Shade
New Member
Or to give it its full title (which doesn't fit into the title bar) Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Now then: we headed out last night to see the multiply eulogised Pan's Labyrinth, only to find out local independent cinema with its doors closed, "due to staffing problems"! So off to the nearest multiplex and Borat turned out to be the next thing on.
And talk about bathos! Talk about from the sublime to the ridiculous! Borat for me is in a shortlist of one for worst film of the year. It aims low - laugh at the funny confused people! - and fails to deliver. Did Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian (a reliably unreliable source at the best of times), who gave it five stars, really see the same film? Even the reliably reliable Philip French in the Observer was, I think, being generous when he called it "sporadically amusing."
If we take as a starting point the proposition - surely unarguable - that it's not funny to try to embarrass people when they're doing their best to be kind and hospitable to you, then Borat falls on its face for about 70% of its running time. A patient driving instructor; a professionally unflappable TV anchorman; an elderly B&B-owning couple: Sacha Baron Cohen's targets are not exactly brave or difficult. In almost all cases the people respond to him with politeness and tolerance, and indeed there are many encounters which are cut off after the initial greeting, presumably because they never developed into anything funny.
And then about 25% of the film is scripted stuff which is equally rib-untickling, consisting mostly of irate, subtitled exchanges between Borat and his obese, hairy producer, including one long naked fight scene which makes Bubbles in Little Britain look like the height of comic sophistication. That's the problem throughout: if the scenes are scripted (it's sometimes unclear), they're not funny enough; if they're improvised, they're unremarkable.
Which leaves the final 5%, which seems to be the parts which were used - if not by the filmmakers then by the critics who praised the film - to justify its blunt 'humour', the notion that this was a satirical masterpiece where the appearance of the naive foreign reporter gave unreconstructed homophobes, racists and bigots just enough rope to hang themselves. In fact it only happens twice: once when a guy at the rodeo rails against Muslims and homosexuals, and once when one of a trio of repellent frat boys makes some vague references to 'minorities' having all the rights (after the crew took them out and got them drunk to loosen their tongues). That's it. The much-vaunted scene at the rodeo where Borat earns the crowd's applause for urging George W Bush to "drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq" actually shows the applause becoming increasingly scattered and polite at this stage (and the boos which accompany his rendition of the Kazakh national anthem were clearly dubbed on afterwards, as we don't see anyone close-up jeering him even though they managed to have half a dozen cameras trained on sections of the crowd cheering him earlier).
And then there's the belittling cruelty of the opening and closing scenes in the film, set in 'Kazakhstan' (actually Romania), basically getting chuckles out of how crap these people's lives are and how hilariously primitive they seem. Little wonder that the villagers are suing the filmmakers for misrepresenting the nature of their enterprise to them (they were told they were participating in a film about poverty). Good luck to them.
There's no satire, intelligence, wit or merit in Bore-at. At an hour and 20 minutes it's too long, and if it had been shown on C4 for free I would have felt short changed. It has done incredibly well in cinemas both here and in the US. The world has gone mad.
And talk about bathos! Talk about from the sublime to the ridiculous! Borat for me is in a shortlist of one for worst film of the year. It aims low - laugh at the funny confused people! - and fails to deliver. Did Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian (a reliably unreliable source at the best of times), who gave it five stars, really see the same film? Even the reliably reliable Philip French in the Observer was, I think, being generous when he called it "sporadically amusing."
If we take as a starting point the proposition - surely unarguable - that it's not funny to try to embarrass people when they're doing their best to be kind and hospitable to you, then Borat falls on its face for about 70% of its running time. A patient driving instructor; a professionally unflappable TV anchorman; an elderly B&B-owning couple: Sacha Baron Cohen's targets are not exactly brave or difficult. In almost all cases the people respond to him with politeness and tolerance, and indeed there are many encounters which are cut off after the initial greeting, presumably because they never developed into anything funny.
And then about 25% of the film is scripted stuff which is equally rib-untickling, consisting mostly of irate, subtitled exchanges between Borat and his obese, hairy producer, including one long naked fight scene which makes Bubbles in Little Britain look like the height of comic sophistication. That's the problem throughout: if the scenes are scripted (it's sometimes unclear), they're not funny enough; if they're improvised, they're unremarkable.
Which leaves the final 5%, which seems to be the parts which were used - if not by the filmmakers then by the critics who praised the film - to justify its blunt 'humour', the notion that this was a satirical masterpiece where the appearance of the naive foreign reporter gave unreconstructed homophobes, racists and bigots just enough rope to hang themselves. In fact it only happens twice: once when a guy at the rodeo rails against Muslims and homosexuals, and once when one of a trio of repellent frat boys makes some vague references to 'minorities' having all the rights (after the crew took them out and got them drunk to loosen their tongues). That's it. The much-vaunted scene at the rodeo where Borat earns the crowd's applause for urging George W Bush to "drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq" actually shows the applause becoming increasingly scattered and polite at this stage (and the boos which accompany his rendition of the Kazakh national anthem were clearly dubbed on afterwards, as we don't see anyone close-up jeering him even though they managed to have half a dozen cameras trained on sections of the crowd cheering him earlier).
And then there's the belittling cruelty of the opening and closing scenes in the film, set in 'Kazakhstan' (actually Romania), basically getting chuckles out of how crap these people's lives are and how hilariously primitive they seem. Little wonder that the villagers are suing the filmmakers for misrepresenting the nature of their enterprise to them (they were told they were participating in a film about poverty). Good luck to them.
There's no satire, intelligence, wit or merit in Bore-at. At an hour and 20 minutes it's too long, and if it had been shown on C4 for free I would have felt short changed. It has done incredibly well in cinemas both here and in the US. The world has gone mad.