Top of the box-office mornin' to ya, make racist benefit and glorious prostate for cult learning Americay!!!
Reconstituted poo editorialising from cyberspace make chicken good elsewhere:
Candid-Camera throw-back Borat ENJOYS embracing these stereotypes [and unlike in traditional candid-camera programmes, he refuses to break "character" either diagetically or non-diagetically, remaining in dumb character even while pathetically promoting the film, desperate for credibility - for himself and his eternally doomed victims]. He reminds of today's postmodern subject at its purest: "Isn't everything oh so Oironic!" - its boring and its anachronistic.
>meeting antisemitics (a controversial irony on his part when doing Borat since Cohen is Jewish) and just general intolerance and stupidity wherever he goes and >without fear.
You mean ridicule for the sake of ridicule. So why doesn't he "
play" a Jew then? Stereotypically, of course. You know, the ranting and raving Zionist kind, calling for the genocide and nuking of all Arabs everywhere as a prelude to The Rapture after armageddon ... ?
The problem here is with those who have seen the movie and STILL don't know what they are actually talking about. The issue here is in understanding WHY people should find such an openly racist film so, you know ... FUNNY!
> If there is anyone stoopid enough to believe this character is representative of the >people of Khazikstan or anywhere else, they are as foolish as Borat and are watching >the wrong movie.
But they are not the people primarily watching it [or reviewing it]; it is those who don't believe the stereotype who are watching it and who are finding it so, you know ... FUNNY!
> The real stupidity (if not racism) is displayed by the 'real' people he
> meets, who go along with (and agree with) a lot of what he says and does.
> These are (for the most part) deluded Americans (not Kahzakstanis) who often
> go out of their way to "help the poor little foreigner"
No, they are NOT the "deluded" ones. It is those who smugly laugh at them who are the deluded ones, using their "stupidity" to justify their own pompous and elitist position (towards both supposedly dumb Americans and mad foreigners).
> So when Borat and his producer get in the naked wrestling match and
> Borat gets Azamat's junk swiped in his face who was that making fun of?
> "My moustache still tastes of your testes."
Oh, underneath his mad facade he's really a
real human being after all!!! Just like us, messy and fleshy and victim-vulnerable, but beautiful and precious all the same. All satire, a well-worn traditional genre, relies on such devices to "humanise" the supposed villain: even as the film ostensibly "exposes" the bigotry, racism and sexism of all and sundry [Borat and his willing victims], it purports to excuse it all by suggesting - and explicitly showing - that hidden away underneath all the racism lies real caring human beings with secret hearts of gold, genuine really real, nice and wonderful, people - all of this then oh so comfortably JUSTIFYING all the racism, sexism etc ... when they're not of course being nice caring social workers ["It's not that we really mean it, the racism and stuff, it's just that, you know, SHIT HAPPENS!"].
"As Rosenbaum points out, the film is only ostensibly anti-anti-Semitic. Something more troubling is going on. Borrowing a bit of dialectical logic from Slavoj Zizek for a moment, Borat reveals the anti-Semite not to be an aberration from the human, but excessively human. In his passionate attachment to Pamela Lee Anderson and other absurdities of contemporary American life, the buffoonish anti-Semite Borat reveals the ridiculousness of the masks of propriety of a fabulously wealthy yet bitter and fearful culture. The nastiness of the film comes from its pitiless assault on the human weaknesses of our presentations of self. This is why critics look for respite from the troubled laughter of the film. Dargis finds it in the nude wrestling scene, which serves "an elegant formal function" in Borat. Zacharek finds it in the instances in which "for every American who rises to the bait he so temptingly dangles, there are at least two more who go out of their way to be kind to him." In other words, we find our respite in the moments of consolation offered by satire, that favorite form of the eighteen century, when people knew all about masks, pieties, and chaos." ---From
"Borat: The Jackass Has Landed"
> Haven't spent a lot of time in the lesser known places in the States
> have ya? It seems to be the so-called "rednecks" that Borat targets
> mostly, and there is no shortage of them.
As this forum has indeed witnessed over the years [though not just from the USA]. But the point is: Borat WANTS these rednecks, will even most definitely invent them where necessary to legitimate his own underlying racist and elitist agenda. "Please, please agree with make glorious me, because no future Borat stereotype otherwise have it, me have no Hollywood make Borat celebrity Pamela in Kazakhstan prison."
