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Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) More at IMDbPro »

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507 out of 802 people found the following comment useful :-
The film has a hidden message, 2 June 2007

Author: MoseKatzer from Israel

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

1. It is important to know, that the film has two different layers. The first layer is the toilet humor that is spitted into the face of the movie-viewer. The film is made in the way, that the typical American doesn't understand the other layer of the film. The awards were given NOT for these toilet humor aspects.

2. There is a second layer of the film, which is only really understandable for a Jewish viewer. Because Borat Aka. Baron Cohen is a Jewish man, and he could put a lot of sensitive topics is the film, which things are heavily important for the Jewish minority in America, and for the Jews anywhere else around the world. The film has nothing to do with Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan just a metaphor for the Eastern European countries, where form most of the the American Jewish people are immigrated to America. Immigrated especially from Poland and Russia. That is why the titles are in the Cyrillic script, and that is why Borat speaks Polish words. The director shows everything with the Jewish eye. He wants to show that how primitive and uncouth brutes are East Europeans where the Jew lived in ghettos for centuries.

Beside this I think it was completely unethical to shoot the 'Kazak' scenes in the poor Romanian little village - whose inhabitants are one by one uneducated gypsies. It is a kind of racism, what the film-makers do with them. For example it was unethical to attach a brutal sex toy to the end of the amputated arm of a inhabitant, because it's obvious, that he doesn't even know what is was. It is not an ethical way of proving how uncouth are these people. Maybe it just shows that how uncouth are the film-makers, and even those, who laugh at these situations. The film director knows, that these poor men will realize too late, what happened to them, and even after it they hasn't got the ability to give a reply, or start lawsuit against the film makers. It's also unethical because Gypsies are a minority in Romania, just like the Jews. For me, it is just a little bit making fool of the Jews who lived in similar conditions in the Eastern European Ghettos in the past times.

The other half of the film is just showing that (from the Jewish point of view) the American people are not superior that the people in the Eastern European countries. Just wants to show, that how uncouth, uneducated, primitive and racist are the American people. That's why the Jewish people mustn't forget that although America looks like a friendly country for them, but be aware, that it is just the surface. They are in the deep just as anti-Semitic as all other countries in the world, where the Jews lived in Diaspora. (Many countries – including the countries in Eastern Europe, Spain, England, or the Roman Empire.) Southern people, republicans, and Christianity are perfectly acceptable hate targets in American movies. Yes, the film-makers want to show the blood thirsty and racist Texas, the stupid feminists, the primitive American Christian fundamentalist, the Racist American student. – As the director sees them. The film also wants to show oneself a kind of documentary, and wants to pass a sentence on these people, to dishonest them, to make fool of them, to destroy them in the real life too. Many people misunderstand the bread& breakfast scene. It is not anti-Semitic. For the Jewish people it is obvious, that this scene just wants to make fool of the people, who are afraid of Jews. The cock-roach scene (when the Jews turn into cock-roaches) is reference to the Nazi propaganda movies, where the Jews are often represented by cock-roaches or rats as metaphors. The film is invokes the ancestral anxiety and phobia of the Jewish people living in America, including those anxiety, who are in the film-industry, or in the film-critics. I think these people are the most deceived. Cohen makes a false representation of America, which seems like a genial unmasking for him. I think, it is not a genial unmasking. Yes, Cohen wants to show, that that Americans are anti-Semitic. But in my opinion, all the anti-Semitism came out of Cohen's own antics rather than from his interviewees. He just managed to find some people from 300 million, to make fun with, and managed to put his phobias in their mouths.

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817 out of 1429 people found the following comment useful :-
I literally could not stop laughing., 20 March 2006

Author: xpanasonicyouthx from United States

And I mean the actual definition of "literally." I was lucky enough to catch an advanced screening and I wish I could see it 100 more times.

It's hilarious. It's offensive. It's actually pretty smart as well. Sacha Cohen is so ridiculously consistent and never seems to break character, even when he turns an entire rodeo against him in less than 5 minutes.

I really don't want to speak anymore of the film, because part of the beauty of it is being surprised by what you see on the screen. I only hope they don't edit the hell out of it, because it really was a joy to see as it was.

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246 out of 337 people found the following comment useful :-
A Hilarious (and Much Needed) Assault on Decency, 13 November 2006

Author: brocksilvey from United States

Sacha Baron Cohen comes to America in the guise of Borat Sagdiyev and wreaks his own brand of Kazakhi havoc in this very very funny film.

In our age of uber-political correctness, "Borat" comes sweeping through like a brisk and refreshing wind, completely bounding over every cultural taboo we've erected around ourselves. Thus, no one is safe: Borat takes on Jews, blacks, gays, feminists, middle-Americans, religious fanatics, frat boys. The only weapon against the bumbling Borat is a sense of humour, which this movie shows most Americans painfully lack. Indeed, if there is any message to be had from "Borat" (and I'm not sure there is much of one, beyond its fascinating cultural experiments), it's that everyone needs to lighten up and not take themselves so seriously.

