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Baron Cohen has played this game in the past, ascending to a position of
chattering-class darlinghood on the perception that his main target was the
political Right. In Borat, he appeared to be attacking neo-cons as the
instruments of an ignorant and reactionary American public, while Brüno, his
flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion pundit, was deemed to be sending up
homophobia while outwardly revelling in it.

But The Dictator has unsettled liberal sensitivities by appearing to suggest
that in a world as out-of-control as ours, personal freedom may be an
unaffordable luxury, and – as the Admiral General passionately argues –
democracy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Divining what Baron Cohen really thinks isn’t easy as he rarely speaks out of
character, and is particularly reluctant to explain his work. But last week
he used a rare interview with Radio 4’s Today programme to defend the film,
calling it “an attack and parody of dictators”.

Not that the message was easy to get across. Sacha claimed he was banned from
filming at the UN, on the grounds that some of the organisation’s member
countries might not like it. “We said, ‘Why? This is a pro-democracy movie.
“They said, ‘That’s the problem. We represent a lot of dictators, and
they’re going to be very angry at this portrayal of them. You can’t shoot in
here.’”

And still he gets asked where his comedy comes from. It comes in part from his
upbringing in an observant, high-achieving Jewish family in Hammersmith,
west London. He was the youngest of three brothers with an Israel-born dance
teacher mother, and a father who ran a menswear shop in Piccadilly. It
wasn’t a particularly privileged upbringing, but comfortable enough for
Baron Cohen to attend Haberdashers’ Aske’s, a public school in
Hertfordshire, before going to Cambridge, where he joined the Amateur
Dramatic Club and a Jewish theatre group.

His parents hoped that he would become an academic, but the showbiz bug bit
deep, and after a stuttering entry into television he broke through with Ali
G of the West Staines Massiv, the bling-laden, urban black “voice of da
yoof”, on Channel 4’s The 11 O’Clock Show. As a representative of
misunderstood suburban youth, Ali G landed interviews with the likes of
Mohamed Al Fayed and Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the US House of
Representatives. Gingrich was so taken in that when he heard he’d been
hoaxed, he refused to believe it. The character made Baron Cohen famous, but
when his first movie, Ali G in da House, was picketed by black activists
labelling him “the new Al Jolson”, it also gave him a taste of the
sensitivities even “sophisticated” comedy can touch on.

Having earned a fortune from his movies, he now lives in a large house in Los
Angeles with his Australian actress wife, Isla Fisher, and their two
children. Even those who work closely with him admit to knowing almost
nothing about his life away from the job. “During the auditions and
rehearsals, he was the Sacha you think you know,” says his Dictator co-star
Anna Faris, “but he kept his personal life and personality hidden.”

For all the high jinks in Cannes, he was still revealing nothing. Apart from
an inability to ride a camel.

Don’t get fresh with the Prince of Bel-Air.

Will Smith gave a backhanded slap to a Ukranian reporter Friday after the man planted a surprise smooch near the actor’s lips at the “Men in Black 3″ premier in Moscow, TMZ.com reported.

“Come on man. What the hell is your problem buddy?” Smith snapped when the back-patting hug turned into a kamikaze kiss attack.

After a forceful shove, the “Ali” star ended the encounter with his left hand smacking the young man’s cheek.

“Sorry. He kissed me on my mouth,” Smith said as he continued down the red carpet with cameras rolling.

“The joker is lucky I didn’t sucker punch him,” he quipped.

“I’m so sorry,” one of his shocked female handlers said.

“No, no. It’s all good,” Smith said with a laugh as he moved on to the next interview.

TMZ

The reporter, notorious for kissing celebrities, quickly leaves after his encounter with the Hollywood star.

The reporter – looking like a wannabe wiseguy in a black shirt, white tie and white suit – slinked away without comment and stood behind a camera.

He’s a TV personality who often kisses celebrities as part of his shtick, according to TMZ.

The incident follows just days after Smith said he agrees with President Obama’s support of gay marriage.

“If anybody can find someone to love them and to help them through this difficult thing that we call life, I support that in any shape or form,” he told reporters in Berlin on Monday.

ndillon@nydailynews.com

ASSOCIATED PRESS

May 20, 2012 3:02AM

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Universal Pictures

Singer Rihanna has a major role in “Battleship.”

REVIEW: The audience at my screening of “Battleship” cracked up whenever an allusion was made to the board game that loosely inspired the movie. They laughed when the Hasbro logo came on up screen, when aliens fired weapons shaped like pegs, and when a character called for a strike on “Echo-one-one” and it came up on the computer screen as “E 11.” (Miss!)

“Battleship” plays like the kind of dream a kid might have if he or she fell asleep after a rousing round or two of the game. Where do the pegs come from? Why can’t the two opposing sides see each other? How come everyone only has five ships? All these questions are answered, kind of, and whoever’s in charge of Hasbro’s rule book should get promoted for shoehorning so many actual game references into the script. (Sadly missing: Liam Neeson never yells “You sank my battleship!”)

But like the game itself, “Battleship” the movie offers up nothing more than a simple old good time. It delivers decent performances even from unexpected quarters — singer Rihanna and swimsuit model Brooklyn Decker do fine, with Rihanna playing the tough-military-woman role we’ve seen Michelle Rodriguez do so well (and before her, Jenette Goldstein as Vasquez in “Aliens”). Taylor Kitsch is sure to have better success with this film than with mega-flop “John Carter,” but he’s outacted by everyone on screen, including the ships.

