Meet my sister, she nice (Borat (DVD))

Member Name: freediveheaven

Product:	Borat (DVD)
Date:	20/10/08 (246 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some very funny moments

Disadvantages: Does not transfer fully to big screen

The other night I was at a loose end and so decided to give this film a second chance as some comedies can be better the second time round as you get to see jokes or nuances that you missed the first time around when you were focusing maybe on the plot too much or were watching a film that you had high expectations of only to be disappointed. For me comedies like Caddyshack and The Blues Brothers both fit into this category, films that were much better the second and third time around and I hoped that Borat would maybe fall into this category however unfortunately it did not and so the DVD is likely to be collecting dust for the foreseeable future in the FDH house.

For those who have been making like Osama and living in a cave for the past few years Borat is the comic creation of Sacha Baron Cohen who also bought us Ali G and Bruno the camp Austrian fashion reporter. Borat is from Kazakhstan and was originally a TV character who appeared in a number of sketches visiting the United States in order to find out about the culture of the country and to report back to his people, as a short sketch it relies on people believing totally in his character and then he uses this trust to push the boundaries either to shock with his own antics or to get them to say things on camera that would shock the viewer, in particular Borat has strong anti Semitic views (the inside joke being Cohen own faith is Jewish) and one of his best known sketches was the time he sang an anti Jewish song to a group of redneck cowboys in a country and western bar and got them to enthusiastically join in with the chorus.

The film follows the same format, it opens with his showing the camera team around his village in Kazakhstan (actually filmed in a Romanian village) with many of the jokes borrowed from his TV show, and then he learns that along with his producer Azamat Bagatov, played by Ken Davitian, he is off to America to send reports back to his country. While in New York he sees Pamela Anderson on TV in her Baywatch role and falls instantly in love and tricks Azamat to agree to travel across America to California to discover the real America. From that point the film takes on a comedy road trip style with lots of stop offs along the way for Borat to interview unsuspecting middle America.

In my opinion this film fails to transfer the qualities of the small screen sketches featuring Borat into a feature film package. On the plus side the film does have a wider range of comedy genres to it, there are the face to face interviews that you would expect with Borat based around deception and the fact that the interviewee is in the dark, there is also a lot of slapstick in the film including the now famous naked fight scene in the hotel room and finally there are the quick fire visual gags like the one where Borat is seen urinating in a river and as the camera pans out you see Azamat washing his face a yard down stream.

Some of the humour is quite puerile and some of it is delivered entirely for shock value and in that it borrows from the "gross out" humour style of the Farelly brothers. The problem is that the humour does not work all of the time and certainly some of the interviews fall flat. I'm not convinced that they got the balance right in this film, for me Borat is funniest when he is sat in front of someone and can develop the joke over the course of the interview, in some cases the interviews scenes were little more than one liners, maybe they failed to get enough material from the rest of the interview or maybe he was rumbled, this you do not see on camera so what you get is only half a serving and as such you are left wanting a bit more. Some of the humour is too structured and predictable for me

Some of the comedy is classic Borat and works really well, the rodeo scene is excellent and you have to admire the sheer bravery of a comic who is prepared to stand up in front of a group of cowboys and insult their national anthem with his own hilarious anthem of Kazakhstan, indeed on the extras they actually show the news reporting of the event and how completely the stations fell for the joke. His send up of the feminists also works well although again this is not really original material which is one of the problems with the film; you have seen a lot of it before.

Overall I reckon I did laugh a bit more second time around, I certainly identified some extra humour and appreciated the film more, Davitian as Aramat was excellent and Cohen himself must be applauded for both his bravery and comic genius. In the commentary they reveal that the running battle which they fight naked through a hotel was actually shot in three different hotels as they kept getting ejected as they shot the scene.

The extras are the usual offering of language choices and some commentary along with trailers for the film however it is the censored clips that are the only thing worth watching and all these do is to remind you of how best the Borat format works, short five minute sketches that have a stand alone quality. The final sketch of Borat own version of Baywatch is a great visual gag while there are some great interview sketches which I'm surprised did not make the final cut into the film itself.

This is not a total turkey of a film however it is similar to other attempts to take a TV comedy show character onto the large screen in that it fails to deliver the same consistency of performance throughout the entire length of the film, the humour is of an adult nature and will offend some people but then that is what makes it funny to people like me. Sending up bigots, racists and the pompous is always good humour in my opinion and I would love to see him develop another character able to send up the BNP and feminist groups in this country.

If you want to buy the DVD then it is available on Amazon for £4.98 new and from £2.10 in the new and used section. Personally I would advise borrowing a copy from your mates and watching it a couple of times.

Thanks for reading and rating my review.

Summary: Comedy that you hope will be better