The full title of the new Ali G or Sacha Baron Cohen film is BORAT!  CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION FOR KAZAKSTAN.  Not only is the title outrageously long and almost impossible to remember unless repeated a dozen times, the broken English
will almost guarantee that no one will get the full title correct.

The spirit of the title is captured consistently throughout the film, arguably the most blatantly deliberately offensive but also perhaps the funniest film of 2006.  Already, the film had critics rolling in the aisles and dishing out rave reviews during Cannes and the Toronto International Film Festival.

The film begins, just like the BORAT segments on the ALI G Show with the standard Borat Sagdiyev (Cohen) greeting “Jagshemash! My name BORAT!” BORAT is a TV reporter from Kazakhstan sent to the U.S. to make a documentary and thus learn more for his country.  In his travels, done road trip style, he, and producer Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian) get detoured to California.  BORAT had seen a video of Pamela Anderson and decides to go there to marry her (with the help of a wedding sack).  “She has teeth as white as pearl and ***censored*** of a 7-year old,” he quips.

BORAT appropriately parodies MIDNIGHT COWBOY format at the start.  BORAT, like the Jon Voight character of Joe Buck, starts off in New York City then heads for warmer weather down south.  The famous Nilsson song “Everybody’s Talking” is heard on the soundtrack as BORAT roams the streets of the Big Apple.

For a film based on a series of sketches or make believe interviews, the writers (Cohen one of them and Todd Phillips too, of ROAD TRIP) go to great lengths of linking the parts together.  From getting lost in a black ghetto, Borat learns street talk.  He uses it, gets in trouble getting entry to a hotel and end up at a Bed and Breakfast.  The film is consistent in its absurdities and offensiveness.  Being part Jew (his father was Welsh and mother Israeli), Cohen figures this gives him full license to dish out the most offensive anti-Semitic jokes.  From the ‘running of the Jew’ at the film start (which includes an outrageous segment of kids destroying a Jew egg) to the insulted Jewish owner couple of the Bed and Breakfast, the jokes are bitingly funny.  To add a bit to morality – odd for a film that pokes fun at everything else – the script has his Kazakhstani wife passed on, in order for him to guiltlessly pursue his dream girl, Pamela Anderson. 

Almost no group emerges unscathed in the film.  Women, homosexuals, rednecks and high society are all given their fair share of insults.  Surprisingly, the film has a moral message (the search for finding real beauty) thrown in as well which thankfully, is dished out effectively (short and sweet) at the end.  But in all the American encounters, the film reveals and puts down some real prejudices of certain groups.  A pretentious white southern socialite dinner ending with the arrival of Borat’s black date and a redneck’s comment at a rodeo that all homosexuals should be locked up show that there is more hidden prejudices and racism than meets the eye.

The BORAT segments and the rest of the Ali G Show drew on interviews with important people who did not realize their legs getting pulled.  In BORAT! the movie, most of these are staged and it is hard to tell which are authentic.  But it really does not matter whether the filmmakers cheat on the initial premise.  The film still comes across as one of the most hilarious films of the year.