BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN

In BORAT British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen poses as an ignorant sex crazed Kazakhstani newsman named Borat making a documentary about traveling across the United States. Cohen interacts with real unsuspecting Americans including former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr and former presidential candidate Alan Keys. He attends a real Pentecostal church service, goes forward during the alter call, feigns salvation and manages to get the microphone and speak to those in attendance. The movie attempts to generate Candid Camera laughs by showing ordinary people’s reaction to a foreigner who seems friendly and innocent but whose behavior unexpectedly becomes extremely offensive.

The movie opens with Borat introducing the audience to his nasty little fake hometown in Kazakhstan filled with rapists and prostitutes (the real Kazakhstan has protested the negative portrayal). He and his “producer” Azamat played by Kenneth Davitian travel to New York to “acquire cultural learnings of America for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan.” In his hotel room he flips through the channels and finds Pamela Anderson in BAYWATCH. He is so smitten he decides he must travel to California to have sex with her.

The journey provides the comedian with many opportunities to shoot real Americans reacting to his ambush comedy tactics. At one point he signs up for a real etiquette class and asks if it is polite to show family pictures. The woman instructor says, “yes” at first but politely advises against it when he shows her a pornographic picture of his “son.”

Cohen, himself Jewish, pretends to be a raving anti-Semite to see who he can get to agree with him on camera. At one point he tries to buy a gun at a real gun shop and asks which model would be best for killing Jews.

This type of comedy may appeal to some male college students, but it is a mean new twist to the concept of entertainment. Clearly several of the people ambushed in the movie tried to give Borat the benefit of the doubt — assuming he came from a different culture — only to be tricked into coming out with some anti-Semitic, racist or sexist comment. One wonders how much footage of Americans being kind and generous to this trickster wound up on the cutting room floor.

The film overflows with profanities, vulgarities, crudity, nudity, drinking and debauchery. Pray that the day will come when the executives at 20th Century Fox will be embarrassed that this film opens with the once proud music, spotlights and logo that preceded THE SOUND OF MUSIC. While Kazakhstan has good reason to hope the world doesn’t think BORAT accurately represents their nation, Americans have good reason to hope the world does not judge America based on much of what Hollywood produces.