So bad, it's depressing

Rating: 1/10 (2 September 2007)

This movie was so bad on so many levels that I had to write about it.
Some people say that the movie is "racist" and "sexist." That's not true. What it is, is an idiotic attempt to make fun of people who are supposed to be racist and sexist, but who probably aren't. And it does this by painting an entire country, Kazakhstan, as racist and sexist. That's bad enough--and sickeningly ironic, by the way, precisely because it makes use of the very sort of bigoted tendencies in making fun of racists and sexists. Basically, you're supposed to laugh at the idiotic, racist, sexist Americans by seeing how they are like the idiotic, racist, sexist people of Kazakhstan. This joke is completely unfunny because you can't begin to take the stereotype seriously. If you can't take the stereotype seriously, you can't take Cohen's method of mockery seriously. It ends up being just stupid.
A lot of people have said this film is politically incorrect. That's not true either. It's aggressively, in-your-face politically correct. It is the political correctness of a too-clever, potty-mouthed 14-year-old boy. It doesn't frown moralistically at political incorrectness, like college professors; it doesn't mock it contemptuously, like Michael Moore or college students; the movie mocks it using stupid crudity. And this really is offensive, because in the process it offends the real dignity of real people. No wonder Cohen is being sued. This is one reason he's sometimes called an elitist. The other reason of course is that he manages to put down a whole nation he obviously thinks he's better than.
But the movie is also offensive in the old fashioned sense of ridiculously unfunny scatological and homosexual "humor"--which isn't funny at all. The "humor" is offensive, and it's offensive that we're supposed to find it funny. An elitist that makes use of this sort of bottom-feeding "humor"--the irony is appalling.
What's most disappointing to me, though, and what really moves me to write, isn't how bad the movie is, but the fact that it got such an amazingly high rating on the TomatoMeter and the IMDb average rating. What is this world coming to? If "Borat" is supposed to be the best comedy in years, we must be closer to the apocalypse than I thought.