{"id":23272,"date":"2020-10-25T22:10:02","date_gmt":"2020-10-25T12:10:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=23272"},"modified":"2020-10-25T22:17:43","modified_gmt":"2020-10-25T12:17:43","slug":"borat-subsequent-moviefilm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=23272","title":{"rendered":"Borat Subsequent Moviefilm"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"borat2poster\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Director:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Jason Woliner
\nWriter:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Sacha Baron Cohen
\nCast:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Sacha Baron Cohen, Maria Bakalova, Mike Pence, Rudy Guliani<\/p>\n

K<\/span>azahkstan’s\u00a0Premier Nursultan Nazarbayev is upset.\u00a0 The despot ruler of the impoverished Central Asian nation feels slighted by American president Donald Trump.\u00a0 Trump, he complains, is infatuated with fascist rulers around the world – Putin, Kim Jong Un, Bolsonaro etc. – but has paid the Kazahk ruler no notice.<\/p>\n

To win him over, Nazarbayev decides to send Trump his prized Minister of Culture Johnny the Monkey as a gift.\u00a0 To act as his messenger, he frees the disgraced former reporter Borat Sagdiyev who has been held prisoner in a gulag for 14 years after he inadvertently humiliated the country with his documentary in 2006.<\/p>\n

Borat returns to America to deliver the package.\u00a0\u00a0Borat Subsequent Moviefilm<\/em> is the mockumentary that documents his travels.<\/p>\n

\"borat2thumb\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There’s roughly a million reasons why this movie is a bad idea and shouldn’t work.<\/p>\n

When the original Borat<\/em>\u00a0film was released in\u00a02006, a lot of America’s staggering social issues (race inequality, fundamentalist religion, obsession with gun rights) were broadly known and understood by the rest of the world but in a pre smart phone age, very little of it was captured on film.\u00a0 Certainly not in the way Sacha Baron Cohen succeeded in getting people to let down their guard.\u00a0 Although President Bush was a laughing stock, there was still a general statesmanlike veneer to the rest of the Republican party and their followers that Borat<\/em> so successfully peeled back in a way that felt revelatory.<\/p>\n

In 2020, another Borat<\/em> film shouldn’t really work because, well, just look at what America is now.\u00a0 The mask hasn’t just slipped.\u00a0 It’s totally fallen off the GOP and their elected leader who have openly embraced white supremacy, anti-intellectualism and unvarnished prejudice.\u00a0 So the idea of another film in which Borat\u00a0shows\u00a0Americans with these\u00a0particular beliefs feels totally redundant.<\/p>\n

What’s crazy is that\u00a0Borat Subsequent Moviefilm<\/em> is actually…pretty good?<\/p>\n

\"borat2scene\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There’s a few reasons Cohen has been able to make this work against the odds.<\/p>\n

Early in the film, when Borat returns to America, its established that he is too famous and recognizable as the Kazakh reporter to complete his assignment.\u00a0 So instead he spends the majority of the film in various disguises and new personas.\u00a0 This keeps the material in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm<\/em>\u00a0fresh and mercifully free from Cohen simply re-treading old material – my wiiiife, very niiiice,\u00a0Jak sie masz? etc.<\/p>\n

Also broadening the scope of the comedy is newcomer Maria Bakalova.\u00a0 In this first film Borat was accompanied by his incompetent manager Azamat.\u00a0 This time, he travels America with his 15 year old daughter Tutar.\u00a0 Bakalova is excellent in her role and is more than capable of keeping up with Cohen in the unscripted scenes in which she engages with actual unsuspecting Americans.\u00a0 Tutar also becomes central to the plot of the film and is key to the shift in its tone.\u00a0 The original film has a rather bleak, anarchic energy that focuses its lens squarely on how stupid and awful a lot of Americans are.\u00a0\u00a0Borat Subsequent Moviefilm<\/em> strikes a more hopeful and humanistic approach as Borat changes his outlook on women thanks to his blossoming relationship with his daughter.<\/p>\n

Prank\/stunt mockumentaries are not exactly a well respected genre in cinema but I do believe there is actually a real art to crafting a good one of these.\u00a0 Another film released around the same time as\u00a0the original\u00a0Borat<\/em> was the first\u00a0Jackass<\/em> movie.\u00a0 I loved that film and re-watched it many more times than I care to admit.\u00a0 And yet, I found the Jackass\u00a0<\/em>sequels – although they had individual scenes I enjoyed – never grabbed me in the same way.\u00a0 It comes down to crucial things like editing, pacing and tone.\u00a0 That first\u00a0Jackass<\/em> movie just really successfully captured the vibe of a group of guys hanging out and enjoying\u00a0each others company that I think is as important to my enjoyment of the overall film as any individual prank or stunt.<\/p>\n

I’ve found Cohen’s mockumentaries to be a mixed bag.\u00a0 The original Ali G shorts were an enjoyable novelty and I loved the original\u00a0Borat\u00a0<\/em>film.\u00a0 But\u00a0Bruno<\/em> completely fell flat for me.\u00a0 I also found his most recent work –\u00a0Who Is America?<\/em> – to be wildly uneven from episode to episode.\u00a0 For whatever reason, the stars seemed to align with\u00a0Borat Subsequent Moviefilm<\/em>.\u00a0 The writing for the scripted scenes is good.\u00a0 Most of the gags actually land.\u00a0 Even when the most crucial scene involving Rudy Guliani was leaked days before the film’s release, the rest of what’s there is more than enough to carry the film.<\/p>\n

I think a lot of what works boils down to Cohen and his sense of purpose with this production.\u00a0 Again, I think back to the mid 2000s and how the likes of\u00a0South Park’s<\/em> Trey Parker and Matt Stone, along with Cohen, were kings of topical, politically-charged, gross out comedy that captured the zeitgeist of the time.\u00a0 Over time however, Parker and Stone’s rigid “both sides” approach to their work looked increasingly mealy-mouthed\u00a0in the current political landscape.\u00a0 They recently released a Pandemic special to complete indifference.\u00a0 I couldn’t tell you a single thing about it because no one I know has watched it and no one online has mentioned it.\u00a0 They are borderline irrelevant.<\/p>\n

Cohen on the other hand just eviscerates Trumpism, Q-Anon followers, Zuckerberg and the like.\u00a0 He isn’t fucking around and he also doesn’t need to take shots at the left in an attempt to ‘balance the ledger’.\u00a0\u00a0Borat Subsequent Moviefilm<\/em> is absurdist political satire but it ends\u00a0with\u00a0a message encouraging American viewers to vote or risk their country sliding into an autocracy.\u00a0 On that final note, Cohen couldn’t be more serious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the the premier of Kazakhstan wants to win the admiration of Donald Trump, he sends Borat back to America to delivery a gift to win the president over.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":23274,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2926,2924,2925,2927,372],"class_list":["post-23272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films","tag-amazon-prime","tag-borat","tag-maria-bakalova","tag-rudy-guliani","tag-sacha-baron-cohen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23272"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23289,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23272\/revisions\/23289"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}