Marcel Berlins doesn’t like the Borat movie. But he “admit[s] to laughing quite often because parts of it are very funny”. Jesus wept.
“My objection is to the exploitation of the… ignorant for the sake of a joke.”
Marcel, luv, if we can’t poke fun at the ignorant, then who the Hell is fair game?
“What Borat did was to inveigle ordinary, harmless people into participating in what was promised to be a documentary; the real motive was to abuse their cooperation by making them the objects of ridicule… Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen’s character, managed to extract from a few of his pathetic victims some loutish behaviour and racist remarks; they may not have been nice people, but that hardly justifies the effort put in to make them look silly.”
So “ordinary, harmless people” are racist louts? Not where I live they’re not, Marcel.
And since when are we not allowed to make racist louts look silly? For what other reason do they exist? (Apart to beat savagely.)
Fuck me: and this man’s a lawyer, supposedly able to argue a case semi-coherently.
To be fair to Berlins, he’s at least half-French, so you can expect him to get ordinary, harmless folk muddled up with racists.
Steady, Domdeplume (though you are right). The only justifiable objection to Borat that I can see is one which is best understood by imagining the following: If an American humorist came to Britain and performed the same stunts on particular elements of our society: backward farmers, the uneducated, BNP candidates, extremists, “simple christian” folk, finishing with a film which would enable most people in the US to assume that we are a population of nincompoops. I might feel a touch peeved and, dare I say it, I might not go and watch it.