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In 2011, the sitcom Community aired an episode entitled "Remedial Chaos Theory" and reintroduced an idea first described by Erwin Schrödinger, according to which different versions of reality were happening simultaneously; Millions of stories rub shoulders forever. In this episode, a character named Abed fears being stuck in the worst of all these possible worlds, in "the darkest timeline". Community was finally canceled, but the sentence got stuck, turning into a guessing game. When did we cross exactly the darkest timeline? Brexit? When Trump beat Hillary? When Antonio Brown mutilated his foot in a cryotherapy accident? It's always impossible to say.
But perhaps the most exciting moment was held in February 2019, when Rami Malek won the Oscar for Best Actor for his work staging the effects of the biopic actor on biopic, Freddie Mercury. Bohemian Rhapsody. Disrespectful to Malek, he is a talented actor and his performance in Bohemian Rhapsody is the most human and coherent part of the film. Still, I shunned when the nice young man got his prize back; when I realized that we may be living in the darkest of scenarios after all, since the comedian and actor Sacha Baron Cohen abandoned his passion project, a less pious and less sanitized and really good version of it. Freddie Mercury's story, in 2013. Somewhere in an unknown alternative universe, Cohen accepted the Oscar, his first, and was embarking on the next era of his career.
Cohen finally plays his first dramatic role this fall in the Netflix series L & # 39; spy, thriller in the manner of Square in which he plays an infiltration agent of Mossad in Syria. The version of Cohen that we see in L & # 39; spy is unprecedented: he looks dull and fearsome, and lacks the ridicule he usually uses for his performance throughout the body. The series is a deviation for Cohen, a serious detour via a road paved with pranks and pranks. But it's the discretion of choice that makes him, and he's so appealing – after all, since he came into the mainstream of pop culture at the very beginning, Cohen's best work relied on a element of surprise.
"A joke is something that traces a surprising new neural path in the brain. That explains why a joke we heard before would not make us laugh, "wrote Iaian Lauchlan, a history professor at Edinburgh University, in 2010." That also explains why a joke must follow some familiar patterns to lead us into a false identity. sense of security, before the surprise hit line. "
It's a kind of theory that Cohen, so often quoted as a witty humorist, would probably support. "Often the joke says you're heading in one direction and that at the last moment you're heading in the opposite direction," Cohen told podcaster Matt Wilstein earlier this summer, explaining his mission: laughs of the valley between expectations and what we get. "It sounds boring, is not it," said Cohen to Wilstein a moment after thinking about why he will review every second of a movie to make small adjustments so that his jokes are framed so as to cause a maximum of surprise laughs. "You thought it would be all cocks and what was lifted in my ass!"
Of course, the mix of bathroom humor and surprising and meticulously planned social interactions has long charmed Cohen's career. Almost every profile or interview where Cohen sits to emphasize his education in Cambridge, advance the image of the wise man who plays the fool. Cohen has been working on this angle since the early 2000s, when he launched his initial menagerie of silly characters on Channel 4. The 11 hours show and its fallout, Da Ali G Show. This team included chavtastic goof Ali G, fashionista obsessed with celebrity Brüno and valiant Kazakh journalist Borat, and through them, Cohen introduced a kind of hybrid and cheeky comedy that looked like opening a window during a day of fun. 39, winter Bush years.
It was the right moment; The public had been primed by the popularity of Donkey and Tom Green's show, where tall men have used clumsy and conflicting interactions with the public as comic material. Cohen has combined this touch of cheat art with refined characters to reveal the true opinions of people unhappy enough to interact with them. In doing so, he offered his audience something new: a show of pranks in which this farce was his own mephistophelic presence. He would have convinced people to speak with him by suspending the promise of media coverage, then test their patience until they remained bristling at the ignorance of Cohen's character – or, worse, until that they renounce it and reveal their own deformed beliefs and prejudices.
In 2006, the release of Borat: The cultural knowledge of America at the service of the glorious nation of Kazakhstan made Cohen a star for his interpretation of the cumbersome package of xenophobic stereotypes about Eastern Europeans. In the film, Borat travels the United States interacting with real people, who feed on his merry anti-Semitism, his misogyny and his cruelty in general in a disturbing and laughable way. Part of the attraction of the film lies in the fundamental daring of Cohen's performance, a full-body major against the authorities. When I saw him as a worried high school student, I found that the scorn underlying the film was incredibly refreshing. There was no tenderness in Will Ferrell's impressions of George W. Bush's SNL, or Bill Maher's smarminess. And while Borat was a caricaturist, he crashed into the real world in a way that South Park (who was just as vicious) did not, showing the real answers that real Americans have to caricature among them, including politicians like Alan Keyes and Bob Barr.
Cohen had studied with French clown Philippe Gaulier, as did actors Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter. Gaulier teaches his students a jester, a hypocrisy revealing jester, and Cohen is a real jester, with spikes around the neck instead of Bozo frills. Cohen's humor brand, with its satire based on joke and confrontation, and aims to expose his subjects in ridiculous, malicious ways, or both, is not hug. The gross sequences of his burlesque in his work, such as the battle scene in Borat between the collapsed Kazakh journalist and his beloved / revered manager, Azamat, is sort of the least cringey sequence of the film – a role play pure (nude). It is miles away from the slippery vulgarity and loose improvisation of the Apatow comedy school, which is a particularly American entertainment variety. Instead, Cohen is brutal but controlled, with a bite under the buffoonery. His characters are tools and weapons – clumsy, but intended to hurt their target.
