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Borat 2

Do we really need Sacha Baron Cohen to tell us how racist we are in 2020? OTOH, a throwback to 2006 is strangely a comforting thing. God I hate this political climate but also have a trailer.


 

Rascally Badger

El Capitan de la outro espacio
(He/Him)
I'm pretty much in the same place. As funny as this may be--when Baron Cohen hits, he hits--I don't see the use of him using a little goading to get people to reveal their racism when people are more than happy to just be overtly racist these days.
 

Ludendorkk

(he/him)
I don't know about the movie but "playing a disguised character who has to wear additional disguises because the disguise became too famous" is pretty conceptually brilliant
 

Sprite

(He/Him/His)
I adored Brüno but Who Is America got waaaay too dark for me. I’m not sure I could take this.
 

ThornGhost

lofi posts to relax/study to
(he/him)
You guys...this movie is pretty great.

Legitimately laughed quite a bit, though it is very much a product of this time right here right now. Watch it pretty soon or not at all.
 
Probably not watching it until Monday because I need to show the kids (21 and 17, so it's okay) the verry niice Borat 1 first. But from what I've heard (including from our own reibeatall), it's as relevant as the first film. Besides, we have an excuse now in 2020 to say "Great Success!" and what is that worth?

I adored Brüno.

My daughter's friend's mom showed them Bruno during a sleepover when my kid was 13 and now the film makes me angry for reasons that are entirely not Cohen's fault. We don't talk to that mom anymore, obviously.
 
I love Maria Bakalova as Tutar. It was risky to bring in another performer to be so prominent in this, but she nails it.
 
Two white, or at least non-Asian, people doing outrageous performances as Central Asians seems weird and bad in 2020. I'm sure it's funny. Bit surprised by the reception; that's all.

I will give Cohen a Brünopass (he can say Brüno) bc I saw that in theaters, thought it was funny, and never had to think of it again bc it didn't permeate culture for the next decade plus.
 

Zef

Find Your Reason
(He/Him)
That linked article is absolutely appalling. The evil is almost cartoony and the response from the Fox rep is even worse. Fuck this guy.
 
I've got no qualms with Borat. It would be exceedingly easy for me to default onto, "Nobody cares about racism against Asian people" and just be done with it. But the whole purpose of Borat isn't to make fun of Asian people, it's to make fun of ugly Americans and our hatred/ignorance. You've got a Jewish actor, who speaks Hebrew while pretending to be Kazakh and saying a bunch of anti-Semitic stuff. It is exceedingly easy to spot as satire if you know literally anything about any of the involved cultures. But Americans can't be bothered to even learn their own language, let alone know what other languages actually sound like and other cultures look like. It would literally be like someone walking around dressed like an Egyptian, talking in Hindi, and claiming to be Korean.

There is definitely an argument to be made about using satire responsibly, and how the lines between satire and honest emulation are often blurred. It's what led to Dave Chapelle to quit his show when he realized the hordes of his white fans were laughing at black culture like he was providing them a minstrel show, versus understanding any of his underlying critiques of our racist society. But that's not what is being argued by above blue checkmark. (I couldn't help but roll my eyes at them complaining about holocaust survivors when Cohen is from a family of *checks notes* holocaust survivors.) Should Cohen have similar moral qualms with what he's doing? I dunno, but I'm not really willing to pass swift and universal condemnation when the root of the problem is mostly our ignorance versus anything else. There literally wouldn't be a movie to begin with if Americans on average weren't so blitheringly ignorant, racist, and easy to dupe.
 

Zef

Find Your Reason
(He/Him)
How is bamboozling and then underpaying a Romanian village mired in poverty a satire of American racism, though?
 
How is bamboozling and then underpaying a Romanian village mired in poverty a satire of American racism, though?
That was the story for Borat 1. Did he go back to the same village for Borat 2? If we're going to cancel every movie that that pissed off locals where they filmed on location, there just wouldn't be Hollywood. That's not really meant to be an excuse, but it ranks pretty low on my outrage meter all things considered.

Answering your question specifically though, it's the same issue. Here's a supposedly Kazakh village, but it's full of Romani speaking Romani without a hint of spoken Kazakh/Russian, or either language written in Cyrillic to be found.
 

ThornGhost

lofi posts to relax/study to
(he/him)
I suppose I had never really considered Borat potentially racist, which is definitely my fault. My initial reading of the character (circa the first movie) seemed such an over-the-top cartoon pastiche that it would be hard to imagine it affecting anyone's perception of Kazakhstan, and I hadn't bothered to update that. That's obviously wrong and I'd like to think I've learned some things since the original film.

I think I'll be doing some reassessment of the character now.
 

Trar

Grilling
(he | him)
Borat is funny and I'll probably watch Subsequent Moviefilm if I can figure out how without giving Amazon money but duping a village of Roma isn't really defensible. That's a huge black mark on the otherwise fairly good first movie.
 

madhair60

Video games
I saw Borat as confronting the west with its racism, the way he's patronised, etc, and playing into the whole outrageous racism thing as kind of a part of that, how people just seemed to accept him without qualms. Like ah, yes, this is a convincing, real person who exists. It's much like how Ali G used the character's background and the way he's patronised to slip past depth charges and make politicians etc look ridiculous, show them up.

