Borat movie a brilliant satire and laugh out loud comedy

I saw the Borat movie last night - it had to be the funniest movie I've seen in five years. It is a brilliant satire on a lot of different levels. And it's a comedy, so you have to take some, if not all of the comments with a grain of salt (e.g., Cohen gets a lot of regular American people to expose some of the most bigoted, racial, anti-Semitic, homophobic things you'll ever cringe at). Thus, there are definitely some scenes that you will feel bad about laughing at and others you will just sit and watch in stunned silence, but the situational humor is unlike anything that I have ever seen. As George Carlin says in his opening bit, "if I haven't offended all of you at least once by the time I'm done, I haven't done my job." So, unlike at least four of the people whose faces upon leaving told me that they were not ready for this movie, be prepared to be offended at some things, if not more than some things. Overall, the movie is laugh out loud funny. If you don't like satires like Dogma, you probably won't like this movie either, so don't complain if you go to see it and are then disappointed.

In my rankings of all-time movie comedies, some of them include Austin Powers, Dumb and Dumber, Meet the Parents, Major League, Old School, and Road Trip, to name a few - Borat certainly falls within the top ten or fifteen. There's nothing so great about it that justifies seeing it in the theater (as compared to an action movie), but if you just need 82 minutes of solid laughter, this movie is for you. I can't wait to see the uncut DVD version just to see what got edited out.

Also, thank god I didn't go to the University of South Carolina. What a bunch of tools. Way to represent your Chi Psi fraternity, clowns. Idiots. Damage Control my ass. I'm sure that their contractual releases are legally gold (i.e., untouchable), so good luck with your fraudulent inducement defense.

Update: The Chi Psi frat suit has commenced; my two cents about it can be found here.

Funniest scenes: the chicken escaping on the subway and the bear growling at the kids running up to their ice cream van. And the bear head in the fridge was funny too (esp. given the context that it was shown after Borat was told that the bear ran away).

Here are a couple of reviews that give fairly representative reviews:
Ty Burr, Kazakh it to me, Boston Globe, Nov. 3, 2006.
Joel Siegel, Review: 'Borat' -- Offensive, Juvenile and Very, Very Funny, Nov. 3, 2006.

This one, not so much: Edward Douglas, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Oct. 26, 2006.

Tags: borat review, borat