I haven’t seen Borat yet but I’ve read over a dozen reviews of the movie, which makes me superbly appropriate to post a few comments about it.
1. The movie’s website is a work of genius. The site looks exactly like what you might expect from the Ministry of Information of Kazakhstan but, moreover, it looks like the best of what I’ve called, for a few years now, “dirty design.” The site, with its poorly rendered typefaces, flying flag, discombulated “controls” on the movie, flashing blue text, missing images, non-matching photos, bad grammar, and poor line breaks is a case study in web design done in the 1996 year of internet. Further, the HTML code sitting behind the site is equally bad and wonderful.
2. While I appreciate that no venal stone is left unturned and the film is non-stop funny-funny, I’m not sure what the true underlying politics are. (My semiotic theory studies are old and rotten at this point.) On the one hand, Borat could be seen as a tall-tale deriviative of Mr. Bush and his friends and colleagues. A confident boor and a collegial misanthropist, Borat could be said to represent the worst tendencies of the current Administration, the fierce inanity that directed the country to go to war because of hyped pretenses. Here, the sendup is aligned with the left, as Borat dismantles the monopoly of stupidity we have witnessed. On the other hand, Borat could be seen as a highly reactionary impulse, a schmuck who can be likened to someone in contemporary blackface that seems to think that insulting minorities (and everyone is a minority) is a right. By taking on the disguise of a less recognized Caucasian (and therefore legitimate) culture, Borat can smile at the inherent divisions created by our clouded social vision. In this case, he could be seen as a manly return of the repressed, a social revulsion by those in power who largely enjoy the class, religious, and ethnic divisions we experience daily.
3. The movie has received some criticism by various reviewers because news anchors and journalists have succombed to interviewing Borat in character. I tend to agree that news producers have no excuse for perpetuating free entertainment on their news programs. Their responsibility, unfortunately for them, is to present the news, the reality behind the screen, to the public. By interviewing “Borat,” they do a disservice to the field of journalism.
And so ends review of movie-film Borat in blog by man not seeing yet movie-film.