The new Borat movie, “BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM” has been released on Amazon, included in their Amazon Prime package. I enjoyed the original movie: it was absurd, and it was hillarious to me at 25 years old in 2006. I think I fit perfectly into the target demographic.
This new movie, however, just didn’t strike me as all that funny. Instead, we mostly saw a very powerful media star picking on random, anonymous, people in rural USA. Repeatedly, Borat behaved in literally disgusting ways to “ordinary” Americans, while their reactions were filmed and broadcast globally. These ordinary Americans were both the butt of the jokes, and the victims of the movie – yet throughout, these victims were remarkably polite.
The late, great, Christopher Hitchens wrote a review of the 2006 Borat movie, and, although Hitchens passed away almost ten years ago, his review is perfectly applicable to this just-released movie:
Oh, come on. Among the “cultural learnings of America for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan” is the discovery that Americans are almost pedantic in their hospitality and politesse. At a formal dinner in Birmingham, Ala., the guests discuss Borat while he’s out of the room—filling a bag with ordure in order to bring it back to the table, as it happens—and agree what a nice young American he might make. And this is after he has called one guest a retard and grossly insulted the wife of another (and remember, it’s “Americana” that is “crass”). The tony hostess even takes him and his bag of shit upstairs and demonstrates the uses not just of the water closet but also of the toilet paper. The arrival of a mountainous black hooker does admittedly put an end to the evening, but if a swarthy stranger had pulled any of the foregoing at a liberal dinner party in England, I wouldn’t give much for his chances. “The violence that Borat encounters on the New York subway after trying to greet male strangers with kisses is frighteningly real,” writes Gilbey, who either doesn’t use the London Underground very much or else has a very low standard for mayhem.
Kazakh Like Me
Updated to add: This tweet by @DonTravlos is also 100% spot-on:
