Release Date:November 3rd, 2006
Kazakhstani reporter Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) travels to the United States in hopes of bringing back important knowledge to his primitive homeland. Borat Sagdiyev, Kazakhstan's sixth most famous man and a leading journalist from the State run TV network, travels from his home in Kazakhstan to the U.S. to make a documentary. On his cross-country road-trip, Borat meets real people in real situations with hysterical consequences.
In Larry Charles's "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," S.B. Cohen plays a reporter from Kazakhstan, named Borat Sagdiyev, a perpetually upbeat, seldom defeatable mustached TV reporter who's in the U.S. to learn about our country's peculiar norms and mores, hence the title, which in length, matches the subtitle of Kubrik's "DR. Strangelove" (f you don't know it, look it up now).
There's a first for every comedic element and here it's in the form of an obese man stark naked on top of a naked Borat, with his testicles and ass rubbing against Borat’s face, as the two men compete over who is allowed to jerk off to cheesy sex icon Pamela Anderson (who appears in the picture).
At 82 minutes, "Borat" is a good-natured mockumentary, in which half of the targets are "safely" chosen; the other half explode with ferocious energy and uproarious humor. Though the material is uneven, the movie contains enough caustic interactions and sharp observations to please larger audiences than S.B. Cohen's TV fans.
Unfolding as a series of encounters with archetypal Americans, the movie aims at both individuals and social institutions, such as country rodeos, gospel meetings, and TV studios. Constantly open to new experiences, Boart is shocked at some of the home truths he "discovers" in his travels and troubles, from the luxury of indoor sanitation to the vulgar rudeness of New Yorkers, faced by a foreigner who just wants to be warm and nice to them.
One of the satire's strongest sequences is when Borat gives a rabble-rousing address to a rodeo, claiming he supports the war on terrorism, but then he turns the crowds against him as he sings a version of the Kazakhstan national anthem to the tune of the American national anthem (a barb that's perhaps addressed at recent news reports of the increasing number of Latinos who sing the American anthem in Spanish).
Rude, raunchy, timely, and ridiculously funny, as a culture-collision picture, "Borat" is everything that Albert Brooks' tame and lame "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" should have been.
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