Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Directed by Larry Charles
Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev travels to America to make a documentary. As he zigzags across the nation, Borat meets real people in real situations with hysterical consequences. His backwards behavior generates strong reactions around him exposing prejudices and hypocrisies in American culture.
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13 films that influenced this film
What critics say influenced Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Cohen is being compared to Peter Sellers, and in a way Borat is reminiscent of Sellers' Bakshi in The Party, a disruptive Other presence, but Blake Edwards' picture was bracingly inclusive (low gags and sophisticated slapstick, foreigners and natives, Hollywood classicism and hippie openness -- hey, this was '68) where Cohen's transgressive humor is pettily divisive.
The idea in a nutshell is a cross between Joseph McGrath's The Magic Christian (1969) and Allen Funt's Candid Camera TV series.
Borat is first glimpsed in his Slavic homeland, guiding the camera through a cheery tour of his inbred, cretinous, raping, whoring nation, practically a send-up of an Emir Kusturica circus (a musical cue from Time of the Gypsies clinches the deal later on); a documentary is being made, so Borat is sent to America with producer Azamat (Ken Davitian) by his side.
Borat leaves his ramshackle home village of Kuczek (actually a Romanian gypsy village) in a horse-drawn Yugo and soon lands in the middle of Times Square, attended by Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’”, a coy Midnight Cowboy reference suggestive of the type of cultural and especially sexual moré-shattering to come.
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As for the whole "funniest film of all time" tag, it's the old Andrew-Sarris-at-The Producers bit, laughter drowned by hype.
It's kind of like what Jackass would be if Johnny Knoxville and his boys had the brainpower necessary to become master satirists.
In fact, a great deal of Borat feels like Jackass with an agenda.
Without the exhilarating mix of high and low culture, and the real, unsuspecting interviewees that characterized Da Ali G Show, Cohen's daft youth reporter came off as just another clueless faux-black poser along the lines of Jamie Kennedy in Malibu's Most Wanted.
Director
Jay Roach
Critics compare Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan to 2 of Roach’s films.
Think of Peter Sellers in the original Pink Panther series or Mike Myers in the Austin Powers movies: comic performances so outsized they make the movie around them seem like mere decoration, an excuse for the character to exist.
Behind the veil of the film’s carefully guarded blueprint are director Larry Charles ("Masked and Anonymous") and producer Jay Roach (director on "Meet The Fockers").
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Certainly Andy Kaufman had a stellar career doing a similar character without resorting to racial epithets, and Eugene Hutz of New York band Gogol Bordello, an actual Eastern European, plays a similar cartoon character onstage–one slightly modified for Liev Schreiber’s “Everything Is Illuminated”–without it being so offensive.
Unlike the movie version of Ali G (Ali G Indahouse) which abandoned Ali G's formula in favor of a lame, scripted adventure; Borat sticks with what made the character so great to begin with, and only amps things up by wrapping Borat's short collisions with random Americans into a single cohesive story with plot-driving scenes shot using actors.
That Ali G Indahouse is ultimately revealed to be a cliched and somewhat tedious comedy doesn't come as much of a surprise, given the one-note nature of the character that inspired it.