Hacker Cinema
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
2006 · Film · 84 min
Directed by Larry Charles
Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev travels to America to make a documentary. As he zigzags across the nation, Borat meets real people in real situations with hysterical consequences. His backwards behavior generates strong reactions around him exposing prejudices and hypocrisies in American culture.
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54 comments on Hacker News
Probably due to the movie "Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan".
People missed the joke that it was poor English on purpose.
I don't think Borat works as well for this. Borat was made for an international audience, including many Americans, and involved Sasha Baron Cohen meeting Americans in person to wind them up, so there had to be an element of accuracy in his satire. Top Gear, on the other hand, was made primarily for a British audience, so the jokes in that episode are very much lazy stereotypes that the British have about Americans without having to be too rooted in reality. I imagine that the production crew spent some time looking for a filling station where they could provoke the 'throwing rocks' incident, for example.
Tech dependency is only bad when it's bad content consumed with that tech.
Ipad toddlers are really only bad because of moonbug entertainment and whatever the heck this is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate. If my kid gets addicted to Minecraft, Among Us, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, or any paradox interactive map painting simulator, I know that they are much more likely have a gainful career ahead of them (assuming AI doesn't automate them away, in which case, all such thoughts are forfeit anyway). Load up 50s era cartoons onto that Ipad and I've got entertaining attention span building happening. Swap the language to french and suddenly my kids are learning a new language.
I find it absolutely disgusting how common it is on this forum to see the opinion that "the kids are too tech dependent", and advocating for taking away phones, restricting access to the internet/computers, etc.
A huge amount of these pedagogical luddites themselves only became worthy of working a high paying tech job through their own tech/screen addictions. We should celebrate them here and respect the insane ROI that such addictions provide to us as "hackers". The self-hatred and authoritarian parenting styles advocated here should leave all who witness those who hold these opinions ashamed.
And yes, the kids do have genuine "brainrot" like skibidi toilet or whatever nonsense memes they're making today. I've seen the videos that young kids watch of GTAV characters falling from buildings ad infinitum. We cannot forget the millennial MLG 420 air horn brain-rot of our own era, or the crap TV/movie brain-rot like American Pie, Borat/Bruno, or Reality TV, or the crap from the 90s like bad tabloid talk shows like Jerry Springer, or crap from the 80s designed to sell toys like Transformers, or crap beach movies from the 60/70s like Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, or literally all of Mad Magazine, or formulaic Westerns in the 50s... ?
I for one will relish in high quality entertainment with my child and won't condemn them to getting only tiny glimpses of the wonderful world of art that is within the screen. Addictions to entertainment like books, art, etc are naturally features found in the best writers, painters.
I live in Kazakhstan as expat, and locals are brought up patriotic pretty much like in America -- national anthem at school every day (I shivered when I learned about it, both about KZ and America), told they're the richest post-soviet country. So the movie that plays the anthem and highlights so much that he's from Kazakhstan (although he looks nothing like a Kazakh), looks like a serious insult.
(edit: to be exact, I don't mean he mocks this partiotism, there's nothing to do with it in the movie.)
I've been told that the true meaning was to film Americans with candid camera and laugh at how stupid they are, but to me, Borat is the only thing people utter when I say where I am, so it's pretty annoying.
OTOH, given this popularity, nat. govt could have paid some petro-uranium-dollars to Cohen for some tourism commercials.
> The government and locals don’t like when you bring up Borat
Depends on which locals. Younger generations never really cared about this. All my friends have always found the movies hilarious, especially the first one.
When the sequel was released, the government finally started acting like adults: https://youtu.be/eRGXq4t9wY4
I'm pretty sure this is also caused by generational change in the government.
These are just my favorites, and in the order of which the popped into my mind.
- Office Space, 1999 (especially for people who work at offices) - The Matrix, 1999 - Fight Club, 1999 :)
Umm, what else? - Spirited Away, 2001 (and many others from Miyazaki) - Requiem for a Dream, 2000 (Very Heavy addiction-related film! I actually got watery eyes just by typing this, I've seen it too many times.) - Joker, 2019 - Full Metal Jacket, 1987 (and many others from Kubrick, such as Dr. Strangelove and The Shining) - Django Unchained, 2012 (and many others from Tarantino, at least Pulp Fiction) - Alien, 1979 - The Silence of the Lambs, 1991 - Saw, 2004
I made a bit longer list, so that I can share the link to my friends.
