I didn't want to like this movie

Rating: 8/10 (16 April 2007)

I was concerned that this would be simply another "Latka Gravas from Taxi" character where the humor is solely derived from mispronouncing words and speaking broken English.
But it turned out to be very much more than that.
I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that the other people in the movie (regular citizens, men and women on the street) weren't in on the joke (at least they didn't appear to be). This gave the movie a dynamic that I didn't expect.
I must add however that because of this I found the movie EXTREMELY difficult to watch in large sections. I had to pause it repeatedly whenever Borat would walk up to someone and kiss them on the cheek or when he said or did something (unintentionally) inappropriate. It was like watching a series of train wrecks. You couldn't watch but you couldn't look away either.
A couple of the lines made me laugh out loud ("My wife's vagine now looks like a wizard sleeve"). When he said that his mother was the oldest woman in the country and that she was 43, I laughed at that for about five minutes.
The less said about the scene with him and his friend in that hotel room the better (but it was funny). There were extra scenes on the DVD that I started watching but I just couldn't continue. All in all I thought it was a good movie just a very difficult one to watch.