The Borat creation was bigoted and a continuation of Ali G. Ali G was funny but ultimatedly too manipulative to amuse me much when I woke up to how one-sided the interviews were.
Borat, in particular, existed to pander to SBC's prejudices and world view - that's fine, it's art, I'd just like him to be honest about it.
Instead he and his production company rolled up, misled if not actually lied to people, and distorted them for our entertainment and SBC's bank balance. Used to - they can't play that game any more. So he's retreated to 'satirising' in stuff like The Dictator which isn't funny enough.
In what strange world is it okay for a person with something as powerful as a Hollywood studio behind him to do that to 'little' people? Some parts of Hollywood have a proud tradition of standing up to that kind of thing.
It's actually the way vicious regimes have spread lies and disinformation about minority groups all over the world. I'm sure that irony isn't lost on someone as clever as SBC.
When he was making Borat and Ali G In The USA people could only appear in his films on his terms. In every case they didn't know what the terms were until the final edit.
With Borat, if they spoke English, they were made to sign contracts which have been shown to be misleading, if not actually fraudulent. If they didn't speak English, like the people in the 'Kazakh' village, they didn't even get that privilege. His 'co-stars' got the shit ripped out of them and in some cases were libelled and there was bugger-all they could do about it.
If someone is connected enough to put a stop to it, like Naomi Wolf was, they are attacked crudely. When she stood up to him his production company portrayed her in subsequent newspaper pieces as a humourless grump who takes herself far too seriously. My, my, what a groundbreaking picture of a feminist.
Couple of things that struck me as crude, unfunny bullying in Borat - apart from the whole Kazakh village sequence: the sequence in New York City where Borat was sexually harassing and insulting women. Borat isn't a real person, it's SBC under those clothes actually sexually abusing women with impunity while everyone laughs.
There was no come-back; no satisfying conclusion where his behaviour was shown to be wrong.
The bit where he's insulting people too polite and bewildered to object at the dinner party: I didn't notice them agreeing with him. Again, he gratuitously insulted a woman. What was that about apart giving you another clue to SBC's view of women? Did he want to have a fight with her husband? That would have been really funny too.
The bit at the rodeo where people were cheering him on in his racism. Yes, they did seem racist but by that time I'd got a bit fed up with seeing things through SBC's prism and editing. And the message that rednecks can be bigots wasn?t telling anything we didn't know.
Anti-semitism exists, and especially so in in parts of the former Soviet Union as well as Eastern Europe. But if SBC wants to bring that to wider attention he could make a straight documentary on it with real examples of real people, portrayal of State-sanctioned anti-semitism and interviews with anti-racists in those countries.
It would be easy to find concrete examples but maybe that was a little bit too much hard work. It also wouldn't build him a Hollywood acting career.