Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
I was that one person who didn’t see this at the cinema, primarily because I was sure all the dodgy Borat impressions I was hearing everywhere would taint the experience. And it was everywhere. It was an epidemic. You couldn’t escape bad Borat impressions for months. Luckily by the time the DVD arrived they had subsided somewhat and I was anxious to see what all the fuss was about.
Cohen has obviously learned from the awful Ali G Movie about translating his characters for the big screen, and here he doesn’t mess with the formula too much. It’s Borat interacting with real people, either straight out embarrassing them or luring them to expose their bigotry and prejudices through the innocent charm of his wide-eyed "wacky foreigner" character. It’s pretty remarkable that stretching this character and this format into a feature-length film works, and that adding the vaguest of plots (Borat comes to America to report on the country but instead wants to find Pamela Anderson and marry her) and skirting the edges of the road trip genre work so well for it. While Borat the movie is funny, damn funny in spots, for those who have already pissed themselves over his antics on the Ali G shows it’s pretty much more of the same. Which isn’t that bad a thing I suppose if it’s this amusing.