There was some discussion about the “Borat” guy and his big new movie.
This might change some opinions of this guy.
Having read this along, with a few other stories coming out about him, I don’t think he’ll be getting any $$'s from me.
Not that he’ll miss them.
[url=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=415871&in_page_id=1770&in_page_id=1770&expand=true#StartComments]When Sacha Baron Cohen wanted a village to represent the impoverished Kazakh home of his character Borat, he found the perfect place in Glod: a remote mountain outpost with no sewerage or running water and where locals eke out meagre livings peddling scrap iron or working patches of land.
But now the villagers of this tiny, close-knit community have angrily accused the comedian of exploiting them, after discovering his new blockbuster film portrays them as a backward group of rapists, abortionists and prostitutes, who happily engage in casual incest.
They claim film-makers lied to them about the true nature of the project, which they believed would be a documentary about their hardship, rather than a comedy mocking their poverty and isolation. (more at link)[/url]
Wow. And here I was plugging this thing all over the place based on the reviews it has gotten…
I’m a little skeptical though whether the villagers were quite as naive as is being suggested now.
Either way I don’t suppose it made a lot of sense to insult a people that way… Unless they are Americans of course. Americans are like Canadians, only further south and resiliant as hell to that kind of mockery.
[quote=“Tyc00n”]Tainan cowboy:
So its ok when Ali G or Borat tricks ordinary Americans / Brits / whoever, but if its poor villagers its not ok?[/quote]WTF?
I don’t write these stories.
This article, if its true and I see no reason to think otherwise, shows that the guy is quite a bit more than just pulling a few legs.
He is a major sh*t.
Practical jokes and poking at the self-inflated pretentious is not a problem, I do it a lot myself. But using these people like he did is lower than low. I can’t see trying to defend or justify such actions.
Is that hard to understand? Seems like simple common sense to me.
OK, I’ll join in the Borat backlash. If this story is accurate then yes, a very shoddy thing to do. But I’ve always thought that Borat would have been just as funny, but much less offensive, if he had been from a fictional country; another “…stan”, instead of Kazakhstan.
Looks like a plant by SBC’s people to me… The Daily Mail? FFS…
I may be wrong, though.
When poor simple peasant folk from Romania are paid to do a job of work and then later realise their incredibly rich employers were exploiting them and laughing at them, then that’s definitely grounds for legal action, isn’t it?
“Glod: a remote mountain outpost with no sewerage or running wate.”
“where locals eke out meagre livings peddling scrap iron or working patches of land.”
“to scrape together whatever modest sums they can muster”
“Cambridge-educated Baron Cohen”
But fuck them, it was funny. In any case it was never supposed to be about them, rather Borat’s mystical Kazakhstan. As it turns out, they’ve won a little time in the limelight and pocketed a bit of loot. They are making much bigger fools of themselves by being a party to this obvious stitch up, or is it really just a money grab?
There actually “are” really poor people in the world you know. If Ali G took advantage of that poverty, and if, in the process, decieved them about what they were involved with and characterized them as sexually depraved then he is an asswipe, that’s all.
That’s all. Lining up to take your cut is also not classy.
Have you seen the first four minutes on youtube? It has women pulling carts, children with guns. You can’t ‘deceive’ someone into thinking that’s going to be anything positive.
That was one of my first thoughts when I heard he used a real country name. He could have been just as funny, without offending quite so much.[/quote]I suppose people could argue that an obviously fictional country is not as funny. But in fact he could easily have used a fictional “…stan” without most people being aware it was fictional. Off the top of my head, I can’t name all the central Asian republics!
