Shock and awesome. We are co-conspirators with Bruno when we know where he’s headed. Let’s keep Borat out of this.

Bruno (Sacha Baron Cohen) is an out-there-and-back Austrian fashion guru who flaunts his gay attitude and lifestyle. He wants to be the most famous Austrian in history, outranking Adolph Hitler. After his fashion show is cancelled and he is thrown out of Austria, Bruno decides to go to Los Angeles to become world famous.

Bruno takes his assistant Lutz (Gustaf Hammarsten) with him. Bruno’s calling card is his gay persona but he is oblivious to the fact that Americans want their gay celebrities and movie stars to be on the down-low. No matter how far we think we have come as a free, live-and-let-live society, we still want every gay male star to present himself just the way Rock Hudson did. Everyone wanted to believe Liberace was always looking for the right girl to replace his sainted mother.

Let’s review: Michael Jackson married twice only to make us happy.

It might scare the horses but anal bleaching, Brazilian waxes for both sexes, swingers clubs, and dildos are facts. (I cannot pass up the opportunity to also include in this list auto-erotic asphyxiation.) So are ministers who want to counsel gays to change through prayer, and trailer park people who go on talk shows for a trip to the hairdressers and free Target clothes. There is extra cash for (a) fighting and (b) showing breasts (if the women are obese the bonus rate is higher).

If you have a bizarre sex story and are missing front teeth, you are guaranteed a spot on The Jerry Springer Show. So why wouldn’t Bruno turn up with his black baby? Bruno has a lot of catching up to do. Trend-setter Madonna already has two. And what is wrong with naming a baby after O.J.? He got off scot-free for slicing up two people!

Cohen is the creator of a new comedy genre. He will probably be the master of this genre as few will have the nerve to follow his lead. Yet, there is nothing shown in BRUNO that does not take place in society. He’s just made it offensive.
He’s telling the truth and if you don’t like it, there is always Saudi Arabia’s solution, the powerful religious police, The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

The scene with a psychic, as Bruno attempts to contact his dead lover, is priceless but not original. We saw Demi Moore do that in GHOST!

The “wide public bathroom stance” and “foot tapping” of Larry Craig educated many of us. There is no need to disguise or hide this kind of widely practiced behavior. It’s out there and called “cottaging”.

Gay websites even have a state-by-state listing of the best public bathrooms for cottaging. Apparently, the one Craig used was ranked very high on the list!

Baron Cohen’s purpose is to ridicule our racist attitudes towards people we feel are poor, backward and uneducated (Borat) or gay (Bruno). He is merely presenting it to us in its most exaggerated and outrageous form.
Baron Cohen’s mockery would have been hailed by Oscar Wilde as brilliant.

Bruno suddenly comes to the realization that he needs to become (or appear to be) straight in order to achieve world famous status. He goes to a minister, a swinger’s club, and spends time learning how to kill small, defenseless animals with real men.

Here is the essential Baron Cohen oeuvre. We know that Bruno will eventually do something that not only shocks the outdoorsmen, but will make them mad. We are in on it. We are Bruno’s co-conspirators. So we are ready when Bruno wants to spend time with one of the men in his tent.

Director Larry Charles understands Bruno and his genius is knowing when to keep the camera running.

Baron Cohen might be preparing to marry his baby-momma but he really takes to the gay stuff with a zeal I approve of. He likes being naked and posing. It must be a gift. And, the dominatrix encounter. I’d say it was not his first time at the rodeo.

Baron Cohen’s skill is his total emersion in his roles. There is no winking in his characterization as Bruno. He’s committed to his craft just like Robert De Niro when he played Jake La Motta and Fearless Leader.

Released by: Twentieth Century Fox
Running time: 86 minutes / Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

When I was in college, back in the early 90′s, my roommate and I were assigned the abdicable task of showing a soon-to-be freshman around campus. He was a foreigner (from a country which shall remain nameless) and I was amazed at his misconceptions of what America was all about. For example, his idea of our Independence Day was a free day to do absolutely any disgusting or heinous act imaginable without suffering any of the consequences. To him, it was a twenty-four hour risk-free celebration of anarchy and debauchery, if you will. Needless to say, I knew I had to keep this guy close to me when he began his academics. At the very least, I saw a way to cure my constant boredom, but I truly felt that I needed to keep an eye on my friend to keep him out of his inevitable one-way-ticket introduction to the American prison system. Sadly, I haven’t thought of my foreign friend in over ten years (although I know he went on to Graduate School for a PhD in New England and returned to his homeland an academic hero), but I was immediately reminded of him when I put BORAT into my DVD player.