Actually there are many quirky ones which came to my mind, such as Borat, the South Park movie, Team America, Airplane! (alternatively titled Flying High!), Idiocracy and Hangover, but I wouldn't say these are in the must-see category. Actually I wouldn't even recommend these to most people, if I didn't know what kind of humor they like.
I think it happened when the Borat movie came out.
I miss the cheesy but wholesome comedies and parodies of the 1990s and 2000s: Anger Management, Rush Hour, The Cable Guy, American Pie, Scary Movie, Bruce Almighty, Eurotrip, Tropic Thunder, Hot Shots, Borat, Idiocracy, How High, White Chicks, etc.
We can't have any like those in this age because someone on Twitter will claim to be offended. Good thing to back-up those old gems as well before they get cancelled/edited to comply with modern sensibilities.
The Elon Twitter movie will be the next Borat, I can’t wait.
Oh, the Olympics has done worse:
https://www.npr.org/2012/03/23/149244038/ceremony-plays-borat-kazakhstan-anthem-by-mistake
> Kazakhstan won the game but lost the award ceremony. A parody of the country's national anthem was played by mistake after a Kazakh athlete won a gold medal. Organizers of the shooting competition in Kuwait are apologizing for playing the Kazakhstan anthem from the comedy movie Borat.
My wife and I are performing magicians and there is a surprising amount of overlap in the history of the two performance arts.
Wrestling came from circus and sideshow. Stage magic has also had a large presence there, historically. Both art forms have a history of keeping their "methods" secret.
It reminds me of the first Borat movie, where Sascha Baron Cohen - at the time relatively unknown outside of the UK - stayed in character during the promotion of the movie. People didn't know if this character was for real or if it was an actor playing a part. It was part of the "art" (I know it sounds weird to call Borat "art", I don't want to get into a pedantic argument about definitions ... let's just say that magic, film, pro wrestling ... all theatre).
Ethically, it's an interesting grey area and I think that each has different reasons for being protective of what going on behind the scenes. Every magician has learned the hard way that audiences usually react to finding out how a trick is done with disappointment and that's the real reason that methods are kept guarded. The line for me is that I will never pretend that what I am doing when in character is anything other than parlour tricks and illusions.
I think that pro wrestling and Kayfabe are similar. For a long time pro wrestling did want to protect the illusion. These days they are much more open about it being scripted and predetermined and, like magic, anyone that wants to learn how some of it is done can find out very easily online. But I think that they still don't want to advertise the techniques because, in their belief, it would ruin the suspension of disbelief.
Magic is actually the UNWILLING suspension of disbelief. Even if a trick is not framed as an intellectual puzzle, it takes an intelligent audience to experience the illusion. The person watching must have a clear understanding of what is possible vs what is not, and the magician needs to understand every possible explanation that might run through a typical rational human mind and work to preemptively disprove those explanations. It's a fun implied intellectual challenge.
I can find pro wrestling to be entertaining but I'm not a super-fan and so I don't know if the "unwilling suspension of disbelief" enters into the picture with Kayfabe at all .. but I can see how it can. If we were under the assumption that every move and stunt were without any risk then would it still be AS entertaining? The "moves" in pro wrestling do not eliminate risk but they definitely work to reduce it. And understanding the mechanics, like in magic, has the potential to break the illusion.
What Borat did in his film was purposefully ridicule dirt poor people from Eastern Europe, making them look like bigoted idiots who might live in a makeshift barn with their cow and playing the whole thing for laughs. There was a lot about it that really was kinda despicable.
The point of the Borat movie was to make fun of western peoples beliefs about foreign people and foreign cultures.
In order to capture the audience, it uses satire. It takes ideas about foreign people, exaggerates these ideas even further, and investigates how people react to these exaggerated ideas. It turned out that even when taken to ridiculous extremes, many people (as seen in the movie) were willing to buy the idea that Borat was a real person from a foreign country.
Borat does feel dated now. But perhaps that also means, the movie was effective on some level, in highlighting these beliefs? And perhaps even to help combat said beliefs?
So I dated Kazakh woman for a while. This is true, but the title is misleading. In a nutshell, when two people elope, it's officially considered a kidnapping, to save face for the family. But no one get prosecuted and everyone knows what's going on.
She said the only realistic thing, in the movie Borat, was the kidnapping scene, and even that was outlandish.
Gonna go read the article now and see if I need to make any updates.
