Get this man a psychiatrist

Rating: 1/10 (26 July 2007)

Every year, a near infinity of bad movies is churned out by people who think they're artists or who can raise a lot of money or (what is so much worse) both; so it would hardly be sufficient to pan this rancid piece of putrescent offal on the simple basis that it is bad  although it is agonizingly, oppressively, relentlessly bad. What lands this movie, instead, smack dab in the category of the justifiably censurable and eminently burnable is that Sacha Baron Cohen deploys his so-called humor to express what I can only imagine is a virtually bottomless wellspring of hatred and hostilitytoward himself, but especially toward anyone unlucky enough to share the planet with him. More than that, he's the kind of "comedian" who considers himself exempt from all the normal rules of human decency simply because he's a comedian; he can "say anything," because his "art" liberates him (or so he would no doubt tell you). He'd tell you that because he's too neurotically immature to admit the truth: He chose comedy so he could "say anything" without paying the consequences that the rest of us must. His "humor" masks a form of psychological illness and shouldn't be mistaken for a profession. It is a truism, in fact (though it also happens to be true), that one of humor's main engines is hostility, and Cohen is a classic perpetrator. For Cohen, "just kidding" is all the excuse he would need after he'd run your pet dog over with the lawn mower or dropped your infant child over the balcony. (And what a giggle, that look on your face!) For him, the excuse of "humor" excuses, well, everything. It's precisely the kind of shield that bullieseven skinny, unattractive bullieshave used since speech was invented to lacerate others. If you object, if you take offense, then you just "don't get it," you're a bore, you're a poor sport. When, in point of fact, you are none of those things. When what you are, instead, is someone who can perceive when another person is calling you an idiot (and not even with great subtlety). The antics that Cohen got up to in making this filmand of which, thus, the film itself is the documentary evidenceare one example after another of his loathing and malice toward all. He finds stupid people and makes them say stupid things; this is "funny." He finds sincere, honest people and he treats them so abominably that they lose their cool; this is "funny." He finds warm-hearted, helpful people and he embarrasses them horribly; this is "funny." He creates unnatural situations in which people can only react unnaturally; this is "funny." Cohen's rationalebecause tyrants always have a rationaleis that he's "exposing" hypocrisy or letting us see the "underbelly" of society. No, he's actually not. What he's actually doing is fully and happily participating in that underbelly; he's perpetuating hypocrisy (using the fictional character of Borat, Cohen literally lies to get people to talk to him). He's inviting you to give him money to see him say "FU" to people who don't deserve it (and a few who perhaps do), and then he says "FU" to you for being stupid enough to want to watch. He is, in short, a jerk. An angry, hostile, misanthropic, nasty-minded, obnoxious jerk. _Borat_ is for people who don't have the guts to launch their own insults. It's symptomatic of an international "I'm OK; you're a worthless piece of s***" malaise--the malaise that Cohen would like you to believe he's exposing but which, instead, he's working as hard as he can to foster.