Sacha Baron Cohen has created a character, with his portrayal of Borat Sagdiyev, which has endless possibilities. While the film does have a storyline to follow, the majority of the movie relies on Cohen’s quick wit, allowing him to ad-lib against unsuspecting Americans who have no idea that the Borat character is just that… a character. Borat is a naive reporter from the country of Kazakhstan. That description alone has potential for comedy, but Cohen gives Borat undesirable personality traits, such as making him homophobic, misogynistic and a gigantic anti-Semite. He’s also horny way beyond medical textbook proportions. Thus, in my opinion, making him even funnier, and quite complex as a leading character.

BORAT is part road trip comedy and part fake documentary. It also uses hidden camera and inside joke pranks as elements. The closest films I could compare it to are SPINAL TAP and the two JACKASS films, but that still isn’t exactly accurate. I have to admit that I avoided the television show that Cohen developed the Borat character on, DA ALI G SHOW. I love British comedy. My two favorites Brit comics are Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson of THE YOUNG ONES and BOTTOM fame. They mix bloody violence and lowbrow comedy in ways that no American comic has ever touched upon. I just never had the time to catch Cohen’s television show on HBO. I still kept up with popular culture enough to know who played Borat and what the character was all about. I wondered if Cohen showed up somewhere while filming and was “called-out” on his false reporter character. The DVD has no commentary to let us in on that constituent.

I also realized that Borat could have easily been one of the endless rubes I’m forced to live my life with here in Marion County, Tennessee. In the film Borat receives toilet etiquette from people located in the state of Alabama for god’s sake… ALABAMA people! If you are not familiar with the dim-witted character of Borat, perhaps that gives you an idea.

BORAT’s plot is simple. Foreign reporter comes to America to do interviews for his local television show back in Kazakhstan. While visiting, he discovers Pamela Anderson on the television show Baywatch. He is convinced he must travel from New York to California, find her, marry her and bring her back to Kazakhstan. He purchases an ice cream truck for the epic trek across America and stops throughout to do interviews with people across this great country.

The pure genius of the movie is the never-ending people who don’t realize that the Borat character is fictional; much less that they are in a movie. Highlights include: a chicken escaping from Borat’s suitcase on a New York subway, Borat taking on three stuck-up feminists, our champion experiencing a driver’s education class, Borat mistaking a woman’s simple yard sale for a gypsy outpost, our hero making a total mockery of a local newscast in Jackson, Mississippi, and Borat, inadvertently, staying at a bed and breakfast run by Jews.

The Kazakh Government, for being a concoction of unfit repute and horrifying manners, endlessly picked this film apart. The opinion was retracted and the Kazakh Government eventually played it off like they were in on the joke and invited Cohen to visit their country. It just proves my point that people are way too uptight about FICTIONAL characters. Borat had to be from somewhere and besides, am I supposed to believe that Kazakhstan doesn’t contain one single idiot? This film was nominated for best original screenplay by the Academy, which was quite odd, seeing as how more than fifty per cent of the film was improvisational. Yet, I still pulled for it to win. Watching the film, I couldn’t help but wonder why Cohen wasn’t arrested or physically assaulted. The deleted scenes answered half of my questions on this respect.

I would love to see a sequel with the likeably naive character of Borat, but with all the remarkable publicity this film received and the magazine covers he’s appeared on, I don’t see how Cohen could appear in another film unrecognized. Maybe he could do a fake documentary strictly in his home country of Kazakhstan. He is, after all, the biggest thing to happen to that country since dysentery. Better yet, perhaps he could show up to my unfortunate hometown of Marion County, Tennessee and create the rest of a trilogy. God knows the locals could relate to the chicken in the suitcase and the cow in his living room. BORAT is highly recommended to absolutely ANY comedy fan.

The extras on the DVD are excellent and include deleted scenes that feature physical therapy by an unsuspecting male masseuse and Borat’s journey to a dog pound where he rudely asks the attendant what temperature the puppy must be cooked at for it to be safe for consumption. It also features a Baywatch spoof that has to be seen because it is not for literate descriptions.

