Word: borates
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...docu-comedy in which an Austrian fashion journalist shoves his flamboyant gayness in the faces and other body parts of unsuspecting Americans, won the weekend with $30.4 million, a bit above most industry expectations for an R-rated provocation whose star was unknown to the mass audience until his Borat became a surprise hit in 2006, earning more than $260 million at theaters worldwide on an $18 million budget. Yet Brüno's box-office decline from Friday to Saturday indicates that the film's brand of outrage was not the sort to please most moviegoers - and that their...
...Baron Cohen, whose first job after graduating from Cambridge University was as a fashion model, deserves credit for pushing further than he did in Borat. He's beyond brazen in his forced marriage of suicide raids on homophobes and the cartoon mockery of rural Southerners - sort of al-Qaeda and Al Capp. But he and Universal (which paid a hefty $42.5 million for rights to the movie and launched a worldwide marketing campaign that brought the pre-release tab to about $100 million) had two hints that things could go wrong. One was the death of Michael Jackson, which spurred...
...role in particular hovers over everything Baron Cohen does - Chance the Gardener, the blank slate in Being There who provokes all those around him to expose themselves in some way. And then there's the other comic who was routinely described as a performance artist: Andy Kaufman. For starters, Borat owes a thing or two to Latka, the Ruritanian innocent that Kaufman played on Taxi. More important, Baron Cohen's approach calls to mind those Kaufman routines - though routine is the wrong word for anything he did - in which he deliberately set out to bore and bewilder his audiences, just...
...they were audiences were already primed for a performance of some kind, even if they didn't always get the joke. Baron Cohen takes his act out into the wider world, all for the fun of proving what fools these mortals be. That includes the mortals called Ali G, Borat and Brüno - Baron Cohen's comic characters are as dumb and deplorable as the people they mock. Ali G is a self-deluding white guy who yearns to be a black rapper. Borat is a rube and an anti-Semite. This is why the inevitable debate over whether...
...looked at as the third in a trilogy of films that Baron Cohen has devoted to each of the three characters he developed first on British television and then on HBO. Though Ali G Indahouse was a hit in the U.K., it went straight to video in the U.S. Borat was, of course, a global cultural and box-office phenomenon, except maybe in Kazakhstan, where some people got a bit sniffy. Both characters are too famous now for Baron Cohen to use them anymore as a lure for the unsuspecting. Before the summer is out, Brüno will...