Friday, October 13, 2006

Borat Visits Amsterdam


Borat, aka Sacha Baron Cohen, visited Amsterdam yesterday to defend his portrayal of Kazakhstan. Maybe you’ve seen the ads on CNN or the four-page New York Times advertising insert placed by the government of Kazakhstan in order to persuade audiences that the real Kazakhstan is not like Borat’s version.

Borat says agents working for rival nation Uzbekistan placed the ads and said that Kazakhstan will “commence bombardment of their cities with our catapults if they do not stop,” according to an AP story.

You may recall that Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev met with President Bush recently. Borat says that the real reason Nazarbayev came calling was to publicize the new movie, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” which opens in the U.S. November 3.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am very connected with Gallaudet and, in fact, was on campus on October 9.

From 1980-1996 I was Episcopal/Anglican chaplain there. I've both taken and taught courses there and currently am an on-line course. My wife earned two Masters and a Doctorate at Gallaudet.

In 1988 I picketed daily to get rid of the president-elect, Elizabeth Zinser. (I was the only chaplain to be on campus all eight days of the protest).

It is saddening, now, to see Dr. Jordan "turn tables" 18 years later and cruelly order the arrest of peaceful protesters. `135 persons were arrested on Friday the 13th.

It is even more saddening to learn that he hand-picked his successor, and lied about it. From what I have learned from many faculty and staff friends at Gallaudet, she is a disaster in many ways.

I'm very much with the protesters. For more information the best source is www.deafread.com, which will point you to various blogs on this topic.

The Rev. Jay L. Croft

Anonymous said...

Ha ha! This was a good post Sheila. Come over to Diary From England, I've just done a post on Borat especially for you! I think the thing about Sacha is because he's in the guise of Borat and not "politically correct", he gets away with saying so much! You just have to take his remarks with the humour they're intended and not be easily offended.

Sheila said...

Naomi I'll be there in a minute. I am so obsessed with Sacha Baron Cohen, but a lot of other crazy Americans are too. I got the idea last night that I was going to put up some t-shirts in advance of the movie and see if I could sell a few in a CafePress shop I call "Say it in Kazakh." Mostly, they will feature actual words that the Kazahkstan Embassy has on its web site. I'll be posting the link tomorrow when I get a few more together.

Anonymous said...

That's a great idea Sheila. I'm sure they'll prove very popular

Sheila said...

Naomi,
It's up. We'll see if people find it funny or if I lose my regular readers in the process. CafePress has a lot of designs playing on the movie, Sacha, and Kazakhstan already but nothing like the hoopla when the Snakes on a Plane movie came out. This will be bigger I predict. Sacha was on the cover of Entertainment Weekly and I quickly read the story before my teen scarfed it up to his lair (room). All the while, Borat never broke character.