Another drooling retard, this time the Australian critic from the Herald Sun, pisses in his pants:
Borat the buffoon, by Andrew Bolt
ANDREW BOLT writes:
Are these really just jokes about social too-niceties? Or is this film in fact a celebration of their collapse?
IT'S my own fault that Borat made me sick. That I was ashamed I'd also taken my son.
I know it's my fault because even in the dark of the Chadstone cineplex last Wednesday I could tell I was out on my own.
From all the braying and hooting, it was clear I was the only one who didn't think Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan was the funniest joke since that one about the two dirty Jews called Hymie.
And look at the film's box office here. Its huge success in the US. Its rave reviews. "Scathingly funny", declares the Boston Globe.
So, if I'm alone in not getting the joke, it's obvious why. No sense of humour, right?
And you'll agree, I'm sure, when I tell you all the laughs to be had from this film that British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen made of his trip from New York to Los Angeles, pretending to be a Kazakh journalist making a documentary on America.
Deceit is the key to his film. Here's part of the email Baron Cohen's producers sent to a manager of a swish Texan hotel to trick him into letting them film him with "Borat" for his "documentary".
Dear David,
It was great speaking with you today! ...
(We are) privileged to be a part of a new documentary style film that highlights America at its best.
It is our hope that we may capture that "New America" -- sophistication and Southern hospitality -- in Dallas. One way of illustrating this would be to film in a historic Dallas hotel, shooting anything from the grandness of the hotel lobby to the professional look and nature of an experienced service.
Once tricked into helping this nice Kazakh journalist that manager and all the other victims similarly fooled found themselves in fact confronted by a racist, sexist, lewd, pornographic and foul-mouthed alien.
And whether you laugh at what happens next on the screen depends entirely on whether you've got modern sensibilities -- today's delicate appreciation of what is funny and what is not. What is cool and what is cruel.
Let me put it this way. Borat is certainly for you if you like jokes about Jews, gypsies and other foreign types, and think it's funny to call African-Americans "chocolate face".
In fact, anyone who loves seeing the weak humiliated, the victimised mocked, or the polite made to seem stupid, must rush to see a lot of what would please them plenty.
Hurry, folks, and see Baron Cohen embarrass unsuspecting hotel clerks and car salesmen just trying to do their best, or watch him smash racks of antiques of an astonished shopkeeper in Vicksburg.
Watch him excite a couple of university students (first made drunk by Baron Cohen's producers) into saying crassly adolescent things about women and minorities to a world they cannot know is watching -- a world that gets off on being in on Baron Cohen's secret betrayal of people with no power and no comeback.
Watch "Borat" show explicit photographs of a naked boy to a female etiquette coach, or make jokes about raping women to an exasperated driving instructor, or tell a humour coach about his brother having sex with his sister. No joke too vile, no bullying too mean.
Watch this tall man with his alarming looks terrify pedestrians in New York by rushing up to them with arms ready to grab and lips to kiss. See how they run!
Watch especially for the scene at a dinner party in Alabama, to which six kind local people, including a Pentecostal minister and his wife, have come to talk about Christianity to this visiting "Kazakh journalist".
As they try to put their guest at ease, Baron Cohen turns to the minister and, pointing at two of the wives at the table, tells him: "In my country they would go crazy for these two." Then, pointing at the minister's wife, he adds: "You, not so much."
Laugh! You wouldn't have had this much fun since you last made someone cry.
The woman "Borat" points at is, I should remind you, a real person called Sally Speaker, whose face has now been shown to and sniggered at by millions.
She now says: "Lives have been ruined by his comedy. I realise some people will watch the movie and find it funny, but for the people who were duped into appearing, what happened was anything but humorous."
The etiquette coach who arranged that dinner says her business has been ruined. A TV producer who booked "Borat" for an interview on a breakfast show -- during which he offered the host sex with his sister -- soon lost her job. Two of the college boys are suing for the humiliation they've suffered.
But the film's damage isn't just measured in the real people being tricked, humiliated and even harmed. There's also the values it trashes with them.
You know what makes the dinner scene, for instance, so funny to those who still manage to laugh?
It's that the guests behave so kindly for so long to their "Kazakh" guest. As Speaker says: "We thought he was from a foreign country, so we gave him the benefit of the doubt."
Again and again, the film shows courteous people taken advantage of by a man who'll stoop to any trick or meanness to make a joke of them. What fools, to be nice. Of course, the film isn't all a celebration of bullying. Heavens, no. For the more refined there are also the shots of "Borat" apparently defecating on a busy street outside a Trump hotel, or washing his face in a toilet.
At the dinner party he returns from the toilet to the table brandishing a plastic bag of his faeces.
Not your style? Then how about the scene of his hugely nude manager first masturbating, and then suffocating Borat during a naked wrestle by squatting his immensely fleshy backside all over Borat's face? Now, there's a meeting of like with like.
All this makes what is today the biggest comedy on the screens of the Western world -- a hit from London to Hobart. This is the barbarity that has critics wowing and punters howling. Ker-chinggg go the tills.
Naturally, we still have some remnants of shame that make excuses necessary for the fun we're having at the weak's expense.
The most common one given for applauding what should appal is offered by the apologetic critic of the Courier Mail -- that "Borat's prejudice is really just a tool, which prompts biggots (sic) to reveal their prejudices to a wider audience."
Baron Cohen loves that one, too, telling Rolling Stone: "Borat essentially works as a tool. By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudices, whether its anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism."
But in the film's entire 84 minutes, I struggled to find just three examples of Borat exposing the prejudices of anyone it tries to trick.
There's the two drunk students, a rodeo manager, who agrees with "Borat" that gays should be hanged, and the rodeo crowd who half cheer when their guest anthem singer from Kazakhstan tells them he supports their "war of terror" and "may George W. Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq."
But even then the cheers soon turn to boos, which forced Baron Cohen to run to the safety of his car, and everywhere else in the film the racist ravings of "Borat" are either politely ignored or fiercely rejected. The police are even called.
Maybe it's true, as some say, that the film just mocks the political correctness that's grown so stifling of late. Maybe Borat makes us laugh more at the prissy rules being broken, than the offence being given.
But is that how it really works? Is this a film that relieves the exhausted polite, or does it in fact just encourage the cretins, who actually need more manners, not more encouragement to mock the few restraints they have left?
Perhaps I might find the answer by watching the screenings in Werribee -- or Lakemba -- to see who laughs loudest, and when.
But what would I know. I lack a sense of humour, right? So help me out. Tell me again how to laugh at the dirty foreigner telling a joke about the rape of his sister. Tell me the one about a kind Christian woman having a bag of s..t thrust in her face.
Are these really just jokes about social too-niceties? Or is this film in fact a celebration of their collapse?
Of course, maybe Baron Cohen was right after all -- Borat does expose prejudices. But I fear that the prejudices he exposes aren't those of anyone on the screen, but of the hyenas laughing in the stalls.