The image of Americans projected in this film varies from the heartwarming to the downright frightening. New Yorkers threaten Borat with physical violence when he approaches them on a subway. Feminists walk out on him when they find his views on women too much to tolerate. Folks out in the heartland commiserate with him over his hatred of gays and Jews; a gun shop owner even helps him pick out the best weapon for shooting Jewish people. A sweet Jewish couple give him a place to sleep, and bring him a homey meal (that is, before they turn into invading cockroaches). A group of manic Pentecosts help him find Jesus. An RV full of frat boys make complete asses of themselves by espousing their hopelessly ill-informed views on minorities in our country and the need to revert to slavery. The majority of people treat Borat in the condescending way of those who want to think of themselves as being culturally aware without really knowing anything at all about other cultures. These people become rude the second Borat offends their sense of propriety. On the other hand, the disenfranchised of America greet Borat with open arms, and we see a group of gays and a group of blacks interacting with him as if no cultural boundaries existed at all. The film's sweetest (and most unexpectedly so) moments come from Borat's befriending of a black prostitute.

Of course, this is a carefully crafted work of fiction, and Cohen only lets his audience see what he wants them to see. I would probably react much the same as many of the people in this film if this crazy-looking and sounding man appeared out of nowhere and began to antagonize me. But the movie does make Americans look like a bunch of awfully self-important, uptight stiffs, and I've been to enough places in this country and met enough people to realize that the way events play out in this film (even if they are manipulated or staged) probably come very close to the real thing.

Thank God for movies like "Borat." If nothing else, they remind us that our cultural boundaries only matter as much as we let them, and that all of the fears that govern political correctness are mostly ungrounded. After all, virtually every person in this film was offended at one point or another, and as far as I can tell, all of them lived to tell about it.

Grade: A

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280 out of 474 people found the following comment useful :-
Pass on By.., 16 November 2006
Author: (eclipseadmin@ca.rr.com) from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

From all the hype I was expecting an hilarious comedic masterpiece. Turned out to be Latka from Taxi does Jackass. Like all bad "comedy" or satire it drops to the lowest level, i.e crude sexual innuendo, bathroom humor, foul language, cheap laughs at the expense of others. There's some laughs in this, but they are strained and infrequent.This could have been a much better movie, but save for the few humorous moments, it relies on making fools of unsuspecting people for most of its laughs. This is its main flaw, and I found it uncomfortable to watch.Save your money. There's also nothing really original here. This is a DVD movie, and only when there's nothing else to rent....

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309 out of 540 people found the following comment useful :-
Don't even bother..., 2 January 2007

Author: compaq24 from Canada

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Primitive, stupid, unsophisticated, low budget clownery exploiting the fact that average Americans don't even know where Kazakhstan is. If Sacha Baron Cohen showed black Americans, for example, or Jews washing their face in a toilet or defecating in a plastic bag as something they normally do just because they belong to a certain ethnic group, he would be charged with hate crime and his movie would be banned even before anybody would be able to watch it.

It's hard to understand why this amateur video attracted so much attention rather than going straight to video without any comments. Don't even bother watching it. Total waste of time and money. If you wanna have fun, watch Mr. Bean instead...

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331 out of 584 people found the following comment useful :-
Cruel and exploitative, 12 November 2006

Author: Æthelred from Oakland, Calif., USA

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I have to admit I laughed as much as most other people in the packed theater. Still, immediately afterward I gave "Borat" a 4, because the comedy often was juvenile and tasteless in a way that wasn't funny. (There are plenty of movies I've enjoyed for their sophomoric humor because they were funny -- think back to "Airplane.") But sometimes it was funny, and I thought the meaner vignettes had to have been staged, with the victim knowingly playing the straight person.

After processing the movie overnight, however, and checking the excellent "Salon.com" article that reveals almost none of the gags were staged -- http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2006/11/10/guide_to_borat/ -- I reduced my rating to 1.

Two scenes are memorably cruel. In one, the Borat character takes advantage of a kind, elderly Jewish couple, bed-and-breakfast owners, pretending to go into an anti-Semitic panic on discovering they're Jewish. If they'd noticed his antics, they could have been deeply hurt. In the other, the Borat character mocks a pastor's wife as unattractive to her and her husband's face, comparing her unfavorably to two other women at a dinner table. It's vicious.

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366 out of 654 people found the following comment useful :-
Borat was a terrible film ...NOT!, 4 November 2006

Author: Flagrant-Baronessa from the kingdom of far, far away (Sweden)

Borat proves to be the Python of our generation.

I say this as a die-hard Monty Python fan – not because the humour is on the same level or follows the same guidelines (in fact, the common ground is here is that it follows no guidelines) – but because both comedy teams mask their sketches in a feature film, passing them off as a story when it becomes glaringly clear that the latter is an elaborate pretext under which to have outrageous, absurdist and side-splittingly fun in a series of genius gags.