After the success of BoratCohen had a problem: people knew his tricks and knew his face. His follow-up, 2009 Brüno, used another character originally made his debut on Da Ali G ShowBrüno, the very European extremely gay wannabe celebrity. While Brüno modest commercial success (No. 1 open at the box office, but on a weak weekend), it suffers from its predecessor, borrowing heavily from Borat playbook (they have almost the same plot) with diminishing returns. His scripted follow-ups were mediocre: The dictator is a fish slapstick out of the water decent entertaining, but with regard to zany dictators in vulgar comedy is concerned, 2014 L & # 39; interview is weirder, braver and funny. And unlike the rest of Cohen's uneven but often brilliant catalog, the The grimsby brothers commits the sin of being boring. The spoof parody of goopy is a perfectly usable movie plane, but it is much reminiscent of the movies that Adam Sandler made during his tenure at Netflix that the Borat. Cohen was dangerously on the verge of exhausting his bag of mischief, as his novelty ability seemed almost exhausted.
But then, in 2018, Cohen dropped by surprise a limited series on Showtime titled Who is America?, a disturbing, bitter and extremely uneven show, which contains several staggering scenes of real political actors revealing how ugly they were after being pushed by Cohen wearing prosthetics. The culmination of the series came when Cohen, disguised as a square-faced Israeli counterterrorism officer, urged former congressional members to give children arms and train them to kill. The series proved that Cohen still has the ability to persuade the horror and humor of this kind of performance, but it also shows how much harder it is to really break into such a dysfunctional culture. In another era, Who is America? could have made his way into the information cycle by showing Dick Cheney that he happily signed water-board pitchers and former representative Joe Walsh who advocated for the literal arming of children. In the current state of things, however, it is perhaps the best case for Cohen to take advantage of this particular moment to step back from his strategist and try a different path to pathos.
Sacha Baron Cohen has played roles in other films throughout his career in the field of character stuffing, for a generally warm welcome. The same year Borat came out, he played French Formula 1 champion Jean Girard Talladega Nightsanother stranger role accented to emphasize American idiocy, and which remains wonderfully funny. His specialty in the real action seems to be singing antagonists; he is a rival barber in the 2007 adaptation of Sweeney Toddand the venal Monsieur Thénardier in the 2012 adaptation of Wretched. He also played vocal roles in Madagascar and Hugo.
However, Cohen's film career outside of his own productions was mainly defined by unsuccessful projects. A script by Tina Fey called Curly Oxide and Vic Thrill was supposed to embody Cohen in a true story about a Hasidic man who would become a punk leader, but the project never went anywhere. And in addition to his convicted turn as Freddie Mercury, Cohen was also expected to play the role of counter-culture leader Abbie Hoffman in a project entitled The Chicago 7 trial, based on a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin and originally developed with Steven Spielberg as a director. But the project was stalled during the Writer's Guild strike in 2007, and Spielberg abandoned it. Managers like Paul Greengrass and Ben Stiller have subsequently expressed interest, but the project has been dragging on for years.
L & # 39; spy This is Scénar's first traditional television series with script, and his first role is fully dramatic. Instead of playing the heel, he is the hero, as sincere, silent and robust, Eli Cohen, who will infiltrate Damascus on behalf of the Mossad. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Cohen said he felt "forced" to participate in the series after his father's death, as he had followed the real-life story Eli Cohen, on whom the series is based. Looking at the series, there are themes that show Cohen's kinship with matter. L & # 39; spy follows a man who has to hide in a character and balance his task to deceive people with his empathy towards them. Cohen's performance is sober and tender, good enough that when he wears a big mustache when he goes to secrecy, you're too busy worrying about his character's fate to realize he's once again fundamentally dressed in Borat.
Yes L & # 39; spy helping Cohen to establish himself as a dramatic actor, he could chart the way for a very warm reception of his portrayal of another real political fighter, Abbie Hoffman – after a long lull, one would say The Chicago 7 trial will happen, after all. The film would have found new funding, and Sorkin should turn with Cohen still tied, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Eddie Redmayne, Frank Langella, Mark Rylance and SuccessionIs Jeremy Strong.
Sacha Baron Cohen has been in and out of Hollywood and American consciousness for almost 20 years. He was more provocative than any of his contemporaries – when was the last time anyone heard Johnny Knoxville? – and helped inspire comical guerrilla acts like Nathan for you, The exceptional satire of Nathan Fielder's startup culture. (Fielder, rightly, was part of the editorial staff of Who is America?He may still have several chapters in his satirist story, but for now, the time has come for another unexpected turn. After inciting people to fool for years, the most creative and rewarding option of the moment might well be to come straight to Hollywood – to use those sharp edges and that malicious trail in the system.
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