The problem is one is appearing in Borat films and not taken seriously, the other is on the faculty at Harvard and writing op eds for the nyt.
I’m fairly sure LYAH came from the Borat movie and not from why.
>The 2006 film Borat aimed to expose American bigotry, xenophobia and sexism as the title character's unwitting scene partners reveal their true beliefs.
I loved these movies but the idea that Sacha was taking a moral stance is the height of delusional rationalization. Borat is a racist caricature. This is equivalent to filming in black face then acting like the filmed bystanders are racist a*holes and you are morally enlightened.
When I lived in the US everyone would automatically assume I was Mexican (I am Spanish), so I totally get how it feels. I remember that some times I'd even say that yes, I was Mexican, just to avoid having to spend any time on it. For example, in the US loads of people think that Spain is next to Mexico. So I'd joke that I went home by train, and if nobody blinked, I'd at least get a laugh out of it. This is a big part of why I love all the Borat movies
Point 2 is completely backwards in my opinion. The "political correctness" not at all emanating from America. It's emanating from China. Sensitivity to Chinese censors has colored a lot of major blockbusters. There remains little to no filter on what gets produced for US audiences and the latest from Eric Andre on Netflix is proof positive of that. Eric Andre pushes some of the same buttons as Borat with more emphasize on physical danger than parody, but he still got his movie made and released and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
The 22 Jump Street movie kiss/fight scene could never be done today, nor could the other kissing scenes, but the kiss/fight scene was a pivotal part of the movie.
Borat is racist, it's not 'satirical' and that's ok, the world's complicated. It's also ok to hide behind 'satirical' as everyone does, except when you get picky on movies you personally don't think are 'satirical'
Hollywood's inability to deal with kissing is academically interesting. Currently combining sarcasm with the 'correct' actions they are told to follow. It's a dangerous path towards the religious moralism we left behind in the 60's, but perhaps I fear change.
The idea nothing is happening is incorrect.
Yawn, everyone always uses this film as a "prime" example. I don't even think it's true. This film (like Borat) was clearly satirical and the real targets of the jokes quite obvious...
I think a better example of movies which "wouldn't be allowed today" is probably something like the Hangover, which just mines outdated stereotypes & slurs for laughs. Just a sign of society moving on really (as much as Todd Phillips likes to cry about it, I feel his inability to adapt to the comedy landscape is really just a failure of the imagination). I thought the 21 / 22 Jump Street movie addressed this issue quite well it seems the shift took place sometime between the two releases
> Just compare with who was the laughing stock at the original one - feminists, blacks, gays, jews.
If you think the first Borat movie was laughing at any of those groups then you have seriously misunderstood the movie.
Shock horror, society has moved on in the 40 years since Airplane was made...
How do you even know it wouldn't be allowed? People love to spout this kind of stuff, but... have you even tried?
Edit: A very nice example I've come across is Ricky Gervais stating that the British Office couldn't be made today. I think he's being very disingenuous saying that because while out of context it could appear to have a lot of controversial jokes touching on taboo subjects, within the show it was always clear who the real target of the jokes was (same with Borat). Masterfully done and I believe (from what I've seen in terms of comedy recently) that kind of stuff would still fly at the BBC. There's even a documentary from a couple of decades back about the success of the office and a BBC producer admits even back then they had to reign in a few of the areas Gervais wanted to go in terms of race & disability (it was also mentioned that he is quite obsessed with these topics), so its all bullshit that people like him are shouting about "THESE DAYS...!".
In fact maybe he's right and the Office couldn't be made today. But that's primarily because Gervais isn't funny these days
For someone who claims to know movies, these opinions are pretty bad.
Borat couldn't be made today... Except a sequel was made... but only because he's already famous? Certainly he had to know that Says Baron Cohen already had a TV show before making borat?
And scrolling through Amazon Prime to watch movies? Who in their right mind does this when they want to watch good movies? Streaming services rarely have good movies on them because their catalog is intended for the kind of people who want to binge watch The Office. These are not curated lists of the best films ever. In fact, even just scrolling through the IMDB top 250, I doubt you can even watch half of them on Prime/Netflix combined.
It's not hard to notice that the two Borat movies are very different in style
Who is ridiculed in the subsequent moviefilm? Orange man, anti-abortion activists, libertarians, holocaust deniers - they are all safe to laught at. Just compare with who was the laughing stock at the original one - feminists, blacks, gays, jews. That wouldn't fly today
Why would you choose Borat as the kind of comedy which "isn't allowed to be made today" when you know you're going to have to contrive a reason for the existence of a sequel which was near enough made today in a footnote...?
