By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Ratting Borat: more fine whine
Salon does a rundown of what’s verite and what’s fake in Borat, and AP’s Erin Carlson chats up some of Sacha Baron Cohen’s unsuspecting figures of fun in ‘Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit of Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, never questioning that their eagerness to be in a television show, any kind of television show, kept them from reading the egregious release forms proffered by the production. 
D.C. public speaking coach Pat Haggerty, who got $400 after signing a release, is affable about the humor. ”They were exercising a First Amendment right,” said Haggerty, adding that he enjoyed the movie. ”And this Sacha Cohen guy’s going to make 87 gazillion dollars. You know, good for him. I’m just sorry that he had to do it in such a way that he allowed people to make jerks out of themselves exposing their character flaws.” The drunken frat brothers lawsuit is mentioned, as well as this paragraph, which doesn’t fully explain the last line. “Cohen’s behavior also wasn’t funny to former TV producer Dharma Arthur, who claims she was duped into giving Cohen airtime on a morning show segment in Jackson, Miss. Cohen’s live appearance, in which he said he had to go ”urine,” led her life into a downward spiral, she said.” Professional unfunnyman Joel Stein doesn’t like journalists who’ve allowed Baron Cohen to conduct interviews in character and sometimes with questions provided in advance. In the LA Times, Stein, who is inexplicably on the op-ed page, writes, “If you can’t make a story about a movie this complicated and different interesting — without just getting Cohen to perform — then you might as well just direct people to a clip of his movie. The excuse is that it’s only entertainment journalism… [P]opular culture has dramatic effects on our society…
I wrote a three-page story… for Time magazine, and my editors chose not to have me talk to Cohen in character. Instead, I asked the director and producer about what Borat‘s candid camera says about Americans and whether the film is offensive to Jews, Gypsies or Kazakhs. Or to people who prefer not to see movies with human feces in bags. But the most important question in Borat—the one that makes it a cultural turning point — is about whether the act of tricking unsuspecting victims and sharing it with millions of people is cruel or funny… The answer to that question about comedy — more than music, MySpace or Paris Hilton — is what cleaves the reality TV generation from their parents. And it’s too bad that Cohen, a Cambridge-educated, traditional, observant Jew, isn’t answering it.”
