Slashdot Mirror
Mahir To Borat, I Sue You!
An anonymous reader writes "The mockumentary Borat bears more than a passing resemblance to late '90s net celeb Mahir Cagri of ikissyou.org, and he's not amused. Steven Leckart of Wired magazine gives him the third degree."
This Wired article has already been debunked, with more sources then you can shake a stick at. The bottom line is that The earliest date we can determine for Mahir Cagri's website is 1998 and the earliest known mention of Sacha Cohen's Borat character is 1994.
:P
So. Thanks Wired for reminding us of Mahir, gotta love him, and for stirring up more press about Borat. But please don't blemish Sacha Baron Cohen like this. On the DVD commentary for the first season Sacha Baron Cohen said his character was based off of a doctor he met in Russia- it's based on someone else, not Mahir. If anything that Russian has a chance to sue Cohen I suppose
In any case, any publicity is good publicity, rite?
Also, first post bitches!
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
In Turkey,
We got tons of Mahir and Borat.
Does any one say What is so interesting about these guys ? Those guys are Turkish equvalent of American redneck.
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
In other news today, Swift advocated cannibalism as a solution to poverty in Ireland. What a monster.
Seriously, you're missing the point here entirely. The way Ali G and Borat work is by simultaneously making fun of the ignorant bigotry of the characters themselves, and also taking advantage of liberal tolerance of them. Thus Ali G is in the first place a straightforward parody of middle-class white English kids who ape American gangsta culture, but is also a vehicle by which Cohen can entrap public figures into making fools of themselves: they try to seem tolerant and accepting of what they take for a representative of Contemporary Youth Culture, and end up walking straight into it.
Unfortunately, Ali G ended up being adopted as an icon by middle-class white English kids who ape American gangsta culture and who didn't quite realise that half the joke was on them. Thus, after selling out spectacularly and milking the character for all he was worth, it was time to bring Borat to the fore.
Borat is a more sophisticated caricature than Ali G. He's a mish-mash of Slavic and Eastern European stereotypes, and bear in mind that what with the Iron Curtain and all, stereotypes about Eastern Europe are decades out of date, going back to before the Holocaust made anti-Semitism unspeakable. Stereotypes rooted in a nasty past of peasants and pogroms. Borat is a fossil out of this past. In the name of tolerance to a different culture, the people Borat meets will bend over backwards not to give offence, and then the fun lies in finding out just how far the faux-Kazakh guy can go and get away with it, and how hypocritical we're prepared to be in tolerating Borat's intolerance. And, for that matter, in finding out just how different to our ignorant peasant forebears we Western urban sophisticates really are, beneath the surface.
The only concern I really have is about how it all reflects on Kazakhstan itself. From what I've heard, though, they've caught on that the joke's not on them at all, that it's rather a good joke, and that there's no such thing as bad publicity. At least now we've heard of Kazakhstan...
I haven't seen Borat's film - I'll be seeing it on Friday, and I'm very much looking forward to it. I was never inclined to see the Ali G film, but Borat I think has a lot more potential.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
All the Kazakh customs and Borat's behaviors are made up, people in Kazakhstan do know how to use toilets and they do not act like Borat. Heck, Borat doesn't even look Kazakh, he doesn't really speak the Kazakh language, and the village was actually Romanian. But the fact that most Americans Borat met didn't realize that (including you) is the ironic part, that is what Borat character was meant to show. There are plenty of scenes where "civilized" Americans go along and tacitly or explicitly agree with some very racist and anti-semitic remarks. For example when Borat goes into the gun dealer's shop and asks for a good gun to kill Jews with, the owner proudly gives him a nice handgun that looked like its bullets could pierce thick armor!
I was glad I payed for Borat. I would even go and say it is a masterpiece. It has something for everyone: the bleeding heart liberals like me can go and see in it how racists the Americans are, the conservative xenophobes can look at it and laugh at the "stupid" foreigner thus only reinforcing their own position of "we are the best country and everyone else is backwards" -- which I have to say on a certain level is funny in an of itself, and of course, there is plenty of slapstick and "Mr. Bean" type humor for everyone else. The interesting part, as I read in another review, is that Sacha Cohen had only one take for his scenes and most of them were not rehearsed (that's why the "masterpiece" label).