> ... but I certainly think Cohen's a decent and convincing actor.
Someone who puts on - and plays out - a
disguise is not an actor, just someone wearing a mask, like the clueless "actor" who gets drunk in order to "play" a drunk.
> I don't believe so.... I guess that makes me something, but I
> emphatically deny it whatever it is!
So, like, you'd have preferred if Borat had, say, portrayed himself as a Koran-quoting, box-cutter waving, cover-Pamela-Anderson-with-a-Burka preaching, death-to-the-American-infidels spouting, politically assertive Islamofacist Muslim? Or as a tatoo-covered, Mein-Kampf quoting, neo-Nazi skinhead demanding all Jews assemble immediately in the nearest ash-tray, and so on? That would really have been, you know ... funny! [as meanwhile we witnessed Borat being frog-marched to Guantanamo Bay] ...
> Duh! Your Europeaness is showing... Americans love to make fun of
> themselves. I love America, but that doesn't mean I want to sleep with
> it...
Oh?
So where, then, are all the [satirical] comedies about 9/11? About Abu Ghraib? About hanging Bush before Saddam? About End-Timers and Zionist Christians, and so on? Borat is making (racist) fun of (imagined) foreigners. [some real dumb Americans constructed by Borat for the make benefit of the glorious camera] to whom we subordinate our latent racism; Borat now permission give benefit viewers to laugh at his glorious racist jokes with maximum love pamela prejudice.
> Again, your reaction appears to be based on a premise you have formulated.
Again, what are you muttering on about? What premise? Or is it that you are just distinctly uncomfortable with the notion that you may have been "enjoying" racist jokes ...?
> The first time I saw The Party I thought it was hilarious. I was around 10
> years old. The 2nd time I saw it I was around 17 and was bored and
> 'offended' by it.
And your point is? That you like to wallow in the sacredness of the knee-jerk irrational?
> I haven't seen it for the past 20 years or more, but I don't think I'd be as
> harsh on it as I was last time around.
Would you ever make up your mind, and before all the ice-caps melt?
> Likewise, the first time I saw Darby O'Gill and the Little people I loved
> it. Then I "grew up". Being Irish myself, I took offence and found it very
> degrading and disgustingly racist.
> Then I grew up grew up and saw it again... and loved it. I don't intend
> getting sidetracked into why/how-so-because,
SIDETRACKED!!? "We cannot allow reason and rationality and thoughtful analysis to interfere with my precious zombie emotionalism and beautiful knee-jerk feelings!"
>but suffice to say, I don't
> find the ole onscreen Oirish-paddywhackery offensive anymore...
It's not "offensive" anymore precisely because NOBODY, anywhere, accepts or tolerates such fucking clearly appalling stereotypes [apart from Ian Paisley, of course, and a few posters here in the past]. Borat is exploiting the fact that some Americans actually believe the Borat stereotype. That's the sole basis of all the humour: "enjoying" seeing people, candid-camera style, being duped by Borat, so transferring ALL credibility on to Borat himself, making him a legitimate stereotype..
> Likewise, anyone watching Borat and (possibly) thinking "these Kazakstanis
> are dim" have a lot of growing up to do. They will come around in time, but
> the movie itself is not to blame for this (possible) reaction.
Huh? The movie is not to blame for presenting Kazakhstan in such a dim light? Oh, I dunno, let's maybe blame the weather instead ... To quote from the Tomb lad: "
Kazakhstan has nothing to do with Borat or this film - unfortunately, it is simply a placeholder for some "Asiatic savages" in the old imperial lingo. Hardly anyone in Kazakhstan looks anything like Borat, and potassium is not the main export (oil is, hence the presence of huge investment banks like ABN Amro and HSBC). So, the film is casually racist - probably not as much as in the usual Hollywood fare, but still. Actually, what is irritating about it is that the ADL worries that people will go along with the antisemitic sentiments Borat expresses, whereas it is far more likely that people will think, when they're laughing at this cheap racist caricature called 'Kazakhstan', that this kind of racism is harmless fun."
Borat is making such racism mainstream
Acceptable. Has just done so ...
