What A Waste of Time!

Rating: 1/10 (3 January 2009)

Comedy as a film genre has changed considerably since "The Groove Tube" created gross-out humor in 1974. Basically, most risqué film comedies try to synthesize lowbrow scatological shenanigans with crude sexual monkeyshines. "Kentucky Fried Movie," "Animal House," "Airplane," and "Porky's" followed in the footsteps of "The Groove Tube" in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. The Farrelly Brothers established new rules for gross-out humor with "Dumb and Dumber" (1994) and "There's Something About Mary" (1998). None of the Farrelly's later films achieved the popularity of either "Dumber" or "Mary." The Weitz Brothers pushed the envelope even further with "American Pie" (1999) and its sequel "American Pie 2" (2001). The Wayans Brothers intensified gross-out comedy with their "Scary Movie" franchise and made millions with the first two entries. The wacky but less perverted Zucker Brothers of "Airplane" fame took over the series with "Scary Movie 3" and substituted absurdity for perversion. Popular HBO comedian Sacha Baron Cohen of the "Da Ali G Show" has made the latest attempt to take film comedy to a new zenith or nadir depending on taste or tastelessness. Although the jokes miss more often than hit the target in "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" (* out of ****), Cohen's comedy of errors is making a lot of people laugh.
"Borat" qualifies as a typical fish-out-of-water comedy about a klutzy foreign journalist on his first tour of America. Imagine what might happen if the Beverly Hillbillies went to Iran, and you'll have some kind of a clue about what the filmmakers were trying to do. British comic Sacha Baron Cohen bears a striking resemblance to late rock music icon Frank Zappa, and the brainless Kazakhstan reporter that he impersonates here dresses like the Howard Sprague character that Jack Dobson played in 18 episodes of "The Andy Griffith Show" on TV between 1966 and 1968. Cohen generates some hilarity with his quasi-Polish accent, even though Kazakhstan's chief language is Russian, and mangles the English language with delightful results.
This thin tale unfolds without fanfare in Borat's third-world village in Kazakhstan. Cohen breaks the invisible fourth wall as Borat and speaks directly to the audience when he introduces his family as well as the village rapist. At one point, he kisses a woman, identifies her as his sister, and then boasts about the trophy that she won for being "the fourth best prostitute in all of country." Afterward, he piles all himself and his luggage into a taxi that is drawn by a couple of mules and heads off for America.
Borat claims to be the sixth best reporter in Kazakhstan. His fat, scummy, pinchpenny producer Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian of "Frogtown 2") and he fly to New York to make a documentary about America. Along the way, Borat surprises the passengers with a live chicken that he packs around in a valise. In New York City, Borat tries to buy a Hummer once an auto dealer convinces him that Hummers attract women. Unfortunately, poor Borat doesn't have enough dough and has to settle for a used $700 ice cream wagon that plays kiddy music over an intercom. His producer and he argue about finances after Borat becomes infatuated with "Baywatch" honey Pamela Anderson. Originally, they had planned to confine their documentary to New York City alone, but Borat's hopeless infatuation with the "Baywatch" star prompts him to travel across country so that he can propose to her. Borat and his producer temporarily part company after our protagonist catches the latter abusing Borat's Pamela Anderson magazine for prurient purposes. The audience that I sat with went berserk over this scene, especially when Borat and Azamat wrestled nude with their hindquarters in each other's faces, before they ran amok in the buff through a hotel convention, flashing everybody. When Borat isn't making a complete fool of himself, he tries to make fools out of real-life people. Apparently, he managed to fool these nitwits into believing that he was a real-life journalist. The overall effect is worth a smirk or two but not a belly laugh. One instance early in the movie occurs at the ABC-TV affiliate in Jackson, Mississippi, WAPT-TV, where he dupes the Morning News crew in believing his lies. The jokes are mostly tame, and Cohen doesn't resort to the "Punk'd" MTV antics of Ashton Kutcher. White Southerners make easy targets for Borat. He dines with a middle-class group of Southerners who appeared to have been plucked from the early 1960s and shocks when his fat African-American girl/prostitute date shows up. In another scene, the oblivious reporter visits a White Supremacist's antique shop and accidentally destroys over $400 worth of merchandise. No, this scene isn't a tenth as funny as a similar scene in "Jackass: The Movie" (2002) set at a car rental agency. Eventually, Borat hitches a ride to California with a bunch of drunken frat boys, meets Pamela Anderson at an autograph session, and attempts to kidnap her.
"Seinfeld" TV producer Larry Charles makes his debut as director with "Borat." Cohen and he season their trim 82-minute farce with some politically subversive wit. They ridicule Jews unmercifully and Cohenwho is Jewish himselftakes particular delight in this clowning around. In one scene at an American gun shop, Borat makes inquiries about the best gun with which to shoot Jews. Watching "Borat" is like binge drinking. Binge-drinkers go until they blow. Despite its classic comic set-up, "Borat" blows more often than goes.