Caffeinated Clint
He too wears skimpy clothes, has a brain the size of a microchip, sees women as meat, and struggles to explain himself in a concise sentence – but thankfully, ‘Borat’ is a lot funnier than Warwick Capper.
Sacha Baron Cohen, Ken Davitian, Pamela Anderson
He too wears skimpy clothes, has a brain the size of a microchip, sees women as meat, and struggles to explain himself in a concise sentence – but thankfully, ‘Borat’ is a lot funnier than Warwick Capper.
In his second TV-skit-turned-film – the first being the one-joke disappointment, “Ali G in Da House” – Sacha Baron Cohen, playing the, kicks a lot more goals too, slicing one straight through the goal line at least eight times out of ten.
Granted, most of the bank that “Borat” is going to make – or make, as seems to be the case. Have you seen how much this thing brought in at the U.S box office on its first week of release?! – can be attributed to the film’s continuous publicity and marketing campaign. Months before the print was even locked, the film was an instant curiosity because of the trouble that Cohen had caused whilst filming the movie in the states – attendees of a Texas Rodeo nearly ate him alive, he was walloped in the face by a New Yorker for harassment, and was kicked out of at least one in three of the businesses or homes he invaded – usually for his anti-Semitic remarks. But more so, its Twentieth Century Fox’s fabulous marketing of the movie that will/has been putting bums on seats. From having Cohen tour the globe ‘as Borat’, to cutting a wildly amusing trailer, they’ve done a wonderful job at marketing this thing.
Not to say the film itself isn’t funny – it is; in fact it’s very funny. It’s not the character himself who gets the laughs per se, but more so the situations he gets himself into.
In the pic, the fictional Kazakh journalist heads to America. He’s supposedly there to
File a story on the ‘greatest country in the world’ – which is a cue for a sequence of embellished and droll cultural differences – but ends up falling in love with a woman he catches on TV, Pamela Anderson. It’s then that he decides to head to California to wed the ‘Baywatch’ babe’.
There are moments in the film that will truly having you busting a gut. A couple of scenes in particular – one involving a repugnantly overweight man, completely buck naked, wrestling with Borat – made me laugh so much I almost vomited. Now that’s a quote you want a poster, right?
Now that the joke’s out of the bag, and people will know who Borat is when they see him coming– this time, many took him for a real foreign journalist– a sequel’s going to be a tough trick to pull off. Not that they won’t try.
(The Preview disc we were sent did not include the extras of the DVD, sorry – so can’t tell you anything about the extra supplements).
Rating : 
Reviewer : Clint Morris
