Sunday, October 25, 2020

Why I'm going with the shorter title for Borat

I've watched the new Borat movie. 

I should tell you about it now, but I'm going to write a review of it for ReelGood, plus touch on it qualitatively here in a day or two. So you'll just have to wait. 

Today, I want to talk about its title.

If a movie is willing to have an incredibly long title, I'm usually willing to go along with it. There are those I like more and less, as discussed here. I may not write the full title every time -- blog labels being a place that particularly requires an abbreviation -- but I will laboriously type out the whole thing on all my various movie lists. 

I would also do it on my Most Recently Seen for the First Time area to the right, but you will notice, if you read this soon enough, that I only called the new movie Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. I'm about to explain why.

This movie does have a longer title, but it can't seem to settle on it.

When we first learned the extended title for the new Borat, it did not have the Subsequent Moviefilm part, and contained the subtitle Gift of Pornographic Monkey to Vice Premiere Mikhael Pence to Make Benefit Recently Diminished Nation of Kazakhstan

While that was laugh-out-loud funny -- I believe I did LOL -- it was always incredibly cheeky, and may have only existed as a leak in order to troll Republicans, Pence in particular. Or, maybe they thought they'd get sued. Either way, the movie now has, more officially, the following title:

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime to Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

This is not as funny. It's still funny, but it would have been far funnier if it were the first title released. As such, it seems like a censored compromise of the originally leaked title by taking its specific elements and rendering them generic.

They're not the only two titles that have been revealed. The first teased title was Borat 2: Great Success, though I have to imagine this was a placeholder, because it always seemed best to continue the unwieldy titular standard set by the first movie. 

But part of the reason the subtitle, even the one they eventually went with, seems sort of indefinite to me is that there's a running gag in the movie that the title keeps changing. I believe it goes through both of the above incarnations, as well as a number of others that start to name-check Rudy Giuliani rather than Pence. As the gift Borat is planning to give undergoes changes as the plot rolls forward, the unwieldy title keeps adjusting, along with adjustments to the adjectives describing Kazakhstan. (I'd list them, but I don't want to give away the plot -- plus it would involve scrolling back through the movie to find them, and I just don't feel like doing that.)

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is funny enough on its own, as the funniest part of the first movie's title is the inexact translations of its broken English. I don't need to humiliate Mike Pence for it to be funnier (it's just an added bonus). 

Plus, going with the shorter title prevents us from having to acknowledge the fact that they had to, or decided to, make it more generic in anticipation of potential lawsuits. 

Then again, having watched the movie, I really don't know how they avoided all sorts of different legal entanglements, and maybe if I did a bit of googling I'd find that they actually didn't. 

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