Larry Charles
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I will say that there are fleeting moments of biting satirical genius that are reminiscent of the very clear inspiration of for this film Chaplin’s The Great Dictator ; But the 3 minutes of the film’s total success drown in (an albeit short – but drawn out) 84 minute running time.
The plucky nature of Baron Cohen’s protagonists harken back to Chaplin — and the easiest point of comparison is “The Great Dictator,” right down to the crude Western imitation of foreign language that forms Wadiya’s native tongue — but the creators of Wadiya owe a tremendous debt to “Duck Soup” and its own fictionalized dictatorship, Freedonia.
Certainly in 2012, a brutal dictator qualifies as an easy target for comedy (that wasn't true in 1940, when Charlie Chaplin released The Great Dictator , to which The Dictator implicitly nods).
A few thoughts present themselves: first, despite how apparently the movie wants to be regarded as a raunchy, 21st Century The Great Dictator , the film in which Charles Chaplin and Jack Oakie played such inspired parodies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, there's no way for the film to breathe as much as a satire as it always seems that it wants to for the straightforward reason that Aladeen isn't a "real" dictator.
Cohen is subtly making his case to be known as the Charlie Chaplin of our time by echoing Chaplin's Hitler satire, The Great Dictator .
In “The Dictator” Cohen matches Charlie Chaplin’s teachable monologue from Chaplin’s 1940 masterpiece “The Great Dictator” with a third-act soliloquy that will ruffle more than a few feathers.
Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (2013)
Directed by Jeff Tremaine
influenced by Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Themes Plot
It makes it all the more rewarding to see folks call Irving out on his irresponsible behaviour as a caregiver, but it’s only a mild exposé compared to Borat ’s brilliant social spotlighting.
In a traditional comedy this kind of audacity would have inspired guilt in those that found it amusing, but here is a movie that, like “Borat” and “Bruno,” uses its shame in a strategic illusion to get reactions out of unsuspecting victims.
Presumably titled to take advantage of alphabetical proximity to hits like Bad Santa and Bad Teacher , Bad Grandpa also borrows heavily from Borat by sending Zisman on a cross-country trip.
Bad Grandpa is, at any rate, an uncertain marriage of the hidden-camera extreme stunt comedy of the TV show Jackass and its three movie spin-offs (I have seen a couple bits from the show, nothing at all of the movies) with an improvised "embarrass the civilians" narrative generally modeled after Borat .
In structure and concept, the film resembles the faux-documentary “ Borat ,” with the distinction that the cameras here are all hidden.
Before I get to that, you need to know that Bad Grandpa borrows heavily from the Borat handbook.
The plucky nature of Baron Cohen’s protagonists harken back to Chaplin — and the easiest point of comparison is “The Great Dictator,” right down to the crude Western imitation of foreign language that forms Wadiya’s native tongue — but the creators of Wadiya owe a tremendous debt to “Duck Soup” and its own fictionalized dictatorship, Freedonia.
Although the movie very casually follows the progress of the romance and the assassination scheme, Cohen and the director, Larry Charles , are about as dedicated to plot as the Marx Brothers; the movie's spiritual ancestor is " Duck Soup " and Groucho's Freedonian dictator Rufus T. Firefly.
In much the same way that the allegedly original schtick that Cohen employed in both "Borat" and "Bruno" was little more than a more vulgar variation of the comedic sensibility that the infinitely funnier and more incisive Andy Kaufman found himself publicly crucified for two decades earlier, "The Dictator" is a film that, despite the claims to its uniqueness, owes much of its existence to two of the most famous comedy films ever made--the Marx Brothers classic "Duck Soup" (1933) and Charlie Chaplin's landmark "The Great Dictator."
Bad Trip (2021)
Directed by Kitao Sakurai
influenced by Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Themes
I’ve always enjoyed public-prank films; pop-culture effective Borat and the recent sequel reminded us how teasing the unaware is absurdly fun.
You pretty much get what you expect in this compendium of low-brow pranks that combines Jackass with Borat .
The reason Bad Trip waffles so drastically between painful and thrilling is that it basically combines execrable Improv Everywhere-style stunts, in which performers assault people just trying to live their lives with hokey shtick, and Borat -style stunts, in which the performer is a wild card clown making a surreal spectacle of themselves in front of those same normal people — often playing on their prejudices and expectations of what that clown is meant to represent in the process (Borat was using people’s assumptions about the “backward former Eastern Bloc” to explore their own cultural blindspots and stock prejudices).
There's also nothing that's so outlandish that you'll find yourself talking about it afterwards, such as the astonishing Rudy Giuliani interview in the much-superior Borat Subsequent Moviefilm .
Pranks have evolved from “Jackass” to “Borat,” “Punk’d” to “Impractical Jokers.”
It's conceptually comparable to John Waters's radically ridiculous Pink Flamingos in its programmatic desire to outrage, but, unlike Brüno, Pink Flamingos came from somewhere beyond the pale.
If I want broad, over-the-top stereotyping laced with genuine comic gold, I’ll dig into my DVD collection and throw on Pink Flamingos, or even better, John Waters’ brilliant deconstructionist camp classic Female Trouble.
The thin plot obviously borrows heavily from other sources, including Eddie Murphy’s “Coming to America” and Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator.”
It worked for Eddie Murphy in "Coming to America," though his anti-misogynist African prince arrived in search of a soul mate.
Reminiscent of 1988′s Coming to America , Baron Cohen’s “Admiral General Aladeen, Supreme Leader, Chief Ophthalmologist, Invincible, All Triumphant, Beloved Oppressor of the People” travels to the States, to speak at the United Nations in New York City.
