Sacha Baron Cohen PHOTO: REUTERS
Call Cohen lewd, sexist, tasteless, disgusting and whatever else you might want to — this is what he stands for and this is what has made him into a global brand that he is. The cynics and critics be damned. In fact, when you have a whole cartload of them, it means you’re doing something right and that you’re successful. He is unpretentious, unapologetic and uncensored — what you see is what you get. The genius has made a living by entertaining and enthralling audiences with his lavatorial humour and fearless spoofing of big names, some of which threatened to sue him.
Sacha Baron Cohen and Isla Fisher donate $1m for Syrian refugees
Let’s face it — which star would have the bottle to turn up at a Leicester Square premiere of his film wearing just underwear and a dirty polo neck, accompanied by a bevy of scantily clad beauties. For the London premiere of Borat in 2006, Sacha arrived in a cart led by a mule, filled with Kazakhstani peasants, whom he depicted grotesquely in the film. At the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, he attended as fashionista Bruno (to promote the film) and lowered himself on the face of an outraged Eminem. In 2010, he was dropped from being a presenter at the Oscars after he allegedly planned to poke fun at the movie Avatar by dressing up as one of its characters — a blue-skinned, female Na’vi — and revealing to the audience that ‘she’ was pregnant with Cameron’s love child.
In 2012, Cohen arrived at the Oscars as Admiral General Aladeen from The Dictator, flanked by uniformed female bodyguards. He carried an urn which he claimed was filled with the ashes of former North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il and was later escorted off the red carpet after pouring the urn over host Ryan Seacrest. Appalled by his antics, the Academy had apparently decided against inviting him for the Oscars, lest he uses the red carpet for a movie stunt but the shock-master extraordinaire wasn’t one to hold back.
He is intelligent. He tops the list of highest paid comedians. He knows how to milk his stunts. He gives people what they want. He caters to the lowest common denominator and I see no reason for people to get moralistic or uptight about his shenanigans. Sacha makes you gasp in disbelief because he pushes everything, and it isn’t just boundaries I’m referring to.
Neerja's fellow crew members claim biopic more fiction than reality
Tailpieces
1) Jude Law visited the Calais Jungle to meet abandoned children, and is now demanding Britain does more to help them. Given that he’s had five children by three women, I guess he shouldn’t be one to lecture about the problems of children with absentee parents.
2) Neerja, the film about the Indian brave-heart who found circumstantial courage on a Pan Am flight, has hit it out of the park. Some of Neerja Bhanot’s batchmates, including those claiming to be on the same ill-fated flight 73 as her, are lamenting the undue attention given to the 23-year old supposedly at the expense of the remaining crew members who were just as fearless. I can understand these participants feeling left out but there can only be one winner.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 25th, 2016.
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