

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Kazakh it to me: Borat not minting Cohen?
If I had an item about Black Snake Moan, the world would be so different… but Variety’s Michael Fleming & Ian Mohr offer intel of the moment on Borat‘s queasy-making for FoxNewsCorpZondervan upon its very nice preem at GrauMann’s Chinese: “Much as unsuspecting people try to gauge the strange [character], Fox and rival distributors are trying to figure out what to make of the Borat box office potential…. Fox maintains standard tracking methodology doesn’t apply. “This is a new genre of movie,” said Jeffrey Godsick, exec VP of marketing… “The awareness is beginning with a targeted audience. When you are breaking a new kind of genre, not everyone knows what to make of it.” …Cohen was to be ushered into his preem by a phalanx of Kazakh locals bearing fruits and wonders of the country. Plans were for Borat to be carried, bridelike, to the podium by an oversized woman. There, he would address the throng of press and fans and respond to a recent invitation to visit Kazakhstan, which has tried to disown Borat almost from the moment he claimed it as his country of origin.” Or, as one of Baron Cohen’s subjects puts it, more condescendingly than the poop he puled on her in a BBC piece about the production’s m.o.: “I thought I was talking to an uneducated man, maybe from a tribal community,” Ms Stein says. “I mean, that’s how it seemed to me… I thought about it, I worried about it, and then felt I have to get back to my work. I just have to move on. I’m a New Yorker, all sorts of things happen in New York. I’m not angry.” But the artist, whose sculptures represent “empowerment and strength”, wants to ask Baron Cohen why his art “zooms in on human weaknesses and foibles.” [DEVELOPING…]