Borat

Boring. Spent most of the hour and fifteen minutes checking the time. Are we there yet, are we there yet? I'll be honest, I don't get the hype. I didn't see any clever political commentary. All I saw was a guy deliberately acting like a jerk to ordinary people. In fact, the movie was so bad that I had more respect for Sacha Baron Cohen before I actually knew what he did for a living.

Secondly, he spends most of the movie trying to play the fool for us. But wasn't the movie all about wink wink, look how I'm gonna get these people, you know who I am but these people don't? Then what was with the nude wrestling scene when there were no "other people" around? Was it for us? But we already know he isn't actually Borat. Who was it for, then? The moment the nude wrestling began, I knew it would probably end up in a public place with gratuitous goofery. Forward. On to the next scene. Only to be disappointed again.

The only humorous scene in the movie was when Bob Barr is informed that the cheese he just consumed was a product of Borat's maternal teat. For the minimalistic reaction. It wasn't very obvious, but it was there.

Are we supposed to feel shock over the fraternity boys incident? Oh please. Break into the mind of any teenaged boy anywhere in the world and you'll find an oversexed hyper-hormonic sexist beast.

Most of the movie Sacha Baron Cohen just plain grates on the nerves. Okay, we get it, falling over things and breaking them is funny. People arguing in a foreign language you don't understand is funny. Wrestling nude with a fat fuck is funny. But only if you weren't expecting "clever political commentary" or "social satire". It is funny only if you were expecting to be fed lowbrow slapstick off-the-shelf pre-packaged swill of the likes of, say, a Martin Lawrence or the Wayans clan.

Also, most of the movie involves trapping people into saying or doing things they might usually not have said or done. For example, the Chevy dealer who wanted to sell Borat a vehicle that could run over Gypsies. Or the gun dealer who showed Borat a gun for shooting Jews. Does it make the Chevy dealer anti-Gypsy or the gun dealer anti-semitic? More likely, they were just humoring the poor hapless shit-for-brains foreigner who looked clueless enough to warrant some extra patience. Or maybe they just wanted to sell guns and Hummers. Don't they say that the customer is always right? Even if he is a bigoted asshole? Was there any kind of point made through all this? I don't think so. In fact, more than anything else, this movie speaks volumes about Americans' superhuman patience and ability to tolerate a lot of asinine bullshit from someone who is clearly a registered fuckwit.

However, the biggest reason for hating this movie is because of the way it bullies the underdogs. The Kazakhs. A nation without a representative voice. Imagine if Borat were to have impersonated, say, an Indian and if he had performed the same antics. Would the Indian community in the US have taken it lying down? Hell no. Imagine the uproar it would have caused in the blogosphere, in Congress, in India. Which is why his choice of being a Kazakh looks more like a coward's way out. It is best to incur the wrath of a community no one has heard about and no one is friends with.

In conclusion, Borat didn't work for me. At all. And on an intellectual level, it was on par with reality teevee footage of people eating a writhing mass of worms. Yes, it is that bad.