Yeshemaash! My name ah Borat..

So begins one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. No, not the funniest I’ve seen and certainly not the funniest movie ever, like some critics said. Christmas Vacation, Spaceballs, Wayne’s World, Anchorman…all are funnier than Borat. But, still it was an unbelievably hysterical movie.

Well, I know that at least two people are waiting to hear what I really think. Mom and Dad, I cannot believe you sat through that movie. You walked out of American Pie!

Anyway, all sorts of adjectives could be used to describe Borat-shocking, hilarious, genius, outlandish, obscene, unrelenting, disturbing, disgusting, side-splitting, alarming…prophetic?

Let’s talk about what a prophet does. In the Old Testament sense. Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, all of ‘em. Their job was to say, “Hey, Idiots, you’re not getting it!”
And that’s exactly the point of Borat. This guy comes to America to learn about American culture and values; instead, he found New Yorkers too afraid of each other to greet another human being, car dealers who don’t blink an eye at the term “p*&^y magnet” (“That would be a corvette” says the industrious salesman), a southern pastor who all but ran away at the site of a black escort (something about eating with prostitutes comes to mind but I don’t know why), worshippers who are so passionate about their own evangelical experience that they walk over a homeless man on their way to church, and a young man who thinks the nation would be a much better place if slavery was reinstated. The film maker, Sasha Baron Cohen, takes one look at what America says is important and shakes his prophetic fist.

Alright, I might be reading more into this than I should. It’s just a movie, a comedy. It’s goal was to make us laugh and it made us howl. But like Lavarr Burton used to say, don’t take my word for it. Go see it. You will laugh the whole time. But, be warned…Borat includes the most outrageous, disgusting, disturbing, and so-bad-you-feel-horrible-for-laughing-but-you-will-laugh moment ever made. You’ll know it when it starts and you might want to close your eyes…

Peace, B