A Savage Satire on Prejudice and Stereotyping!

Rating: 9/10 (21 August 2008)

Sasha Cohen lets us know early in the film that what he says is not what we, as enlightened humanists, should believe when he seeks out a 'joke teacher' wanting to learn 'Not' jokes ("You're so handsome---NOT!"). This whole movie is a "NOT!" spewing an endless sequence of racial and cultural prejudices and stereotypes right in our face. He's throwing a hideous mirror at us with scenes such as 'The Running of the Jews,' reminding us of the persecution of the gypsies and Jews in Europe (particularly in Poland-- much of his Khazak language is actually Polish). But he's making us laugh, in a kind of sardonic way, at mankind's inhumanity to itself.
His first target, then, is anti-Semitism. He uses humor to remind us of the bleak, dark world we live in, in which there are peoples who want to destroy Israel and the Jewish people. Given the endless tirades against many cultural nations, peoples and life styles, we can expand This World of Bigotry to genocidal wars wherever they are currently taking place. As he exhorts the enthusiastic rodeo crowd in the U.S. against Iraq, before he sings the American National Anthem, "President Bush will drink the blood of the Iraqis!"
When he finally does meet some Jews, they are anything but the stereotypes he was been reviling us with -- they are merely a kindly little old man and his wife offering him sandwiches at their Bed and Breakfast Inn. With off the wall stereotyping, he and Azamat think that the two Jews are shape shifters who can change into cockroaches and can be appeased by having money thrown at them. As other reviewers here have pointed out, Nazi propaganda films often showed Jews as cockroaches.
But hey! We real people also live in a world in which genocide and ethnic cleansing still go on; a world in which female circumcision is still practiced; a world in which 'woman is the n----r of the world'; a world in which slavery, though illegal, is still practiced with women and children the victims. It's not that 'human history is a nightmare from which we are just waking up,' it still is a nightmare!
Borat spouts all of these types of prejudice, and even worse, meets Americans who agree with him. He tries to lighten the film with toilet and sexual humor, and even with an amazing nude fight with Azamat. But let us not forget the real message of this movie: he's trying to wake us up and show us the world in which we live as it really is. His viewpoint is disguised, like himself, and presented in a humorous way. This puts him up on the level of a Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut or Stanislaw Lem (also, coincidentally, from Poland).
Borat: Funny but bleak. I give it a 9.