Special Features:
Kazakhstan BAY WATCH spoof
5 Deleted scenes
The Best Of other deleted scenes compilation
Rodeo News Report
World Promotions Tour Featurette

Directed by: Larry Charles
Produced by: Sacha Baron Cohen and Jay Roach
Co-Produced by: Peter Baynham
Executive Produced by: Monica Levinson and Dan Mazer
Starring: Sacha Baron Cohen, Ken Davitian and Pamela Anderson
Screenplay by: Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, PeterBaynham and Dan Mazer
Story by: Sacha Baron Cohen, Peter Baynham, Anthony Hines and Todd Phillips
Music by: Erran Baron Cohen

20th Century Fox / One America / Everyman Pictures
R-Rated / 84 minutes

Evil comedy, a new genre, has arrived. The bar has been raised and is flying over everyone’s head.

It’s absurdly vulgar, so be warned. But if you want to laugh – in shock – from start to finish, this is the movie that will challenge future comedies as The New Template. See the flaccid SCHOOL FOR SCOUNDRELS, then see Sacha Baron Cohen’s pure portrayal of Kazakhstan’s TV host Borat Sagdiyev.

I do not know how Jews are going to feel about BORAT, but the Kazakhstan government is fighting back.

Before Borat travels to the U.S., he takes us on a tour of his village, proudly showing off his upscale Kazakhstan shack lifestyle…

…which has infuriated Kazakhstan and its president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev. Cohen’s film has been denounced by the Kazakh Embassy in Washington and led to the reports that Mr. Nazarbayev intended to complain about the film to President Bush on an official state visit. Kazakhstan has begun a TV (the ads are running on CNN) and newspaper campaign to show the country in a better light.

Kazakhstan will need Tom Cruise’s PR firm to offset BORAT’s “Running of the Jews,” the country’s national drink of horse urine, cheese made from Borat’s wife’s breast, state-ranked prostitutes, and the ultra-anti-Jewish sentiment of the country. And, Borat is fiercely homophobic, even though he cannot keep his hands, genitals, and mouth off other men.

Borat leaves his soon-to-be-deceased wife and the village rapist to travel to New York City with his producer, Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian in the star-making buddy role of 2006). Everyone Borat meets in New York City is horrified by him.

But it is the wrestling in the nude with Bagatov that you will never forget. Sure, Robert De Niro “inhabited” his “Raging Bull” character and so did Charlize Theron in MONSTER, but no one has committed himself so completely to a character like Cohen.

Why ruin it for you? Go see for yourself.

Borat sees a “Baywatch” rerun on TV and decides he will marry Pamela Anderson and take her forcibly back to Kazakhstan in a sack. This means he must go to Malibu. After talking Bagatov into his plan to interview real Americans, he buys an ice cream truck and they travel across America. You can see that not much of the road trip was staged.

BORAT has been cleverly written by Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham, and Don Mazer. We wait in anticipation: What will happen if Borat sees Pamela’s infamous sex tape?

The Americans Borat meets are real people. Cohen appears to have been roughed up several times by security men and probably had a lot of explaining to do afterwards. Especially when he attacks Anderson at a book signing.

It just goes to show how everyone wants to be in a movie – even when Borat goes to a gun store to buy a gun to protect himself “against Jews.”

How does Cohen get his footage? My husband got a call from a “British TV production team affiliated with the BBC” last year. (Their google credits were vague.) He wisely declined to be interviewed about séances but another friend, a parapsychologist, agreed. The production team did not want me at the filming after I went to the pre-interview meeting. I later suggested that my friend have them sign a letter confirming it was not Ali G who was coming over. The day of the filming, my friend faxed them a letter agreement. He should have waited since we are both Sacha Baron Cohen fans. They never turned up.

The outrageous behavior of Borat never lets up. He knows no boundaries. His honesty makes him likeable, as long as he doesn’t come to your house and want to use the toilet.

The character of Borat is so shocking (and Cohen never abandons the character) that you are not laughing at him or at what he says, you are just laughing at his profound ignorance. It is also evident that we are now so conditioned to politeness that it is the fearlessness of Cohen and his director, Larry Charles, which is so liberating. In its crude way, BORAT is providing a service, showing how idiotic cultural stereotyping can be.

