, since its their own fault, but I think when guys get together like that they become assholes. I've been in situations like that and I've never tried to play misogyny off as comedy (then you never call them back! LOL) but I have said extremely dirty of dark jokes I wouldn't appreciate being on film.

I also think parts of the movie where engineered to make Southerners look racist, like how he went to a place called Succession Dr to have the fancy dinner, or how it seemed like bringing a black prostitute as though that was the catalyst for his eviction, or when he made not of the antique stores many confederate flags. Or like when that old racist guy was telling him he looked too Muslim, man they edited that guy out of context!

My favorite part of the movie was when he was talking to the crowd at the rodeo and declared that George Bush should drink the blood of every Iraqi.

EDIT-

The Salon article wrote:

David Corcoran, the most outspoken of the three, spoke with FHM about the experience. "This guy said they were filming a Kazakh reporter who wanted to hang out with frat guys," Corcoran said. "They met 10 of us and I guess chose the three who wouldn't recognize Borat." The producers paid for the three men to drink at a bar, and then had them get in the RV and "pick Borat up ... as if he was hitchhiking." Once in the RV, he says, Borat showed them naked pictures of his sister and confessed to beating women.

Two of the guys -- identified in court filings only as John Doe 1 and John Doe 2 -- are now suing 20th Century Fox and One America Productions, the production company behind the film. The suit claims all three were told at the time that the film wouldn't show in the U.S. and their identities would be kept secret. They're seeking unspecified damages for "humiliation, mental anguish, and emotional and physical distress, loss of reputation, goodwill and standing in the community."

That makes me feel kind of bad about the movie. I also don't think that news lady should've lost her job. She probably took the fall so some suit wouldn't feel embarassed.

the vinculum gate · Posts: 2868

zebadayus wrote:

So Vinc where did you grow up? I assume not in Louisville. Did you move there to get away from the small conservative town that was choking the life out of you?

essentially, yes.