Your promised Borat review

November 5th, 2006 | Posted by PostmanE

Check RottenTomatoes.com. More specifically, check the Borat section of the site. 96 freakin’ percent! For the record, Flags of Our Fathers, an early Oscar contender, has 73%, Babel has 75%, and The Departed has 92%. But those are just some of this year’s best movies. How about Pulp Fiction, considered by most to be the best movie of the 1990’s. Wow, 95%! Just one percentage point worse than Borat!

Sure, those are only aggregations of critical praise, and critics aren’t always the best gauge of quality - but, I mean, don’t those numbers just about say it all? Is there any reason to add another voice to the fray, to sing out about the genius of Borat in similar fashion?

No. There isn’t. So instead, let me just say add one quick question, which may possibly fuel discussion or will - more likely - fall on deaf ears: Is Borat the first movie of its kind? By that, I mean: Is Borat the first successful half-documentary, half-staged movie of all time? It’s not Jackass, but it’s not Talladega Nights, either, though it is simultaneously both. It has one foot in both worlds, both in the real and the fantastic, and it hedges one against the other almost constantly. Is it the first to do so, and to do it so well?

From there, there’s not a whole lot else that needs to be said. So how about closing with a favorite quote from the movie:

Borat: Whoa! There is a woman in a car! Do you want to go catch up with her and make a sexytime?
Driving Instructor: No, because in this country a woman has the choice about who she wants to have sex with.
Borat: WHAAAAAAT!?!!