Yet for all of Borat's subsequent disorganisation and warped narrative, we are first served a gorgeously condensed introduction to our character in his village in Kazakhstan. This segment was possibly the biggest crowd-pleaser in my theatre and perhaps rightly so, for I would call it the film's goldmine in terms of sheer laugh-out-loud humour. Here we are introduced to Borat's sister ("She is number-four prostitute in whole of Kazakhstan."), whom he kisses on the mouth, his main interests (ping-pong, sunbathing and "watch ladies make toilet") as well as a wide variety of hilarious native Kazakhs. Undoubtedly the success of the introduction stems from a combination of novelty and a culture shock.

Once the sprawling surge of Kazakhstani culture subsides, Borat flies to New York City to make a movie-film about the glorious US and A. The booming Russian ethnic score melts into Harry Nilsson's "Everybody's Talking' At Me" and the film gets ambitious: it spoofs Jon Voight's incongruous cowboy character walking down Manhattan in Midnight Cowboy (1969). This I found a pleasant surprise, but the referential spoofs end here and the rest is all Sascha Baron Cohen – and we couldn't be happier.

The second half of Borat is arguably less compelling. It is hard to tell why, for the humour remains consistently good and there is an almost exponential stupidity with our Borat character as the sets out to go to California to marry Pamela Anderson. I would not go as far as to say the novelty "wears off", but we are a little more settled now and Borat has found his safe footing. Next, however, the film totally floors whatever safeness you may have with one of the most unspeakably graphic hotel room scenes I have ever seen. I won't give anything away, but rest assured that some viewers (*males*) will watch in horrified silence while others will literally cramp up from laughing so violently. I belong more to the latter category.

As Borat travels through America, there is a wealth of juxtapositions to be found when he interacts with the people – members of the white house, television broadcasters, etiquette teachers, Christian fundamentalists and Jews – all offers layered hilarity and a consistent cloud of laughter kept hovering in the air. Sadly, it was not always directed toward Borat (but most of the time) but toward some truly idiotic hick Americans. When I was informed the film used many candid takes, I can only hope the unreasonably creepy Jesus convention was *not* one of them.

In conclusion, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)" is a towering comedy achievement. It is apparent that Sascha Baron Cohen has done something truly cool here and has created an anti-semitic, misogynist and bigoted character that aptly embodies all racy taboos. As an actor he is unmistakably brave and uninhibited, which makes it easy for the film to lose itself in a tornado of gags, spoofs, bizarre one-liners and graphic jokes. The most fun I've had in a theatre since...forever!!!

9 out of 10

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290 out of 519 people found the following comment useful :-
worst movie ever, 26 November 2006

Author: alicatluvsjd from Canada

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I went to this movie thinking it would be funny, but it was disgusting. it tried to make jokes about different races and sexism but took it way too far. Calling Jews cockroaches and monsters that lay eggs, and making fun of rape victims. Showing some naked obese guy humping Borat's face, and showing a close up of his sons dick, is taking it too far. This was a waste of film. If this had been rated higher it would have made more sense, but it was 14A, so little kids can see this. i know some people for whatever reason thought this was great, and will probably reply by telling me I'm taking it too seriously, but i think parents should be warned before they let their kids watch this.

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124 out of 189 people found the following comment useful :-
An Appalling Masterpiece, 3 March 2007

Author: mjstellman from An Anglo In Italy

The laughter is genuine even when I was appalled at what I was laughing at. Is Sacha Baron Cohen a genius of sorts or the biggest smart ass to hit the screens in a long, very long time? He makes John Waters appear like an (old) Disney product. The nastiness works because it is immediately recognizable and his targets live next door if not with me between my four walls. It is a social-horror-documentary. The three guys talking about women between beer and beer was so horribly real that I wanted to leave the theater laughing and screaming at the same time. Borat is not tender about his own background either. He is an equal opportunity offender if I ever saw one. The world is a cesspool and nobody is immune. Even his innocence is corrupt. I've been considering seeing it again, as the whole thing in one single disgusting lump was too much to take but I'm not sure I want to. I'll wait for the DVD where I'll be able to select and discard. My only question is now, what will Sacha Baron Cohen do for an encore.

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238 out of 417 people found the following comment useful :-
R for pervasive, strong, crude and sexual content, boring!, 18 November 2006

Author: spankmepink from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

R for pervasive, strong, crude and sexual content, including graphic nudity, and language.

With his wide-eyed, pasted-on grin, thick mustache and loping Groucho Marx gait, Borat is a profane innocent with a will of steel, as earnest as he is devious, someone who is so much a product of his stridently politically incorrect culture that his actions are intended to make us question aspects of our own.

I was very disappointed with the movie. I had a few laughs, but it was not worth the money and i would never watch it again. I like him better just on "T.V.".

Most of "Borat" involves the man's journey to "the U.S. and A." with his producer, Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian). The trip begins in New York City and ends, after Borat falls in love with Pamela Anderson via old "Baywatch" episodes, with a cross-country drive to California in a dilapidated ice cream van.

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