apolitically enlightening

Rating: 8/10 (5 November 2006)

The genius of "Borat" is its creator's total willingness to explore and step across any boundary. You'll see things in this film you haven't seen before -- quite a feat in a media-saturated age. (Some will say there's a *reason* you haven't seen these things.) Borat himself is an innocent clown, one whose naivete draws responses from the other characters that illuminate who we are, for better and worse. But what sets it apart and makes it far funnier than the mindless "Jackass" and grim Michael Moore genres cited by the earlier poster, is the way "Borat" seems basically to like even those it skewers, showing the basic humanity even of all-too-easy targets of the drearily predictable Left (Texans, suburbanites, evangelical Christians). Brainless stupidity drives "Jackass," and preconceived political viewpoints drive Moore. Heart and fondness guide "Borat," and that makes it a lot more interesting and more significant and gives Cohen a chance to last a lot longer.
It would be a shame, and missing the point, if a film as fresh as "Borat" were co-opted, as the previous poster suggests, by a "left-wing" demographic or even "20-to-30-year-olds;" its energy is youthful, but that places it in no particular political camp. There's a healthy self-parody even its parody of Bush supporters, and "Borat" rivals "The Simpsons" in the way it aims barbs more or less at everybody. Feminism and doctrinaire political correctness take hearty and long overdue beatings, for instance, along with seedy hotel clerks, idiotic gang-banger dress styles, frat-boy drunkenness and more. But the film resists stupid cheap shots at Southerners, shows in its goofy way the efficacy of some Christian beliefs, and in general seems to say that everybody's trying in his or her own way, and that that matters.
Last but not least, it's refreshing to see an enormously fat man jiggling naked on the screen. Another taboo dispensed with! Now, off to make sex with sister for enjoyment.