A Portrait of American Bigotry

Rating: 8/10 (5 November 2006)

Borat! is the funniest film to come along in more than a year or two, and it's also the only comedy I find truly "shocking." What I mean is, every time the Farrelly brothers come out with a new movie, critics say it's shocking and the shock value is plentiful and all of that, but when I watch any of the eight or nine movies they've made, I laugh and I enjoy it, but I'm never shocked by anything. When Freddy Got Fingered was released, it apparently was so shocking that a single exodus from one showing was of an epic proportion, but when I saw it, I just found it to be ahead of its time, if a bit poorly directed during its shocking moments, which I think could be what threw audiences so off-guard during those scenes. Borat! not only made me cackle like an idiot, I also found my jaw to be on the sticky, gum- and-popcorn-laden floor, being too fixated on the literally stunning instance of authentic shock to pick it up and reattach it to my face.
I will not describe any of these scenes to you because if I do, the shock will be killed, or at least maimed, for you, but what I will say is this: Borat! is unfathomably hilarious. Its dirty, filthy distasteful and purposely offensive humor is what made it a head and shoulders above how funny it would've been had it not been that way. My point is strengthened greatly not only by all the ethnic and country-based slander but also by the practically record-setting amount of nudity in this movie. One thing that takes the movie down a few is its awful unintentionally kitchen-sink atmosphere that makes the film less of an enjoyment for me, but Cohen and Davitian are so hilarious that I dismiss this minor flaw. In fact, Sacha Baron Cohen's seamless accent and clever Middle Eastern-to-English grammatical foul-ups could be what made me laugh the most.
I'm not sure I understand the head exec for 20th Century Fox. What he did was limit the theaters playing the movie, because he wasn't sure if the masses were going to get it. More simply put, there's nothing to not get, and also, each of the hysterical trailers produce waves of laughter in just under three minutes before a movie starts than most mainstream, wide-release comedies do in an hour and a half. Doesn't he understand that when your typical present-day audience sees trailers like that, whether they think they'll even like it or not, their curiosity is provoked too much to resist?
But there is a lot of speaking out against this movie from all different interest groups. The movie heavily loads itself with rotten Jewish-aimed humor, so people online are all engaging in forehead-vein-throbbing spewings of fury about anti-Semitism, but I'm sorry to say that ignorant as they are, they don't seem to notice all the different last names of the credentials involved: Cohen, Goodman, Levinson, Siegel, Martei, Bernstein, etc. The movie is produced predominantly by Jews, conceived by and starring a Jew that is so Jewish that his first and last names are Sacha and Baron, the most Jewish things I've ever heard in my life. Also, Larry Charles, the director, has directed countless episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the HBO show for Larry David, a Jewish comedian who makes fun of his people all the time. The Kazahkstan fallout is all basically a touchstone to go back to. I mean, you'll be stunned at what they do to Jews, but then what they do with blacks, Christian right-wingers, all forms of southern and Midwestern Americans, feminists, gays, fat people, and I don't want to give them all away, but anyway, what drives the film's paper-thin plot line is its goal to offend literally everybody. And that's what's so unoffensive about it. But it is shocking. I'll give it that.