Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

You've seen the clips, you've heard the raves, you've followed the debates. What you want to know now: Is Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan a good time? Is it actually funny? Yes, J Hoberman establishes right off in the Voice: "[T]he audience with whom I saw the movie wasn't laughing so much as howling." Then come the various anecdotes and so forth - and then:

As sociologist John Murray Cuddihy notes in The Ordeal of Civility, his classic account of newly enlightened Jewish thinkers assimilated into the modern world, Marx, Freud, and Claude Lévi-Strauss were all similarly obsessed with "the raw, the coarse, the vulgar, the naked" and exposing the way in which these things were sublimated by the civil "niceness" of Western culture. So too, Borat (who might add the superstitious, the stupid, the sexist, and the xenophobic to that list).

Indeed, the man who invented Borat is a masterful improviser, brilliant comedian, courageous political satirist, and genuinely experimental film artist. Borat makes you laugh but [Sacha] Baron Cohen forces you to think.

Updated through 11/5.

"[I]t's the rare and elusive film that makes me laugh so hard I snort Diet Coke out of my nose," declares the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Cheryl Eddy. As for Fox halving the number of theaters for Borat's opening, "Apparently, someone's worried that America can't take a joke - a notion that, if proven correct, is indisputable evidence that we're even more fucked up than we thought." Interesting parenthetical throwaway in there, too: "[T]he closest comparison [to Baron Cohen] I can think of is Paul Reubens in Pee-wee's Big Adventure - another road trip movie about a guy in a really awful gray suit."

The Philadelphia Weekly's Sean Burns calls the film "most appalling and original comedy in years - if not decades... The movie has a little something to offend everybody... and believe it or not, it's on the side of the angels."

Why does the film "feel so lazy?" wonders Ed Gonzalez, breaking away from the pack at the House Next Door. "For one thing, it fails to substantiate its unwieldy title."

Anthony Lane just doesn't get it, argues Eric Kohn, though, of course, this would not be the first time.

Online viewing, listening and reading tip. Matt Singer talks with Borat for IFC News, Alison Willmore has mixed feelings about the film, Singer and Willmore talk about it and about Volver and write reviews of both as well.

Online viewing tip. Borat on CNN. Video at Crooks and Liars.

Earlier: David Edelstein in New York, Helene A Aasen and Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, Alf Garnett and Sukhdev Sandhu in the Telegraph, Nick Schager in Slant.

Updates, 11/2: "On my laff-o-meter, it registered a solid 'very funny'," writes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly.

Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix: "Although I knew it was dishonest, cynical, and the ultimate in cheap-shot humor, I laughed more at Borat than at any other film this year. So I guess the joke is on me."

Armond White makes one good point in the New York Press: "Cohen doesn't dare risk offending the markets where his checks are signed." But the rest is all "He's down there in the pits with Andy Kaufman and Neil LaBute, flashing crassness as entertainment," and that sort of thing.

"There is no question that I laughed as much (and as loudly) at Borat as at any film of the several thousand I've seen in my life," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "Does that make Borat the funniest movie ever? Probably not. It's possible, even probable, that I laugh more at, say, Hot Shots! Part Deux than at Ninotchka or any other great romantic comedy. There is a certain kind of humor that provokes laughs louder, more uncontrollable, and more infectious than some other kinds that are just as funny (or funnier) in a softer way."

Yes, it's a comedy, confirms Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper, "But it's also the most outlandish studio-funded conceptual prank since Gus Van Sant's Psycho, a nonstop mindfuck that turns the documentary form, not to mention traditional setup-punch line comedy, inside out."

The film "can teach Americans a thing or two about gross-out comedy and how political incorrectness works when done with pinpoint perfection," writes Steve Ramos in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Adam Doster for In These Times: "Borat examines how the anti-Semitism, racism, sexism and homophobia of Westerners are perpetuated, often through conformity rather than hatred.... As conceived by Baron Cohen, Borat's behavior pointedly calls attention to the cruel realities of American's divisive social relations and ignorance of other cultures.... While Baron Cohen originally set out to satirize bigotry, the comedian unintentionally ended up highlighting the emptiness of the Bush administration's foreign policy rhetoric.... How can Bush disregard the major tenets of democracy when discussing the 'free nation' of Kazakhstan? Simply put, the squashed Kazakh democracy is in the administration's best political interest. Yet with no engagement around these issues, the Bush administration appears insincere in its calls for 'democratization.'"