Most of the points express a disappointment with mainstream Hollywood movies, which if you don't broaden your horizons is eventually going to lead to disappointment for any cinephile.
"The sitcom-and-laugh-track era appears to be over, thank heavens" I would agree about the laugh-track era being over - but thats hardly a new development. I've been watching the Larry Sanders show from the early 90s which was a landmark show without a laughter track. But to say the era of the sitcom is over is nonsense? There are so many great recent ones.
The one thing I agree with is that scrolling through Amazon Prime / Netflix is a draining & dissatisfying experience
Otherwise, I don't know... I've been watching movies at varying frequencies for decades and I certainly don't feel I've come close to even really tapping the surface, don't feel like I can guess immediately where the director will take me & don't feel really constrained by Vonnegut's theory about there only being six types of story.
I posted to corroborate that FBI is able to access iCloud accounts, with what appears to me, minimal legal oversight. Not really trying to convince anyone. But even the best arguments only fall on reasonable people's ears.
That would be a heavy burden to try convince someone that gets their world view from Borat, based on a staged scene in a fictional movie. You are right.
On a side note, tricking people to laugh at them, and to make money from their moment of ambush, and racial stereotypes is gross on many levels.
Instead of viewing people as only representatives of some ethnic group like "white man". Try treating them as individuals. People very more inside an ethnic group anyway. Perhaps your scorn should be directed towards tall people, or short people, the intersectional list is endless.
Not really sure what you're prattling on about, I haven't used Twitter in the better half of a decade. Either way, Giuliani is the dude who tried jerking off in the Borat movie. You're going to have a hard time convincing America that he's some sort of bastion of innocence, and that we should really care about how poorly the system is treating an old white man defending another old white man. There are bigger metaphorical fish to fry here.
I quickly read through this and then read a pretty random selection of the author's Substack posts back to October.
I'm not sure I'm prepared to read a critique of the information environment from someone who believes Qanon is a useful expression of a general problem with modernism. "Satanism", you see, is really just a digestible expression of the unmooring of American society from any ethical framework. "Pedophilia" is in fact really a critique of the sexualization of our culture. Perhaps we should be more accommodating of the ravings of a subculture that believes Monsters, Inc. was really a roman à clef.
Was the election fraudulent? Who's to say? Certainly not hand audits conducted by conservative state governments and adjudicated by Trump-appointed judges. No, where there's smoke, who's to say there isn't fire? And after all, no modern political system has any legitimacy to begin with. What does "legitimate" even mean?
You know what really is problematic, though: the "post-truth" story of Rudy Giuliani with his hands down his pants in a Borat movie. Wouldn't you know, this story, L'affaire "Cohen", actually confronts us with the question, hrm, what does it really mean to have been a "Nazi"? The "contemporary conception", as it turns out, is completely detached from its original conception, a "rhetorical banality meticulously constructed to conjure up the most loathsome imagery". Good note. Perhaps that explains why the author so often and fondly cites Carl Schmitt? I stopped counting, and then stopped reading.
At any rate, the rhetorical engine of this article's argument is pretty basic. People have a general distrust for the federal government, surprise surprise. And the public health establishment was, in fact, indefensibly dishonest about mask wearing. As a result, why trust anything? Your Moderna vaccine, my HCQ, the guy living in his basement wrapped in grounding wires to avoid the cell tower radiation, it's all the same. Except the stuff about Hunter Biden. That's real.
Yeah, right. And surely Rudy wasn't actually farting in court without wearing a mask. Or dripping black slime down his face beside a dildo store. Or putting his hands down his pants in a hotel room in the Borat movie.
Maybe the more precise words are, where do the economic gains the company is concentrating into the hands of ownership come from? Where do you draw the line for how much rent is too much?
Taxi drivers have always been undocumented and much poorer than the people they were driving. Uber didn’t change that, and nobody needs permission to boss a poor person around - go to a restaurant, send your kids to school, shop, you will be bossing poor people around. The remedy is immigration and labor law reform, that is something Uber actively worked against - and won! They care because the economic gain they are concentrating comes from people driving below minimum wage because they lack documents or work authorization.
