Ali G

Ali G--Aiii also features Cohen's newest character Borat, a reporter from Kazakhstani television who is producing a guide to Britain for his viewers back home. Amazingly, Cohen ran into trouble with the Kazakhstani embassy in Britain over his portrait of the bumbling reporter with only the faintest grasp of English, but in fact it's the Brits he interviews who patronise Borat who come off a lot worse. (See, for example, the embarrassed silence which greets Borat's attempt at introductory small talk at a society dinner party: "My wife, she is dead"!) Like the rest of the show, there is a smart satiric edge to the comedy but it's also very, very funny. Ali introduces the compilation, keepin' it real with a promise that profits from the sale of the video will be channelled back into the Staines ghetto.

Bling Bling is an assortment of Ali G's interviews; a couple of them with possibly the last people in Britain who didn't realise that someone was pulling their leg and several with American grandees of various sorts, including economist JK Galbraith and former CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner. The real selling point, however, is Ali G's undeniably spectacular Comic Relief interview with David and Victoria Beckham, which, incidentally, presented the pair in a far more favourable light than any amount of avuncular fawning by Michael Parkinson. Bling Bling also includes quite a lot of Baron-Cohen's other alter-ego, hapless Kazakh! reporter Borat. Though Borat is a lazy and disappointing retreat to a time when British comedy was grounded in a belief that all foreigners are inherently hilarious--he's basically Manuel from "Fawlty Towers" with a microphone--he deserves kudos for the interview with an insufferable English undergraduate comedy troupe, in which he manages to get invited to slap two of them, and does so with the force they deserve.

Bafta Award winning Da Ali G Show is back, and this time Ali G gets to take on America. Ali G In Da USAiii, nominated for 3 Primetime Emmys, stars Sacha Baron-Cohen. The series, filmed in the USA for HBO and Channel 4, brings to life three unique characters: Ali G, Borat - the naive television reporter from Kazakhstan, and Bruno, a camp Austrian fashion reporter.

By the marginal-or-miss standards of British TV spin-offs, Ali G in da House is well above adequate, even though it drags out every smart line or decent routine until they lie dead on the screen just begging for a laugh track. The film pulls back a bit from the absolute obnoxiousness of the Ali G TV skits, which makes Sacha Baron Cohen's character bearable at feature length, but also significantly less funny. Here it is finally confirmed that Ali is a weedy white kid called Alistair who pretends to be Jamaican, rather than a weedy white comedian doing a Jamaican character.
Believe it or not, there's actually a plot, with a scheming Chancellor of the Exchequer (Charles Dance) recruiting Ali as a parliamentary candidate for Staines in a devious attempt to unseat Prime Minister Michael Gambon. Yet this framework is really an excuse for the sketch-like bits, such as a Los Angeles ghetto movie fantasy, Ali G addressing a meeting of lesbian feminists ("I've seen a lot of your videos"), and Charles Dance forced to read a budget speech in Ali G speak. Oddly, the film makes early-1990s jokes about Tories rather than going after New Labour, but any political satire here comes in second to knob-polishing jokes and sometimes-hilarious patter. Luckless inhabitants of the M4 corridor will nod ruefully at the final gag, in which Ali G persuades the PM not to devastate Staines and nods agreement as Gambon reassures him, "it's all right, we'll destroy Slough instead

Sacha Baron Cohen brings his Borat character to the big screen with this feature length adaptation of his American exploits. Fans of DA ALI G SHOW will already be familiar with the devilishly simple Borat formula, in which the heavily moustachioed TV host from Kazakhstan dupes a number of unwitting citizens into revealing their deepest prejudices, and this movie takes that premise, stirs in a little narrative structure, and serves a side-splitting mirth-fest. The action begins with Borat travelling to America alongside his producer Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian). After a hotel room viewing of BAYWATCH, Borat decides he must travel to California to woo Pamela Anderson, so he and the long-suffering Azamat take a cross-country road trip in an ice cream van, encountering some funny, disturbing, and deeply strange individuals along the way. SEINFELD producer Larry Charles lends his directing talents to BORAT, and he gets the balance between the loosely threaded plot and Borat’s encounters with real Americans exactly right. At times the movie threatens to topple over into glorious anarchy, with each situation escalating to ridiculously funny extremes, but Charles knows exactly when to put the brakes on and progress to Borat’s next encounter--although the police are called at the tail-end of one memorable sequence. Keen-eyed viewers will notice some repetition from the TV show, with Borat once again going to a rodeo and again taking etiquette lessons, but it’s almost as if Cohen treats each of these set-pieces as a comedic ‘bit’ he is working on, gradually adding further delirium every time he goes back for another shot. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell who, if any, of BORAT’s participants are actors, but it matters little when the material is this gut-wrenchingly funny, and it’s testament to Cohen’s talents that he’s managed to take a marginal supporting character from his TV show and turned him into a genuine cultural phenomenon.