The film smartly never takes itself too seriously — when grim vet Mick Canales (played by real vet Gregory D. Gadson, who lost his legs to a Baghdad bomb) delivers the oh-so-heroic line, “Let’s see if we can buy the world another day,” another character responds “Who talks like that?”

That’s what’s fun about “Battleship.” Sure, it’s ludicrous that aliens are shooting explosive pegs at our ships, and that they’ve somehow created a protective dome over only a certain part of the Pacific Ocean, and that we just happen to be engaging in a military exercise there with the Japanese, who once attacked us on those very waters. And how convenient that a group of elderly vets with knowledge of pre-modern technology ships are on hand when needed, providing a lump-in-the-throat, go-get-em-Grandpa moment.

But in for a peg, in for a pound. If you’re willing to engage your summer-movie brain, and to cheer aloud at lines like “We’ve got a battleship!” and “I need to borrow your boat,” ”Battleship” is a hoot. Bring on the inevitable 3-D film version of ”Hungry Hungry Hippos”!

Will you see “Battleship”? Tell us on Facebook. 

Related content:

• ‘Battleship’s’ Neeson: Shipshape and nearly 60
• Brooklyn Decker was on the (snot) bubble for ‘Battleship’ role
• VIDEO: Rihanna on identifying with ‘Battleship’ role

I was immediately hooked. It is a tribute to Mr. Fischer-Dieskau’s artistic greatness and incomparable legacy that I am just one of countless music lovers who had him as their first guide to the art of the song.

Mr. Fischer-Dieskau died on Friday, just shy of his 87th birthday. The music world knew this day would come. But his death reminds me of the way I felt in 1971, when, then a student at Yale, I went to the music building for a piano lesson and saw a note posted on the door with a message of just four words: “Igor Stravinsky died today.” The death of Mr. Fischer-Dieskau feels comparably monumental.

What captivated me in that first experience of his Schubert was the seemingly effortless mix of vocal beauty and verbal directness. Even when not really following the English translation of the German poems, I hung on every word. His technique was superb. In the manner of the great musical theater performers, Mr. Fischer-Dieskau sang as if he were speaking. And there was nothing quite like his voice: a rich, warm, textured baritone. He could dip into his low range and project phrases with chesty emphasis, and soar high, sounding mellifluous and lyrical with almost tenorish colorings.

My collection of Fischer-Dieskau recordings grew steadily, not just songs of Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Beethoven, Mahler and more, but also his operatic roles. Alas, my experience of his artistry comes mostly from recordings, and in this I am also not alone, at least among Americans. I heard him only in recital. But he sang opera mainly in Berlin, Munich and elsewhere in Europe, and never performed at the Metropolitan Opera.

His voice was probably light for some of the operatic roles he took on, though I remember from his recitals how penetrating and vibrant his sound was. In the theater, as critics and opera buffs consistently reported, he drew listeners in, never forcing his sound, making a virtue of subtlety.

My favorite Fischer-Dieskau opera recording — even more than his distinguished portrayal of Hans Sachs for the conductor Eugen Jochum’s classic account of Wagner’s “Meistersinger” (unrivaled for me) — is Berg’s “Wozzeck,” with Karl Böhm conducting the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, recorded in 1965. Mr. Fischer-Dieskau utterly inhabits the title role, an oppressed, delusional soldier who is forced to do menial tasks for his captain and subjected to medical experiments by a quack doctor in order to earn some money to support his common-law wife (the great Evelyn Lear) and little boy.

Yet touches of refinement and elegance in his singing lend humanity, even tragic stature, to this lowly character. While conveying the sharp contours and modernism of Berg’s atonal musical language, Mr. Fischer-Dieskau reveals the plaintive lyricism of the vocal writing.

How fitting, and a little eerie, that his death comes 12 days before the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Britten’s “War Requiem,” an enormous work for three vocal soloists, chorus, boys’ choir, organ and two orchestras. It was commissioned for the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral in England, which had been bombed during World War II.

Britten, a pacifist, incorporated antiwar poems by Wilfred Owen into a setting of the Latin Requiem Mass text. For the premiere performance, as a gesture of reconciliation, Britten wanted as soloists the tenor Peter Pears (an Englishman), the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya (a Russian) and Mr. Fischer-Dieskau (a German), but the Soviets kept Ms. Vishnevskaya from taking part. Britten conducted this shattering work with those soloists for a 1963 recording with the London Symphony Orchestra. Talk about a classic.

Though the statistics are hard to pin down, Mr. Fischer-Dieskau may be the most recorded artist in classical music history. But the stunning range of his recordings of older repertory, which include a survey of the entire catalog of Schubert songs appropriate for the male voice with his faithful collaborator Gerald Moore at the piano, tended to obscure his considerable involvement with contemporary music. He performed operas, concert works and songs by, among others, Hans Werner Henze, Aribert Reimann, Gottfried von Einem and Witold Lutoslawski.

There may have been a slight downside to Mr. Fischer-Dieskau’s reputation as a paragon among lieder singers, a tendency for listeners to take him for granted and search out fresher approaches. But on recording after recording he emerges as a searching and adventurous artist. When he returned to songs he had recorded years and decades earlier, to work with pianists like Sviatoslav Richter, Alfred Brendel and Christoph Eschenbach, he did not simply give his old performances with new partners but threw himself into rethought interpretations.

I get such a kick from a New Yorker cartoon by William Hamilton that appeared in 1975. A Manhattan couple, obviously divorcing, are packing up things and sorting through recordings. In the caption the glowering wife says: “Just a minute! You don’t get three years of my life and the Dietrich Fischer-Dieskaus!”

How poignant that seems today. What could be more central to a person’s well-being than Fischer-Dieskau recordings?