It had nothing to do with lures or whatever, everyone knows what the deal was. Cars could require no maintenance and people would still be screwed. Uber shut down its self driving car unit and none of that shit mattered. Nobody is out there designing cars that are cheaper, we already have $1,000 used cars, in fact all the effort pours into cars that are way more expensive. Uber blew a lot of money on incentives as long as Lyft does and vice versa, and people just drive for both and none of that shit mattered.
The difference I’m trying to illuminate here is, a permanent subclass of undocumented worker is enshrined in the law. The difference between a W2 and 1099 employee is enshrined in the law. Uber spent a fortune maintaining the status quo, not creating a new one, they did not write those laws.
Personally, I believe, like those guys in the 2006 Borat movie who wish they owned slaves, that people like this status quo, and that Uber could have spent 1/10th the money campaigning for Prop 22 and it still would have passed. People like cheap shit. They enshrine the divide in the law. Bernie Sanders was assailed by the NYTimes for his most divisive opinion, that if people are willing to work below minimum wage they will get the job, and that the government has enshrined that arrangement through immigration law - you’re just not seeing how deeply vested the average person is, not just Travis Kalanick is, in an exploitative status quo.
Meanwhile we type this all out on iPhones. Would you rather they cost 5x as much? I don’t know, if phones cost so much more, if you could ban the exploitation of Chinese labor for real, 50% of the ultra high paying jobs of HN readers would cease to exist overnight. It would be like a pandemic hit software, instead of just Main Street.
This shit is complicated, you can certainly point out that billionaires are bad people, but we all benefit from exploiting someone somewhere, and the road to justice will often visit the people who promote it. And maybe that’s why you and I aren’t out there protesting but those other people are.
For sure the reasonable responses are edited out - It would take one hell of a world to make a Borat-like film _impossible_ - but that doesn't mean the current one isn't effective. I'm not sure I'd _change_ anything, but Borat is a tour-de-force in speaking up when you see something questionable or ridiculous.
Ali G is the same way - you'd have to think street kids are absolutely insane if you can look at Ali G and try to keep a straight face. To take Ali G seriously is the same as admitting you have no idea whatsoever what the youth culture looks like.
The main issue with Borat wasn't the negative stereotypes of Kazakhstanians, it was the treatment of the villagers of God, how they were paid and lied to about how they'd be depicted in the movie that I at least personally didn't appreciate. It's a great film and Sascha Baron Cohen is a brilliant actor making actually meaningful content like Who Is America.
I think this is a very uncharitable interpretation of the people who get “duped” by Borat. They’re racist because they don’t immediately suspect this strange person is actually an actor? Even when they do, that gets edited out. What exactly about American behavior would you have change that would make a Borat-like film impossible?
IIRC Ali G was originally filmed in Britain and the same sorts of antics were pulled off easily... I don’t think “going along to get along” is unique to Americans, although as a multicultural country I am sure we have a bit more than average.
I ignore anyone who puts "left" in scare quotes. It's an ad hominem distraction from the substance of the argument.
As for the claim that Borat is "nearly the most racist movie in history," that shows the author's ignorance of film history and the thousands of very racist films that have been made worldwide. One could argue that Borat is racist, and there would be plenty of points to debate, but there are many many more racist movies in American film history (Birth of a Nation, Song of the South, the entire blaxploitation genre) - not to mention plenty of racist non-American films.
Surely even more common than Geography buffs are people who would Google "Borat Kazakhstan" prior to the interview and learn the whole secret. If he tells his subjects a different name so they can't Google him, then he could tell the subjects the name of a real country, but present the movie with the fake country the same as he might do for his name.
Nassim Taleb has been railing against SBC and described Borat as "nearly the most racist movie in history, overtly degrading the people of Kazakhstan" on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1319976057693503490
Yeah, while the movie made me laugh, the old "people from abroad are stupid because they don't speak English well" stereotype is really tired.
The one redeeming quality the movie had was that it usually got its laughs from people's reactions to Borat, not from Borat actually being a dumb foreigner.
Borat made some very racist and inaccurate remarks about country (Kazakhstan) who did nothing to deserve such humiliation. As a foreigner I did not appreciate the crass of the movie at the time, but I understand completely why there is so much backlash against it. Calling something “satire” doesn’t give you a free license to be rude, especially towards other cultures who don’t share your form of self degrading humor that sometimes us in the West laugh and enjoy.
Source: My partner is Kazakh.
