ONLINE ONLY: Borat: Cultural Offending of Romania

I'll confess I'm just one of the masses when it comes to the new movie "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan." I laughed at the online trailers and eagerly waited in line for a ticket. \nYes, it was shocking, hilarious and everything else it was hyped up to be. Granted there was some pretty nasty imagery -- seeing Borat and a 300-pound man naked and wrestling over a picture of Pamela Anderson was not a pretty sight! \nIt was also interesting to see the racist and misogynistic viewpoints so many people were willing to divulge when they thought it was safe to do so -- interesting, yet also quite a bit disturbing. I left the movie believing what I had heard from various people, that the man behind Borat, a British Jew named Sacha Baron Cohen, was looking for an entertaining way to expose people's anti-Semitism, racism and misogyny. \nAt the time, I didn't really question the opening and closing scenes of Borat's "hometown," which is actually the Romanian village of Glod. I assumed he adequately explained what he was doing and fairly compensated the people from the village who were depicted in his movie. \nI was wrong. I read an article today about the conditions in that particular village. The inhabitants are Roma, also known as Gypsies. Only five of them are actually employed in a nearby rock quarry and a sanatorium. The others gather fruits and vegetables or raise chickens. They have no indoor plumbing or heating systems and instead use wood stoves and drink water from wells. Horse-drawn carts are the most popular method of transportation.\nAccording to the villagers, many thought Cohen was there to help them out. But they were either not paid for their appearances in the film or were paid something in the ballpark of $3.30 to $5.50 per day. Some of the things Cohen and crew did included handing toy rifles to small children in an effort to depict a kindergarten, putting animals in people's houses, having an old woman put on silicone breasts and taping a sex toy to the stump of a villager who had lost an arm. \nGranted, these people were not forced to do any of these things, but they were in a position to be easily exploited. \n"Borat" grossed approximately $29 million at the box office in its second weekend. Cohen is effectively making millions of dollars off a film that mocks the true and abject poverty of a poor Roma village he exploited and degraded to no end. \nIt's hypocritical for Cohen to claim that his movie is doing some sort of social good by exposing the bigoted views of some members of society while cheating those Romanian villagers out of the money they should have received.\nIf he really wanted to do something to contribute to society, he would take a fraction of what he earns from this film and pay those villagers what they are entitled to. Then he might actually help the common good with his movie.