I've been a fan of Sacha Baron Cohen ever since his Ali G days. All three of his creations were hilarious. Ali G was the faux rap artist from London. Bruno was the vapid, self-important gay Austrian fashionista. And Borat was the clueless "journalist" from Kazahkstan.
Cohen's specialty was ambushing unsuspecting victims who didn't realize he was in character when interviewing them.
Cohen has been fearless about playing the fool in all three incarnations
He has been fearless about creating excruciatingly awkward situations.
And he has shown no hesitation to take on recent power players like Avraham Koop, Brent Scowcroft, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, or Bhoutros Bhoutros Ghali.
He has even been willing, in his Bruno persona, to brave the wrath of homophobic gun nuts from Alabama.
My admiration for Cohen reached new heights when as "Bruno" he told a terrorist group leader of the Palestinian Al Aqsa Martyrs brigade that he had sustained great sun damage to his hair, and at another point, actually refers to Osama bin Laden as "a dirty wizard."
Yesterday it was announced that Cohen had settled a lawsuit with this man. Turns out the man, Ayman Abu Aita, is neither a terrorist nor a Muslim, but a Greek Orthodox grocer.
Cohen may be funny, but he is also a con man. And his contempt for his interviewees evidently extends to his audience, whom he fools with equal disregard.
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14 comments:
In that sense he is like Michael Moore...
I agree with you that his schtick can be hilarious. But it is also a huge game of entrapment, and at times a vicious satire on how nice Americans are.
Gilbert --
You're absolutely right, he definitely takes advantage of most Americans' good nature.
John--For what it's worth, I met a guy from Ubekastan, one of the many stans in that area, and he told me that Kazikstan (misspelled I'm sure) is a very highly educated country and the movie had no basis in reality. I thought it was a very funny movie, however, he left that country with a seriously bad reputation. B
Brian --
My understanding is that originally Cohen had planned to make his Borat character either Albanian or Turkish, but he was informed that people from both of those groups, especially the Albanians, would be more likely to exact revenge on him, so he switched to the relatively harmless Kazakhs.
"Homophobia" doesn't exist, or at least not in the 99% of 'reported' cases. Phobia means EXTREME FEAR/DREAD of something harmless, e.g. hydrophobia or rabies, where a man freaks out over a bowl of water.
Most people who oppose the gay agenda do not so out of any phobic feeling but because they don't like the idea of equating the grossness of gay sex with real sex; they object to forcing all Americans to accept-and-celebrate the notion that fecal penetration among men is 'beautiful' and 'natural' and 'healthy'.
And if 'gay marriage' is okay, why not incest marriage? Though I oppose both, I'd rather have incest marriage legalized than 'gay marriage', which is just ridiculous.
Andrea --
You are 100% right about homoPHOBIA, as a matter of fact I wrote an entire post about how misleading that word is a few months ago. I was just being lazy in using the term here.
PS -- I'd much rathe shave gay marriage legalized than incest marriage. Incest marriages would produce lots of kids with genetic defects, whereas gay marriage produces none. Society is better off with the latter.
In the Bruno movie, in the swingers scene, Bruno ends up jumping through a glass window to escape. That scene was pure fakery. If he had jumped through a real glass window he would have been lacerated all over the place. The window could only have been stunt glass, meaning the entire scenario was fiction, not the reality-TV humiliation the joke was supposed to be based on. Don’t know if this is of the same level as the instance you reference.
Ed
Ed --
Good point; there are definitely scenes in both Borat and Bruno where the other actors are in on the joke. But those are usually fairly obvious; I'm not sure where that swingers scene fell. I thought the guy swinger was not a "plant," whereas that dominatrix had to have been.
He wasn't fooling me as I'd long suspected his "ambushes" weren't genuine. They were simply too overly offensive, so I knew at least some of his interviewees were also acting.
I don't actually agree. Ok, that guy wasn't a terrorist.. But he was acting gay in the middle east that takes some balls...
Anon --
Yes, and I gave him credit for being fearless in a lot of awkward situations. And yes, wearing that "gay" Hasidic outfit among a group of Hasidic Jews took some courage. But none of those things would have compared with actually calling Osama bin laden a "dirty wizard" to a Muslim terrorist.
You realize the glass didn't break because the window opened outwards right?
Unknown --
What....?
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