Chris Gore’s Footage Fetishes: Borat Movie-Film Make Me Thinks Deep Thought About Comedy Film

One wouldn’t think there would be much to discuss after seeing a raunchy comedy, but Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is not your typical comedy. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan will not only leave viewers with stomach pain from laughter, but there are many social issues worthy of conversation, as well as a number of lessons to be learned by film’s the hype and inevitable success. (Hey, I get paid by the word, so each time I mention the title, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, that’s an extra 12 words that gets added to this story.)

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Rather than hit you over the head with a diatribe about how Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is effectively a fish-out-of-water tale mocking the ugly American, I’d just like to point out some observations you’re not likely to read in any other coverage of the movie.

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Real People VS. Actors
There’s no better acting than reality in which no acting is involved. Borat’s original director Todd Phillips left the project when a shoot at a rodeo in Salem, VA ended in chaos that nearly turned violent. It was then that Borat actor-creator-star Sacha Baron Cohen chose to pair the film crew down to a miniscule level which further helped to sell the reality of the film’s story – a foreigner documenting his travels across America. The astonished reactions of the real people within the film transcend typical acting from comic actors where we know it’s fake. Lesson: Real is funnier.

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Yakov Regrets Not Wrestling Men in the Nude
Russian comedian Yakov Smirnoff must really be wishing that he thought about wrestling a naked man 20 years ago. (It’s a scene that I won’t ruin, but it provides perhaps the biggest laughs in the movie.) You might remember Yakov as the guy who would say, “What a country?!” Or you might not. In fact, almost no one remembers, but the roots of Borat’s character are clearly influenced by the same type of comedy done by Yakov. Well, if you add racism and sexism done in a way that works. Lesson: Female nudity is sexy, but male nudity is funny.

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Borat could have been unfunny like The Terminal
There was a Steven Spielberg film starring Tom Hanks released in 2004 called The Terminal which is painfully unfunny. Hanks stars as Viktor Navorski who is a foreigner with an accent much like Borat’s. Viktor is trapped at an airport when his fictional country of Krakozhia is overthrown. The comedy is forced and the humor is painful. This cliché by-the-numbers-tug-at-your-heart-strings picture excited, well, no one. Sacha Cohen learned a painful lesson when his Ali G character was forced into a traditional narrative feature script and like a square peg being jammed into a round hole, the result was ugly. And definitely not funny. For Borat, Coen went scriptless and the result is more true to the character. Lesson: Throw away the script. For some films, a script should come in outline form only.

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Shoot the Sequel Yesterday
Sacha “Borat” Cohen’s recent whirlwind press tour and the release of the film itself will effectively kill any chance that there could ever be a Borat sequel. The comedy in the film is based on the innocent bystander’s ignorance that Borat is an actor playing a character and not a real foreigner promoting offensive beliefs. Now that everyone knows the gag, Cohen would have to travel to uncharted regions of America in order to find someone unaware of his movie. Lesson: If it looks like a hit, shoot the sequel before the first movie hits theaters.

Gore gone!

Chris_Gore is an author, a filmmaker, the creator of Film Threat, and one day hopes to travel to Kazakhstan to meet Borat's sister.
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