The Dictator

Shelia hall
English Composition
Instructor Amy Watkins-Copeland
27 May 2012

I believe a great film is a film that draws you completely in and makes you forget your surroundings. Like a great book it’s able to capture your imagination and make the impossible, possible. The movie The Dictator was not able to do this, but I don’t think it intended to.
Most of Cohen’s characters are exaggerations of real types of people. He uses these characters to try and tackle sensitive issues. Ali G is an uneducated white suburban male who likes to imitate what he believes to be rap culture. Bruno is a flamboyantly gay fashion reporter from Austria and Borat is a Kazakhstani journalist, from the fictional village of Kazakh. The common ground these characters share is their satire. Because they are satirical, their main focus is not to capture your imagination but to force-feed you spoonful’s of reality covered in artificial sugar. The taste of reality is meant to get lost in the artificial sugar, but I feel the artificial sugar still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
The Dictator is (supposedly) a comedy about a North African ruler, General Admiral Haffaz Aladeen, who refuses to allow democracy in his country. He is summoned to the United Nations to speak with global leaders about the way he runs his country. Instead he never makes it as he is kidnapped and his beard gets cut off and he’s thrown into the streets of New York to fend for himself. Meanwhile, there’s a look-a-like standing in for him at the United Nations. By the end of the movie, Aladeen has fallen in love and accepts democracy. Essentially this movie has all the right components to be a great comedy. It stars Sasha Baron Cohen, who has already made a name for his self with the characters mentioned earlier. I’ve always wondered if Cohen was actually trying to be a comedian, or just using these characters to humiliate and upset people, or to say and do things that would usually be frowned upon.
Regardless of...