Credits:
Director: Larry Charles
Screenwriters: Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham, Don Mazer
Producers: Sacha Baron Cohen, Jay Roach
Executive producers: Dan Mazer, Monica Levinson
Director of photography: Anthony Hardwick, Luke Geissbuhler
Production designer: David Maturana
Costumes: Jason Alper
Music: Erran Baron Cohen
Editors: Peter Teschner, James Thomas

Cast:
Borat Sagdiyev: Sacha Baron Cohen
Herself: Pamela Anderson
Azamat Bagatov: Ken Davitian

Sony Pictures Entertainment / Columbia Pictures presents in association with Relativity Media
an Apatow Co. / Mosaic Media Group production
MPAA rating PG-13 / Running time — 107 minutes

QUOTE: Product Prostitution. Disgraceful product placement everywhere with an Applebee’s commercial smack in the middle. Ferrell has product names written on his forehead. And, it’s a bore.

The NASCAR phenomenon is known for having zealot fans and product placement all over the cars and driver’s suits. The cost of the sport demands heavy sponsorship. Okay, but did this production really need to place Coca-Cola prominently in every scene? The dialogue was written solely to name products. I give up. This is product prostitution.

Will Ferrell is invincible. As long as he stays out-of-shape and runs around in his underwear, he will have a career. But Ferrell desperately wants to be a serious actor – he’ll be doing Shakespeare in the Park soon. I know he wants an on-screen love scene with a twenty-year old.

RICKY BOBBY is a TV commercial masquerading as a movie. Ricky “Applebee’s Spokesman” Bobby (Ferrell) is a selfish race-car driver with a too-loyal gay friend, Cal (John C. Reilly), who constantly expresses his love for his childhood friend. Cal has no life outside of being a loyal mascot. These two have a very unfunny motto – “Shake and Bake.” Even though Cal is a member of Ricky’s team, he is never allowed to win a race. He is only there to support blowhard Ricky.

Ricky does have a well-written family. His kids (Houston Tumlin and Grayson Russell) are terrific demons with filthy mouths. They were the funniest part of the movie. The rest of the movie is a dud. I never laughed. Ricky’s wife Carley (Leslie Bibb) and his father-in-law are perfectly cast. His mother is played by Jane Lynch, who made her character in THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN so memorable.

Someone should write a movie for Jane Lynch.

When Formula One driver Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen) turns up to challenge him, Ricky feels the Euro-pressure and cracks up on the field. The only clever moment is the “invisible” fire of Ricky’s defeat. He wakes up to find himself paralyzed. It’s a fake paralysis and Rickey’s crew chief, Lucius Washington (Michael Clarke Duncan), along with Cal, try to help him get back into any car. Refusing to get behind a wheel and settled into delivering pizzas, Cal goes off with his sensible trophy-wife Carley. It takes Ricky’s good-for-nothing, long-lost father Reese (Gary Cole) to bring homespun Southern kick-ass training he certainly never used to redeem the man and heal the family at Applebee’s.

Gary Cole takes his small part and kicks the movie into high gear, but it is Cohen who really showcases a reckless comedic appeal. Yes, I’m waiting for Cohen’s “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation Kazakhstan” and this is an ideal introduction to what he can do.

The success of RICKY BOBBY only means that overt product placement will become standard and Will Ferrell will continue to reign as America’s middle-aged fool. The biggest question I have is this: how much rehearsing was done for that long, deep kiss? Will, tell me that was supposed to be comedy, not a statement of fact.

Credits:
Director: Adam McKay
Screenwriters: Will Ferrell, Adam McKay
Producers: Jimmy Miller, Judd Apatow
Executive producers: Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, David Householter, Ryan Kavanaugh, Richard Glover, Sarah Nettinga
Director of photography: Oliver Wood
Production designer: Clayton R. Hartley
Music: Alex Wurman
Costume designer: Susan Matheson
Editor: Brent White

Cast:
Ricky Bobby: Will Ferrell
Cal Naughton Jr.: John C. Reilly
Jean Girard: Sacha Baron Cohen
Reese Bobby: Gary Cole
Lucius Washington: Michael Clarke Duncan
Carley: Leslie Bibb
Lucy Bobby: Jane Lynch
Susan: Amy Adams
Gregory: Andy Richter
Mrs. Dennit: Molly Shannon
Larry Dennit Jr.: Greg Germann
Dennit Senior: Pat Hingle
Walker: Houston Tumlin
Texas Ranger: Grayson Russell