OK I found the movie hilarious. If every one of those scenes had been scripted instead of being candidly captured, then I’d be in 100% agreement with you.
Remember the Picasso painting Guernica? A magnificent work of art, certainly. Was it worth the cost in human misery required to inspire its creation? Of course not. Would it have been worth one life? I’d say no to that also, though in a Joe Frank program one of his friends says that maybe it would have been worth it. Of course, the air strike wasn’t Picasso’s fault; he was taking advantage of something that was already a fact.
Borat is a different story. Of course, noone died or was physically hurt. Some property was damaged maliciously (though paid for). Reputations were shattered and people were taken advantage of. The difference here is that Sacha Baron Cohen harmed these people himself, specifically to create a work of art. Going back to Guernica, imagine if Picasso had paid the Nazis to attack specifically so he could get a good sense of the human misery of war for a great new painting he was working on.
Margaret Dumont was an actress. The producer of that local TV news program, the guests at the etiquette dinner, the people in that Romanian village, even those drunk, racist @*$hole kids in the winnebago, none of them had anything approaching informed consent. They were deceived and manipulated, then humiliated in front of millions of people.
I totally get what Cohen is trying to do. I paid my 10 bucks, laughed until my face was sore, and appreciated his point about the power of apathy to allow horrors to happen. I have very little empathy for some of the people who were humiliated (the guy in the rodeo and the kids in the winnebago come to mind); but what about the TV show producer whose career was ruined over it? What about the antique store owner, or that entire Romanian town? They were lied to, and their good names were destroyed.
As a reviewer, Roger, what I’m seeing is that your audience is reacting to you either ignoring or approving of Cohen’s methods. I think that the methods he used to create the movie were unethical. It’s just as simple as that. Sure killing people and humiliating them are on two totally different planes, but his methods were still wrong.
