Sacha Baron Cohen

Now that he has ditched his Borat and Ali G personas, Sacha Baron Cohen is taking on a more serious role: as 1960s counterculture icon Abbie Hoffman. Mr. Hoffman, was a "self-identified Jewish Road Warrior, communo-anarchist," who was arrested and tried for conspiracy and inciting to riot during violent police confrontations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

The Times Online reports:  read more »

Sacha Baron Cohen told the Daily Telegraph that he is retiring two of the characters that made him famous. He told the UK newspaper that it was much easier to do interviews and act in movies as Borat and Ali G, but it was time to let go and move on to more challenging roles.  read more »

It’s been almost six years since Johnny Depp’s last London slasher flick, From Hell, so it’s understandable that his latest project, Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, left the bohemian-chic thespian a little harried by the whole experience. In Mr. Depp’s first reunion with longtime collaborator Tim Burton since 2005’s Corpse Bride, the 44-year-old actor will co-star alongside Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen. Very nice!

“Having worked with sharp objects before [in Edward Scissorhands], everything was fine until I had to shave someone,” Mr. Depp told Scotland's Daily Record. “The shaving cream made me really nervous. It was the most uncomfortable moment of my life [shaving Mr. Rickman]. Poor Alan. I've never really experienced that full on thing. This is a full beard for me - this is a lumberjack thing for me. But I can definitely appreciate it because when you get into the chair with a stranger and they lather your face up with sharp instruments around your throat...it's frightening."

And while Mr. Depp is no stranger to a little music making—he has worked with Oasis and Tom Petty in the past—he said he was spooked to the max by the prospect of crooning for the camera. “I think I was probably more frightened than anyone. I've never tried karaoke. It scares the hell out of me. I've never been that drunk—and I've been drunk,” he told the paper at a recent press junket. "Tim said he didn't know if I could sing and, likewise, I didn't know if I could sing. I did these demos in my friend's garage studio because I didn't know if I'd be able to hit a note, to be honest, I really didn't. I did that and sent it to Tim and he said we're going to be okay. And then I became a bit more confident," added the seemingly unflappable star.

All funny on-set anecdotes aside, Mr. Depp still knows the importance of actually publicizing his projects at press junkets. Whetting the appetites of critics and fans starving for a little more Johnny, he settled in and got right down to business, saying, “Someone is probably weeping after watching my performance."

To see pictures of the actor from the Sweeny Todd press junket, click here.  read more »

Mary Lucier is no Sacha Baron Cohen.    read more »

In the comedian’s famous last words, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.” In movie ter  read more »

In the comedian’s famous last words, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.” In movie terms, comedy i  read more »

The Forward reported two years ago that Sacha Baron Cohen was playing clubs as Borat, in a singalong urging the audience to throw Jews "down the well" to purify his country. Sounds like he's modeling Stanley Milgram, the Yale psychologist whose famous experiment induced its unwitting subjects to turn up the electric shocks for every bad answer from a supposed test subject, screaming in pain through the walls from another room. Thereby answering the question: Will otherwise decent people follow murderous orders? Cohen seems to be testing an antisemitic principle of human nature.

My commenters below are right: the prejudices that Sacha Baron Cohen stokes in Borat are conventional ones, and the film is a form of Red-State blackface. All the juice in his journey happens between the coasts. When he's on the coasts, the jokes feel forced. In the interior the ignorant peasantry are revealed.

It's minstrelsy because Cohen has taken on the the guise of a minority he secretly loathes in order to put them down.

Why did I write my last post on Borat then? Well, I find SBC screamingly funny in this Lenny Bruceish way. And I fell for the message—pogroms in America—because it was so well coded, coated by humor; and I think I was vulnerable to its orthodoxy. I wonder if I see it again if I'll feel the same. I think not; that I'm likely to see the prejudice plainly, and on behalf of fundamentalists, smalltowners and rodeo audiences, my fellow Americans, feel somewhat offended... (in the same way I'm appalled when Larry David and Jon Stewart talk about pogroms as a real possibility here). Thanks for the smart comments.

The movie Borat is a lot of things, a comic triumph, mean, weirdly Tocquevillian. It is filled with anti-semitic humor, and I admit I laughed. But there is also something really scary about the film, and that seems to me the takeaway, if you are Jewish (which the maker, Sacha Baron Cohen, is): the feeling that it could happen here, pogroms could happen in the United States in about ten seconds.

The U.S. portrait Borat offers is of an ignorant redneck land pulsating with unexamined prejudice. A crowd at a rodeo cheer when Borat gives a speech about killing every woman and child in Iraq. College students who pick him up hitchhiking are pleased to talk about the power of Jews in America. His image of Christians at a revival meeting—crazies. And into this world comes Borat, from a village in eastern Europe, not far from the old Pale of Settlement, talking about Jews and money. When he shows us his village's annual festival of the Running of the Jew, culminating in the destruction of the Jew egg, the Jew baby, the American audience you're sitting with is laughing.

It felt to me like a test. Borat was saying, Watch, I will bring virulent anti-Semitism from eastern Europe to the liberal utopia, and people here will eat it up. These ignorant people too can turn into cossacks under the right circumstances.

I don't agree with Borat on this. I think America is too liberal, too diverse and too loving of its diversity, to fall for such a thing. But I got a chill alright.

Late last Thursday night, the clock ticking toward midnight under a full Canadian moon, a line made  read more »

Sara Vilkomerson reports from a madhouse up in Toronto:
Paulo Costanzo--of Road Trip, Joey and Canadian birth--was freaking out. "This is the best fucking night of my life," he screamed from his seat at last night's midnight screening of Borat. Agent and limousine liberal Ari Emmanuel lurked up in the teeming balcony.

Sasha Baron Cohen had arrived for the Borat premiere on a cart pulled by six women and a tiny pony, each of them in yokes, the women all in shtetl chic. Isla Fisher, Mr. Cohen's tiny gorgeous fiance, in a glittery tank and low-slung jeans, hid behind a nearby tree.

Inside the theater, to introduce the show, Mr. Cohen brought out the flags of Canada and Kazakhstan and kissed them both.

The film began. The first 20 minutes of Borat are the funniest thing you could ever hope to see on film. The audience was in hysterics. Then the projector broke.

Forty minutes passed; apologies from the stage. The Fox publicity staff looked positively green. The restless crowd began to chant "Michael Moore! Michael Moore!"

Mr. Cohen did some shtick and introduced "Larry Charles and some fat man." Mr. Charles—co-creator of Seinfeld and exec producer of Entourage—and Michael Moore came to the stage. Mr. Moore had been the one trying to fix the projector. This was all like some insane dream sequence. Mr. Charles was dressed in a sort of Hasidic costume. Was Mr. Moore tired, someone wanted to know? "You can't sleep these days if you are an American," he said.  read more »

Later, Mr. Moore said that he'd be making out with John Travolta in the lobby. Mr. Charles signed a kid's tardy note for the next day's school. Mr. Charles had not yet seen Snakes on a Plane—but Mr. Moore had.

By 1:40 a.m., it became clear that the remainder of Borat would not be shown. The screening was postponed for Friday night. Everyone went desperately looking for a drink. Sara Vilkomerson

'This Is the War Room!'The 40th-anniversary special-edition DVD of Stanley Kubrick's Dr.  read more »

If you love laughing at cretins-and, let's face it, who doesn't?-you are no doubt already a devotee  read more »