Borat movie- film makes benefit your DVD collection

Depending on your sense of humor and personal sensibilities, Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat character will either be an annoying, 80-minute one-note joke or a brilliantly incisive guide into the dank cavern of America's antiquated stereotypes of Europe and vice-versa. After several viewings, I'm leaning toward the latter, but that doesn't spare "Borat" from the nearly unavoidable hit-and-miss territory of today's comedic cinema. And when "Borat" hits, it hits hard.\n"Borat" follows Kazakhstani television celebrity Borat Sagdiyev and his producer Azamat Bagatov's docu-journey throughout America in order to garner information to benefit their homeland. Much controversy surrounded the film's perceived harsh treatment of Eastern Europeans and Jews, but one viewing makes it obvious (to those with 1/3 of a brain) that the real target in Borat's sights is Americans themselves. Several instances of Americans behaving badly (a racist/bigot rodeo organizer, babbling evangelicals, misogynistic frat boys on a road trip) are jaw-dropping, and Cohen makes them all the more hilarious by playing along as the wide-eyed foreigner. Most of the film's scripted bits are amusing, but Cohen is at his best without a net.\nMissteps in Cohen and director Larry Charles' film are few, yet glaringly obvious. One of the film's most memorable scenes, featuring a naked wrestling match pitting Borat against the morbidly obese Azamat, is funny for the first 90 seconds, but the last four minutes wears on the eyes. Borat's driving force to find and marry the "virginal" Pamela Anderson is a fine plot device, but if you're in on the fact that Sacha and Pam were pals before production began, Borat's final coup in a California bookstore loses much of its comedic weight.\nThis disc's extras fly by as fast as the film itself, but what's here is worth a look. Several hilarious deleted scenes, running a total length of 10 or 12 minutes, make you wish they were part of the movie (which is only 80 minutes long to begin with), and an anthology of "Borat" pre-release press material highlights Baron Cohen's gifts as an ad-lib showman. Additionally, a slo-mo trailer for Kazakhstan's own version of "Baywatch" and a news report detailing the angry aftermath that one of Cohen's better stunts wrought on a small red-state town are side-splitting.\nTaking political correctness, throwing it in a blender and then tossing it into the gutter is Cohen's specialty, and "Borat" finds him working at the apex of both the faux-documentary and ambush humor genres. Whether the film will lend itself to repeated viewings, as so very few comedies do, is still up for debate, but in the moment and this day and age, "Borat" is as good as we're gonna get.