THE BORAT INVASION

Borat, a character created by British comic Sacha Baron Cohen for his Da Ali G Show, will defile movie screens across America starting tomorrow. The film is lengthily titled Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit of Kazakhstan, and for the most part it lives up to the buzz that's been building up for months. It received a standing ovation at the Toronto Film Festival despite projection problems, and Entertainment Weekly made a pretty convincing case that this is one of the funniest (and potentially influential) comedies in ages.

Filmed in low-budget documentary style, the action starts off in Borat's rural village in Kazakhstan. He introduces us to the local rapists and prostitutes (one of whom is his sister), and gives a blow-by-blow commentary on an anti-Semitic ritual called The Running of the Jew.

Soon Borat takes his broken English and his rotund road manager to "the U.S. & A" for a diplomatic tour of sorts. A biohazard of epic proportions, he takes a dump in front of the Trump Tower, pisses in a Central Park lake and unleashes a chicken on a NYC subway. Later, after bungling his way through meetings with politicians and a feminist group, he becomes obsessed with Pamela Anderson and makes it his mission to track her down in California. In the film's best scene, a disagreement with his manager results in a man-on-man nude wrestling match that must qualify as gay fetish porn for some poor souls out there.

I had never seen Borat on Da Ali G Show before, and he started to wear on my nerves after about an hour (luckily the film clocks in at a mercifully short 85 minutes). But I was tickled enough to check Ali G out of the library, and I've enjoyed watching the Borat clips on those DVDs.

For what it's worth, the movie was a monster hit at the preview screening I went to. The laughter was so loud and constant, that I missed quite a bit of the dialogue. To hear the script in all its glory I guess I'll have to travel cross-country with Borat again under less raucous circumstances.