Word: borat
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Baron Cohen throws himself recklessly into all manner of potentially dangerous situations. The crowd at the rodeo starts booing Borat when he sings the "Kazakhstan national anthem" to the tune of "The Star Spangled Banner." A group of young louts in an RV get Borat almost as drunk as they spout their beery misogyny. And there's an eerie scene in a revival tent where he accepts Christ as his Savoir and babbles in tongues. As if honoring the intensity of the believers' fervor, Baron Cohen does not act up - he goes with the holy-water flow...
...Most of the movies so-called victims, however, ask for it. The film's running gag is that Borat, like all of his supposed countrymen, has a childlike fear of Jews (a joke, of course, since Cohen and most of the film's primary perpetrators are Jewish). In his home town, the annual event is the Running of the Jew; and when he and his team travel across the U.S., they decide to drive (in an ice cream wagon) because his producer "insisted we not fly, in case the Jews repeated their attack of 9/11." While in the South, Borat...
...Borat's fear of Jews has an exuberant, childlike ignorance - it's one more medieval superstition he carries in his baggage (along with a live chicken). And that would absolve him more than the Americans he encounters. It's funny when he enters a gun store and asks the gent behind the counter, "What gun would you get to shoot and Jew?" It's creepy when the manager recommends a certain model, without missing a beat, and as if he'd had to answer that question a dozen times before...
...Baron Cohen, director Larry Charles and visiting fireman Michael Moore passed the time by answering questions. The screening was eventually postponed until the following night, leading to some grumbles from the normally ultra-placid TIFF audience - although the headline on Defamer.com, "Toronto Film Festival Projectionist Slain By Angry Borat Fans," was a slight exaggeration...
...Uncut. One clue to the movie's early power is the unease it has sparked among the presumed objects of its ridicule. The real Kazakhstan, perhaps taking a hint from Kurdistan's recent ad campaign promoting itself as "the other Iraq," is busily devising a publicity effort to counter Borat's supposed national slander...