I visited Kazakhstan for the first time in 2007 when Borat jokes were very much in the air. On one hand, Borat has nothing to do with the real Kazakhstan. On the other hand, without the film maybe I wouldn’t have decided to go through Kazakhstan while traveling overland between Europe and Asia, and then I wouldn’t have discovered the real Kazakhstan with its authentic culture that has made me visit the country again several times since. Several other backpackers I have met in Central Asia told me the same. Borat maybe has done more good than harm.
Ali g was full of social commentary of the type that culminated with the Borat movie. You must also take into account that that show was some time ago, his awareness and opinions might have changed since His current stuff mostly deals with mocking late capitalism ridiculousness. Micheal Moore is another beast, he uses propaganda techniques to get his point across. He 'sins' in the same way his targets do.
Cohen uses, supposedly, inferior slapstick humor to build very poingent satire about racism consumerism bro culture fakeness etc.
Actually this is the actor Sasha Baron Cohen. Borat is just a character he portrays in television and movies.
A few things
- Kazakh people (mostly) look nothing like Borat
- It was clearly (to me, a European) set in eastern Europe
- Cohen played on our ignorance to make us believe Rumania is Kazakhstan
- Everybody he encounters thereafter is American
- Cohen uses Borat to mock stereotypical American[0] behaviour
- I am aware just how much juvenile humour there was too
[0] applies to most places, but the film is set in America
My experience with this is very different. I used to know a few kazakh fellows and their views on Borat were resentful to say the least. They said Sacha Cohen is a universally hated figure in Kazakhstan, along with the Borat movie itself, to the point where a lot of people genuinely want him dead. I have no doubt some Kazakhstan citizens actually enjoy Borat but to generalize it as being seen as "high comedy" over there is a vast and incorrect exaggeration.
It is antisemitic in universe, and it's obviously a parody of antisemitic behavior. Comedy and parody typically get a pass on offensive behavior, particularly when the offender is being mocked and the language is being used as criticism (see racist and antisemitic content in Mel Brooks films, for example.) Some people probably do find Borat offensive, and Mel Brooks, regardless.
But I think the mistake your comment makes is trying to find an objective definition to judge a subjective behavior, trying to determine whether people should find something antisemitic, regardless of the context. But sometimes context does matter and you can't really control who gets offended at what, or judge what offense is "legitimate" and what isn't, based on some arbitrary criteria.
The Borat movie has the protagonist sing a song "Throw the Jew down the well". Should that movie be considered antisemitic?
Yet the cow-inside-house scene was filmed in Romania and attributed to Kazakhstan. Borat hired some gypsies, told them to put the cow in the house - the gypsies are simple people and would do any silly thing for a little money. Later, when they saw the movie, they were furious, claimed they've been duped.
So why did you choose to go along with it?
Have you considered you might be making an appearance in the next "Borat" film, or some other similar spoof?
I couldn't find an authoritative story behind the title "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good", but people generally interpret it as a humorous take on poor translations-to-English, such as the All Your Base Are Belong To Us meme, or the title of the movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
But the actual Borat movie (the parts outside of America) was filmed in Eastern Europe (Romania, I think), not Kazakhstan.
I have to strongly disagree. The experience of watching a film in a movie theater is completely different than watching it at home, even with a high end home theater setup.
First of all, the vast majority of people can't even come close to replicate this "technological experience" of movie theater. The huge screen as well as the audio system absolutely do change how you experience a film, be it Avatar or 2001 or Metropolis (the last two of which I've only recently seen for the first time on the big screen, and even though I have a pretty huge TV, this was an entirely different experience).
But aside from the technology involved, a movie theater is a completely different environment than your living room, it is designed to keep you entirely focused. I find I am much more immersed in a movie when I see it in the cinema. Also, some movies are just made to be watched as part of a larger audience (e.g. I can't imagine I'd find Borat even remotely as funny as I did when I watched it in a small theater packed with a cheering crowd).
On a somewhat more esoteric note, I seem to remember a study that showed rear-projection (like on a TV) had a different impact on the brain than front-projection (like on a movie screen). I can't find anything about this now and it might've been complete bogus, but maybe someone else knows something about this...
If you want to do some research into the gun debate, a good place to start is the movie "Bowling for Columbine". Some people will think of it as an extreme left-wing-nutjob propaganda piece, but my recollection of the movie is not that it hammers you with a conclusion, but that it presents a bunch of different scenarios that are all 'odd' in their own way. Accusing BfC of being a propaganda piece is like calling Borat a propaganda piece, stylistically they are quite similar.