It is fucking problematic though. Any kind of race roleplaying is, even when it's as absurdly, ridiculously OTT as Sacha's.
 

Ludendorkk

(he/him)
Okay I'm trying to say this unsarcastically as possible but do none of you know any white people? From my experience the average Borat viewer both understands that the primary purpose of the character is to satirize Western ignorance and accepts Borat's portrayal of Kazakhstan at face value because it is literally their only source of information about the country

(I couldn't help but roll my eyes at them complaining about holocaust survivors when Cohen is from a family of *checks notes* holocaust survivors.)

There's a lot bad things in your post but I absolutely know you are better than spewing garbage like this
 

Regulus

Sir Knightbot
Okay I'm trying to say this unsarcastically as possible but do none of you know any white people? From my experience the average Borat viewer both understands that the primary purpose of the character is to satirize Western ignorance and accepts Borat's portrayal of Kazakhstan at face value because it is literally their only source of information about the country

Oh, bullshit. At least in the US, it's more likely that they simply aren't even aware that Kazakhstan is a real place.
 

madhair60

Video games
I'd be amazed if anyone actually thought the portrayal of Kazakhstan in Borat was a legitimate, accurate one. I find a lot of these criticisms require one to think that people are cataclysmically stupid to the point that they don't understand what a comedy is. Maybe that is actually the case. It doesn't bear thinking about.
 

Phantoon

I cuss you bad
I've got an Uzbek friend who watched the first one and was laughing away happily until Borat made a joke about Uzbekistan and she reflexively shouted "Bastard!"

I guess that shows the "it's all funny jokes until it's about you" thing is universal
 

Ludendorkk

(he/him)
Lots of intelligent people believe very crass and stupid stereotypes about other cultures. No one is arguing people think Borat is a documentary, people don't need to believe something is literally true to have it communicate negative stereotypes or influence their thinking about a group.
 

Phantoon

I cuss you bad
By that thinking though, we should stop making satire because really stupid people will always take the message backwards. I don't agree. Now that's not talking about Borat specifically, but in general the sort of people who'll get stupid racist stuff about Kazakhstan from there will also misunderstand everything else put in front of them.

I do need to stress that Borat would be a lot better if it didn't have the village section at all and was just people dealing with this impossible caricature.
 

jpfriction

(He, Him)
Borat is an obvious satire designed to make fun of dumb Americans who take obvious hurtful stereotypes of foreigners at face value. Most of the people who watched it remember nothing about it other than that it was funny when the guy said “my wife”. I think both of these statements are true.

I confess I’m part of the problem and I didn’t think much about the village segment when I first saw it, I guess I thought it was shot in Ohio or something.
 
Personally I do not remember any non-SBC racists making a fool of themselves in the first movie; I just remember Borat's funny voice and absurd behavior. (I know both existed) Willing to believe it's racist of me to only remember the latter, 14 years later, sure. Find it hard to believe people do not truly associate Turkic, Central Asian -stan countries with backwardness and misogyny generally, partially due to this movie. Agree that there is some cognitive dissonance where many people are like "of course I know it's not like this" while also thinking it's like this. SBC is not just wholly inventing stereotypes out of whole cloth. Apparently he speaks Hebrew in the movie, but (poor) Turkish in some promotional material.

Central Asians do not always have much cultural presence in the west generally and the United States in particular but prejudice is high in the former Soviet Union. I can't speak for how Central Asian people feel about this movie generally or how it's affected them in real life. There's not much awareness of Roma as an actual people in the US, but they are truly a stigmatized racial minority in many countries (including for sure Bulgaria, Bakalova's country of origin) and antiziganism is common enough in Western English language communities on the internet/among actual Europeans I've met. Really poor taste he went back to that well; I don't know to what extent explicit antiziganism features in the dialogue here or how the village scene lands.

It's been a while since I've seen an SBC production and I remember liking Borat and Bruno quite a bit, but I do not think you need an outrageous racist caricature to elicit over-the-top racist statements from people. SBC as a rich English dickhead could also get them, I think! I definitely think these movies illuminate the fact that if you act like a chad freak; people will roll with it. I do not want to watch Borat 2, but maybe I will. Making no grand claims about what satire's for. I am not cancelling anybody; I am just sincerely surprised they made another one.
 
I do not think you need an outrageous racist caricature to elicit over-the-top racist statements from people. SBC as a rich English dickhead could also get them, I think!

I think he already had an even better idea than this in Who Is America with ex-Mossad anti-terrorism expert Capt. Erran Morrad, which was kind of terrifyingly effective at getting elected Republians to let their guard down.

 

Phantoon

I cuss you bad
I think he already had an even better idea than this in Who Is America with ex-Mossad anti-terrorism expert Capt. Erran Morrad, which was kind of terrifyingly effective at getting elected Republians to let their guard down.


That resulted in some genuinely jaw dropping stuff, like weaponised kindergartens
 
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