of Kazakhstanis and social networks
Wednesday some friends and I went to see a screening of Borat. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Borat is the name of a character played by Sacha Cohen (of Da Ali G Show fame). Borat is a reporter from Kazakhstan who gets into John Cleese-like situations due to his hilariously poor understanding of English. While he is normally relegated to a recurring skit on Cohen’s Da Ali G Show, Borat is a feature length mockumentary of his trip to America. 
Seriously? The Dallas screening was held at the Studio Movie Grill in Plano, which has excellent, albeit expensive food.
Though I was initially concerned that the movie would be a 2 hour skit that should have been 5 minutes (like every episode of SNL for the past 3 years), it ended up being pretty damned funny. Think Team America: World Police funny, not West Wing funny. The neat thing about the movie is that a many of Borat’s interactions are with unwitting members of the general public. All of this, however, is secondary to my primary point; namely what was required to get in to the screening.
So you’re Rupert Murdoch, you own the largest news conglomerate in the world, a few movie companies, some broadcast networks, and you’re just aching to do something with that social networking site you’ve just spent $700 million on. What to do what to do?
the mark of the beast Well, I can tell you what they did. Fox decided to hold free screenings of the movie in 25 cities worldwide, but to get in, they required you to bring in a printout of your myspace profile with Borat and Black Carpet Screenings in your top 8. This posed a problem for me, because, well I’m an internet elitist nerd(tm), and to me, myspace is the equivalent of the wrong side of the tracks. Quite a dilmna, after all, the internet is serious business! Well, sucker that I am, I created the profile, added the requisite profiles to the top 8 and showed up with hardcopy in hand. Yes, I know this makes me a hypocritical asshole, but I’m comfortable with that I suppose. Well, at least the movie was good, I would have hated to go through all that for something like Intolerable Cruelty.
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan will be released on November 3rd.