Anyway, one of the things that really struck me about that movie was the difference in gun related deaths (per head of population) in Canada and the U.S. Basically both countries have buttloads of guns and the justification in both is that they are for 'hunting'. I don't remember the exact figures, but the deaths per 1000 from guns was enormously much higher in the U.S. than in Canada. Moore doesn't give an answer to that dilemma per se, but he does throw it out there for people to think about and make up their own minds. Frankly, if that is propaganda, I think the U.S. and the internet in general need a lot more of it.
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As for the guns debate, you could make an analogy to poison, where you say that poisons are sold at the supermarket, so why not sell guns at the supermarket too? I guess the reply would be that the poisons that are sold invariably have some other practical use, e.g. cleaning products. Whereas guns are pretty much designed with the express and only purpose of killing stuff.
Then the gun-nut will reply "oh, there's lots of other uses for a gun, like sport (target practice), hunting and personal defense as a deterrent". The problem isn't that those things are wrong, the problem is that - unlike pretty much every other country in the world with guns - people in the U.S. don't seem to stop at deterrent, they are much more likely to use the 'personal defense' guns to try to kill someone else.
Why is that?
What is it about the U.S. that as soon as they get a gun in their hand they want to go 'pop a cap in yo ass'?
And why doesn't that happen in Canada?
Some of the scenarios I remember from the movie that were presented:
The bank that gives you a shotgun when you open an account
The mall store(?) that was selling ammo in massive aisles
The five year old that took a handgun to school and shot one of his class-mates dead
The Columbine massacre
The gun lobby holding a big pro-guns rally in Columbine immediately after the massacre
Moore harassing Charlton Heston (figurehead of the gun lobby) (this one was most like a scene from Borat - it was an uncomfortable 'excuse me while I invade your personal' thing and went on for ages)
I agree. I've always thought that Baron Cohen's schtick was just a trivial and mean-spirited application of the fact that whoever edits the film has the power to make anything look like anything. But this is news to me:
The "Jew killing" song was set up by an hour of standup comedy by Cohen, and everyone knew it was a joke.
I can't say that's surprising, but it's interesting. "Throw The Jew Down The Well" is by far the funniest thing I've seen him do. (Actually, it might be the only funny thing I've seen him do, though I guess the nude wrestling scene in Borat was funny.) I can't get upset at its ghastliness because everything else about the piece is so comedically perfect. If it was a clip from a standup show, that explains it. It's funny because it makes something horrific ridiculous.
Well, I'm not the one making the claim, and so I don't feel like proving a negative, but his shtick is pretty straightforward (for all the characters, with some variations):
1. Set up a fake interview or staged encounter.
2. Immediately confuse the interlocutor with completely unreal mannerisms/speech. People watching the movies maybe don't pick up on this because they're used to the behavior, but if Borat started talking to you, you'd immediately be thrown off center. A lot of people seem to be overly-polite and nodding because of this, and that's part of how he manipulates them. There was a guy who dressed up like Borat at the ocsars (or some award show) and Cohen was immediately in the same situation.
3. The character then either does one of two things:
3a. Says/does something extremely impolite. Examples include bringing shit to a dinner table, stripping in front of a congressman, singing fake anti-American anthems in front of a "white trash" audience, or singing about killing Jews at a redneck bar. None of this, as far as I can see, gets at any kind of "truth". When Ron Paul called him "queer" or whatever, they tried to make him into a "hater". Well, no. I would have called him worse things, and I'm pretty sure I don't hate "queers". The "Jew killing" song was set up by an hour of standup comedy by Cohen, and everyone knew it was a joke. Again, you know who's the liar in cases like that.
3b. By asking bizarre questions at fake interviews. There might be some instances where he got someone to admit something genuinely valuable, but I don't recall. It's clear he's just trying to make people look silly or trip over their tongues (Pat Buchanan talking about "Mustard gas on the BLTs") or admitting something ridiculous ("Are being racist against me because I'm black?"). I haven't seen as many of the interviews because he did that more on his British TV show, and I sure as hell don't spend my day surfing for them on youtube.
Anyway, his real purpose is to make the audience feel superior to somebody famous or somebody who represents a stereotype (whether rednecks or stuck-up UMC southerners, or Romanians, or whatever) by making those people metaphorically drop their pants in one way or another. Disagree or disagree that it's a bad thing, I don't care.