Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Borat, Borat, boRAT

You must see the movie "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan". It is really really hilarious like all the millions of zillions of people are saying about it.

The theater I went to, had the audience laughing almost throughout the movie. Some people were laughing out so much that they started stamping their feet on the ground!! Claps would be heard every now and then from segments of the crowd. A must-watch movie to get great laughs.

The Question: How many of the people in the movie knew that this was for a movie?
A lot of websites are following up on this question. A good source for answers is "The Real Stories behind Borat". This site has collected various local news articles which report on the reactions of the people who were duped into being part of the shot.

Yes, duped is the word. Most of them reportedly had not read the fine print of the consent forms they hurriedly signed. There is also speculation on the internet that one of them will definitely sue the actor and his team.

About whether there was a script or not, this MTV article has this to say:

"There was no script. The movie is an experiment — a new form of filmmaking for an age in which reality and entertainment have become increasingly intertwined. Real events with real people push the film's fictional story, and when scenes played out in unexpected ways, Baron Cohen and his colleagues had to rewrite the outline."


Surely the whole shooting would have had a lot of hiccups. The team had a lot of problems with the law enforcement authorities reports the same MTV article:
In real life, the legally questionable activities of Baron Cohen and his colleagues often attracted the attention of local authorities. A warrant was issued for the actor's arrest in New York, and Baron Cohen was advised by police to leave the state when he tried to secure a room in a fancy hotel while his underwear was hanging out of his pants. Through it all, the actor remained in character as Borat - even when the Secret Service detained him outside the White House.

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