Eric Kohn for the Reeler: "Validating the closet racist's worst nightmare, he reveals that the biggest monsters aren't overseas - they're hidden in plain sight, shielded by the exclusive dogma of American aristocracy and rampant xenophobia. Cultural learnings, indeed."

"Over the last few weeks, journalists have descended on Kazakhstan," reports Ilan Greenberg in Slate. "Their assignment: Find Borat-like people in Kazakhstan or, failing that, find Borat-like things in Kazakh culture.... This hunt for a phantom movie character is amusing, but it also strikes a nerve."

Updates, 11/3: "[I]t seems instructive to note how discussions of Borat, including the sympathetic and the suspicious, often circle over to the issue of Mr. Baron Cohen's own identity," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Commentators often imply that Borat wouldn't be funny if Mr Baron Cohen were not Jewish, which is kind of like saying that Dave Chappelle wouldn't be funny if he were not black. For these performers, the existential and material givens of growing up as a Jew in Britain and as a black man in America provide not only an apparently limitless source of fertile comic material, but they are also inseparable from their humor. But no worries: Borat makes poop jokes and carries a squawking chicken around in a suitcase."

"They botched the joke," argues Ron Rosenbaum in Slate. "What happened? If you ask me, it was the double-Larry whammy - the heavy hand of director Larry Charles (best known as a Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm director), the guy who managed to turn Bob Dylan's appealingly elusive persona into a leaden, ham-handed, phony-profound parody of itself in the awful Masked and Anonymous. I don't know how much Charles was personally responsible for turning Borat's subtle touch into lead-pipe gag-worthiness (in both senses of the word), but the parallel is suggestive."

Updates, 11/4: This movie really seems to have struck a nerve with the Slate constituency. The most recent additions: Eric Weiner, who's recently adopted a baby girl from Kazakhstan, offers "a rundown of the many things Borat gets wrong about Kazakhstan, and the few things that he gets right." And Jody Rosen argues that "Borat is a throwback to the crudest kind of vaudevillian ethnic burlesque, the stuff that we thought was smoothed out of pop culture long ago. The essence of Borat's act is the same as the dialect comics of 1910: the slapstick story of a greenhorn immigrant, bumbling his way across America, mangling the English language, misapprehending the native customs, and looking ridiculous in a big cowboy hat." What's more, "There are precedents... for 'Throw the Jew Down the Well,' an anti-Semitic song bellowed heartily by a Jew."

"[S]creamingly, hysterically, laugh-through-the-next-joke, laugh-for-the-next-week funny," writes Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. "It's so inventive, so rich with comic moments, so outrageous, so shocking and unexpected, and so blithely willing to be offensive that it consistently leaves viewers off balance - and howling. This is a film by an original and significant comic intelligence."

Steve Erickson for Gay City News: "I'm not sure that Borat adds up to brilliant satire, rather than a scattershot but highly effective series of jabs. Still, it makes its points without succumbing to the blandness that all too often accompanies good intentions. It may be glorified television shot on extremely low-grade video, but it's a great deal more entertaining than most would-be cinematic American comedies."

FishBowlNY rounds up more linkage.

Updates, 11/5: Finlay Mackay in the NYT Magazine: Borat goes to Hollywood.

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek finds in the film "a pure example of the way good satire can never be clean, either for the perpetrator or for the viewer."

"There are plenty of Jews in comedy, but how many keep strictly kosher and won't use a phone on the Sabbath?" Devin Gordon profiles Baron Cohen. Also in Newsweek, David Ansen: "I haven't laughed so hard in a movie since the world's fattest man reached for an after-dinner mint in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.... Borat paints a portrait of the American subconscious that would give you nightmares - if you weren't laughing so hard."

Annie Wagner in the Stranger: "It's hairy, balls-out humor—but behind the seemingly random spray of political incorrectness, it's very carefully calibrated."

Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman: "Baron Cohen is such a kamikaze performer that he whips up a taste not just for the tears of the clown, but for his bruises and broken bones, too."

Ray Pride at Movie City Indie: "No, it's funnier, much funnier than you've heard, no matter what you've heard."

"I know there will be purists out there questioning my labeling of the film as a documentary, but I think the distinction is true enough," writes Tom Hall: "What makes Borat such a loaded comedy is that no matter when you laugh, and you will, it will always be for the wrong reasons. The hope is that maybe, just maybe, the joke sinks in and we all realize that it's on us because frankly, if we weren't laughing, we'd probably want to cry."

Borat has "made glorious returns at the box office, surprising Hollywood with a #1 debut." $26.4 million. David Germain reports for the AP.

Posted by dwhudson at November 1, 2006 3:49 AM