thomas4cinema

Kazakh report Borat travels with his colleague through the USA to make a documentary about the country for his home tv channel, but reroutes in order to get to California, where he wants to marry Pamela Anderson.
What to say about it? Through the hype around the new Sasha Baron Cohen film to be released in 2009, I felt compelled to check out the previous one at last. Reading and hearing about it never got me interested enough before, as I thought this would very much not be my kind of humour. Having warched it now, I have to say that this assessment was slightly wrong: it is very very very much not my kind of humour. Showing stupid people being stupid is nothing I would have a problem with on a moral scale (let the rednecks be exposed, let the hypocrites be exposed, let everybody be exposed for what they are), but funny it ain’t… there is some slapstick bit with the nude wrestling that can be considered to be provoking some laughs, but then again… not really after an initial impulse. There is a scene where Borat sits in a trailer with some dudes, drinking beer and watching the Pamela Anderson home porn movie – while pretending to expose them for the chauvinist idiots that they doubtlessly are, I kept wondering whether it is not those people who would find the Borat movie most funny. It can be appreciated how brave Cohen and his co-start Ken Davitian are. But that does not yet make anything more interesting than … well, than what Borat is. Nothing to write home about.