Great: You mean I’m gonna have to start liking Sacha Baron Cohen?
After his anti-American, anti-Christian Borat?
In the past, Baron Cohen’s satires have generated reams of excusatory explication about how the crude jokes are actually so meta that they’re really politically correct.
But that gag is running a little thin with The Dictator, which is directed by Larry Charles (Larry David’s second fiddle on Seinfeld) and written by Baron Cohen, Alec Berg, David Mandel, and Jeff Schaffer—none of whom, I’ll hazard to guess, are Arabs poking gentle fun at their own people’s foibles.
What’s the common denominator behind Baron Cohen’s four movies, Ali G Indahouse, Borat, Bruno, and now The Dictator? This conundrum has baffled the best minds in the film criticism business.
Yet consider why Baron Cohen goes out of his way in The Dictator to ridicule a seemingly harmless Brooklyn grocery co-op.
A little Googling dredges up the five-year-long battle within the Park Slope Food Coop over whether to ban Israeli products to protest oppression of the Palestinians...
