Borat

So I finally saw Borat, and I was a bit underwhelmed.

I generally liked a lot of it, and there were times I laughed a lot, but maybe it was the hype, or the fact that the commercials had given away so many of the funny moments, but I thought I'd be a lot more entertained than I was.

I was also distracted throughout by the odd construction of the whole film. Basically it is just an excuse for the setpieces in which he acts oddly in front of "real" people, to capture their reaction to the character, his attitudes and his behavior. But many of these setpieces felt contrived, manipulated just to fit into the storyline, from the prostitute just happening to show up at the house, to the college kids just happening to drive by in an RV, to the whole obviously-fake Pamela Anderson sequence.

Even the framing device didn't hold together that well for me. The idea is supposed to be that they are going across America, filming this movie, so obviously they have a cameraman with them, but they never refer to him at all. When the producer leaves, and Borat is alone... clearly he's not alone.

I know, one isn't supposed to take anything here literally. But rather than get caught up in the story here, or the story-within-the-story, or the story-within-the-story-within-the-story, they just kept bumping heads a bit too much for me.

For whatever reason, I liked the very-similar-in-many-ways Jackass 2 much more. Maybe it's just me.

Still, I did laugh, and I had to keep shushing my wife, who was being too loudly outrageously amused.

Within a few days, the movie will have passed the $110 million barrier. Amazing.

I fear that we are doomed to see a lot of projects try to imitate its success, with greatly diminishing returns.