Meanwhile, the now-beardless Aladeen gets humbled in much the same way as Eddie Murphy’s benevolent royal in Coming To America , except instead of mopping up a McDonald’s, he teams up with Zoey (Anna Faris), the hippie proprietor of a Brooklyn organic grocery.
For his third starring vehicle, Baron Cohen's ditched his real-life guerilla attack routine but continues to embrace the same outrageous humor for a film that, while looking a lot like the dark side of Eddie Murphy's "Coming to America," is consistently funny on multiple levels and chock full of comic cameos.
Confined by a conventional narrative, The Dictator at times resembles the John Landis-Eddie Murphy fish-out-of-water comedies of the mid ‘80s, Trading Places and Coming to America—although SBC’s Aladeen is at once more hapless and offensive than Murphy.
Like Cassavetes' Shadows or Altman's The Long Goodbye, Masked and Anonymous feels a little ramshackle in conception, but the more powerful impression made by the movie, at least for me, is that its bold inconsistency as a total work simultaneously frees the movie to shape flamboyant, libidinous characters and vivid, isolated anecdotes that would necessarily be dulled by any movie that needed to wrest them into a generic format.
I'm Still Here (2010)
Directed by Casey Affleck
influenced by Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Themes Visuals
As a gag, though, it’s a grimier version of Borat, an interactive one in which the audience acts as the squirming dupe trying to judge how to respond to the questionable reality of the experience.
Anonymous sources were quoted in various publications that the project was all a con, and the resulting mockumentary hit the cinema world as something of a mix between Borat and This Is Spinal Tap.
Meanwhile, as a hybrid, I'm Still Here might be intent on doing to the entertainment tabloid industry what Sacha Baron Cohen (with his films Borat and Bruno ) and recent Sundance-winner The Red Chapel do respectively to America and North Korea.
Now, it seems as though director Casey Affleck and actor Phoenix intentionally sought to blur those lines, just not in the lampooning Borat sense.
It can now be seen as what it is – an ambitious but deeply-flawed addition to the mockumentary genre, well below the quality of standard-bearers such as Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap (1984), Larry Charles’ Borat (2006) or the films of Christopher Guest (Waiting for Guffman, 1996; Best in Show, 2000; A Mighty Wind, 2003; For Your Consideration, 2006).
The result is “I’m Still Here,” a film that either tells the story of a man trying to find something real after growing tired of his life as an actor or is something closer to “Borat” in the way it tries to push the boundaries of performance art.
The Party (1968)
Directed by Blake Edwards
influenced Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Characters
Cohen is being compared to Peter Sellers, and in a way Borat is reminiscent of Sellers' Bakshi in The Party, a disruptive Other presence, but Blake Edwards' picture was bracingly inclusive (low gags and sophisticated slapstick, foreigners and natives, Hollywood classicism and hippie openness -- hey, this was '68) where Cohen's transgressive humor is pettily divisive.
An American Pickle (2020)
Directed by Brandon Trost
influenced by Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Plot Themes
Absurd premise aside (admittedly it’s what hooked me in the first place), on the surface An American Pickle plays out as an amusing combination of time-travelling mishaps and fish out of water comedy, much like Borat and Coming to America .
In the movie “Borat,” the title character, Borat Sagiyev, wanders to the U.S. from the Kazakh backwaters to interview people in the modern U.S. In David Mamet’s “Homicide” (1991), Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna), a police detective investigating a murder that takes place within an Orthodox Jewish community, is criticized by a Hasidic Jew for being secular, the latter wondering whether there is anything spiritually real in a cop who does not embrace his religion.
Rogen’s phlegmy, Borat -esque narration and glib deadpan as Herschel (“Sometimes when we want to be alone, we go to very special bog”) works beautifully, especially when paired with director Brandon Trost (making his solo directing debut after working as cinematographer on Popstar , The Disaster Artist, The Interview , etc), whose flair for detail turns the broad comedy of Rogen’s goofy narration into pointed stylistic parody.
Cohen’s joy in pushing boundaries with often unfunny material reminds of U.S. comic Tom Green (remember him?), who’s Freddy Got Fingered is often cited as one of the worst comedies of all time.
Yes, 2001's much-maligned Tom Green comedy " Freddy Got Fingered " crossed my mind on more than one occasion.
It's all very cute and innocuous, reminding one of Woody Allen's first movie, "Take the Money and Run," but not as funny.
The vacuous media get a drilling in a couple of sequences recalling Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979) where two news anchors provide moronic ‘analysis’ of the erratic body language of Aladeen’s confused lookalike.
But if one condemns the movie on that basis, then shouldn't we toss Christopher Guest's sublime turn in Waiting for Guffman, Robin Williams' inspired camping in The Birdcage, and so many others onto the bonfire, too?
At times, watching a Jodorowsky film is liking seeing the images in a Bob Dylan lyric come to life (something that would happen almost literally in 2003, when Dylan starred in "Masked and Anonymous").
It plays a little like Altman's Nashville as directed by Spike Jonze from a script by Amy Goodman, or some other National Public Radio hard-lefty.
While the level of satire of The Dictator recalls Team America: World Police (Trey Parker, 2004) to the degree that no political viewpoint or belief is safe from being derided, The Dictator feels more strategic.
The rest of the movie is more like a tired Roman Holiday (1953) retread, with a pampered, sheltered ruler suddenly loose in a foreign city (New York) and disguised as a normal citizen.
It's the geopolitical-nightmare version of "Roman Holiday."
The Magic Christian (1969)
Directed by Joseph McGrath
influenced Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Plot
The idea in a nutshell is a cross between Joseph McGrath's The Magic Christian (1969) and Allen Funt's Candid Camera TV series.
As a comedy about despots, the movie has forebears in everything from Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" to that underrated Richard Dreyfus vehicle "Moon Over Parador."