Category: Movie Comedies (Page 185 of 195)

Before there was “Borat”…

…there were “The Papdits,” an entire family of immigrants unfamiliar with American customs.

Once doomed to obscurity when their TV pilot (not-so-coincidentally written by Anthony Hine, who partnered with Sacha Baron Cohen on the “outline” for the largely improvised “Borat” film) was rejected by CBS, the wacky family from Kashmir has been hastily exhumed so that the network can cash in on the public’s current appetite for fumbling foreigners inadvertently placing Americans in uncomfortable situations.

You can view the full pilot for “The Papdits” online at CBS’s Innertube site…and you know what? It’s not bad. The Papdit papa confuses quartz crystal with crystal meth, and demonstrates a disturbing level of interest in how his mother-in-law might “accidentally” drown on a houseboat. His son aspires to be “important scientist like Doctor Doolittle.” And his wife — she from a region notorious for female infanticide — lets loose with this doozy:

“Our daughter is very strong swimmer. When she was a baby, she was falling from a bridge into the river, and she swam all the way back to shore. We don’t know how she got out of the sack.”

Now that’s comedy.

The homo is out of the bag

Bruno

“Borat” star Sacha Baron Cohen has been eagerly trying to keep his next project under wraps, but when a five-studio bidding war is taking place, it’s kind of hard to keep the secret for very long.

That’s right, folks, Cohen will be bringing Bruno – his third and final “Da Ali G Show” character – to the big screen (Ali G was the first character to make it to the big screen, but the film never came out in theaters in the US). A gay fashionista who mostly intereviews people in the entertainment and fashion world, as well as extreme conservatives and religious figures, Bruno should offer plenty of room for the same shock comedy strategy that “Borat” employed so well.

Universal Pictures is currently winning the bidding war at $42 million, but The Hollywood Reporter is stating that Sony, DreamWorks, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. are still very much interested in the project. Here’s hoping that Fox wins out in the end. I mean, they have already done a great job with Borat…

Exalted moviefilm dignitaries make for “Borat” release 60% more exclusive

Despite having racked up several million views of his movie clips on YouTube, snagged the cover of Entertainment Weekly, and received priceless publicity from the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, Borat apparently doesn’t have enough visibility in the U.S. to open a movie in wide release during the weekend of November 3.

Citing a recent poll indicating that just 27% of moviegoers are familiar with the fictional journalist portrayed by comedian Sascha Baron Cohen, Twentieth Century Fox has reduced the number of screens on which “Borat” will open by 60%:

“Our research showed it was soft in awareness,” Bruce Snyder, Fox’s distribution chief, told the Times. In turn, Borat will start off in 800 theaters Nov. 3 and then expand to 2,200 the following weekend, after interest in the movie is piqued and audiences have gotten Borat’s opening-weekend competition—Disney’s The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause and DreamWork’s Flushed Away—out of their system.

That’s the plan, anyway — but is it a wise one? Does Fox honestly believe that the unique individuals who found the first two “Santa Clause” movies hilarious enough to warrant a third installment are really the same people who are going to go see “Borat”? And are they not the least bit worried about cutting the legs out from under their cult-classic-in-the-making before it even gets rolling?

Given the buzz that has been building behind this picture to date, execs over on the Fox lot may be worried about ending up with a “Snakes on a Plane”-level disappointment on their hands…but they shouldn’t be. The key difference is that no one really expected “SOAP” to be a high-quality movie, while reviews for “Borat” have generally been very positive.

Okay, so maybe 73% of moviegoers don’t know who Borat is yet…but does Fox really expect to fix that by reducing their opportunity to get to know him?

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