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Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious
Nation of Kazakhstan
Movie review by Nick Olds



        Borat... is my new favorite movie ever.  I’ve seen it twice already and I’m adding it to my
DVD collection the day it comes out.  Scooch over Naked Lunch, The Monkees’ Head, Fear
& Loathing in Las Vegas, and My Girl (hmm, that’s kinda revealing).  Sacha Baron Cohen's
a genius.  While he's essentially reinvented Yakov Smirnoff's bit, the culture-clashed Russian
stumbling through America, Cohen is also a brilliant actor and his mannerisms are as
ridiculous as the jokes.  I haven’t belly-laughed this hard since I inhaled a fistful of
‘shrooms and saw God watching America’s Funniest Home Videos.
        And I wasn’t the only 18-25 year old laughing that hard, either.  The box office figures
speak for themselves and for the predominance of the South Park generation.  People my age
appreciate savage wit and a satiric race joke, an approach that recalls Lenny Bruce spouting
off as much offensive clatter as possible to show the bigots what they look like to sane human
beings.
        That's the underlying theme of Borat.  Sacha Baron Cohen is not just trying to make
people look dumb on camera by asking ridiculous questions about our most repressive and
infamous cultural aspects (dinner etiquette, Ebonics, cowboys, Christians, etc.).  He is exposing
the absurdities and hypocrisies of modern American culture while revealing how little some
Americans know about the rest of the world.  And it is astonishing that the barbaric Borat is
perceived as a believable representative of heavily Western influenced Kazakhstan.
        But that’s where Borat thrives.  Movies are inherently a crude and corrupt art for a crude
and corrupt world and today’s Hollywood hits (The Departed, Jackass 2, Saw 3 et al) are no
holds barred barometers for a world that doesn’t work the way we were taught in school nor
how our parents and teachers said it would.  This, in turn, has bred, especially in my gen-
eration, to increased cynicism.  And when cynicism is high, so is savageness of wit (The Daily
Show, South Park, Wonder Showzen).
         So in that sense alone, Borat is a perfect movie for these times and would have been
considered snuff porn in the Reagan-era.  But, as mentioned earlier, shock value is just a way
of revealing awful truths here.  Sounds a lot like Hunter S. Thompson, doesn’t it?  By showing
how mindless a lot of American culture can be, Baron Cohen holds us up to the world and
says "Hey look guys!  You're not missing out on anything in America!  Most of these people
are retarded.  So stop going to cowboy hoe-downs in Berlin and hip-hop shows in Tokyo."
        With that in mind, it’s difficult not to think of Sacha Baron Cohen as a legit journalist
(take that "Scud Stud").  So I'll reiterate my title question: is SBC the new HST?  Decide for
yourself, but just see it, if for no other reason than to ensure that SBC gets to makes more
movies.


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