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5 out of 5 Stars
A funny-looking foreigner with a hen in his briefcase and an offending odor greets you with double kisses on your face and decides to compliment your choice in women, claiming your girlfriend would make an excellent prostitute in his home country.
Welcome to Sacha Baron Cohen's - otherwise known as Borat Sagdiyev's - world of comedy.
His only costume is a bushy mustache and an earnest smile, but it goes a long way toward taking off people's assumed outfits in "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan."
Some initial jokes seem to be for shock value, as when Borat is picked up by an RV helmed by a group of USC students and proceeds to get drunk with them. But the satire sets in naturally, as soon as the people around Borat get comfortable and let their insides show.
The sides of America captured by the reality TV-like method are more than politically incorrect observations - nearly all of the advice the frat boys give Borat pertains to using women for sex, or the "hit it and quit it" mentality.
One segment sets him up in a Texan antique shop, where he observes Confederate bumper stickers near the entrance, then follows further inside to unleash a Three Stooges-esque pratfall of shattered porcelains.
America hasn't seen a brand of comedy so openly inviting of outcry and reaction since Andy Kaufman.
Anybody who buys into Borat's views on the world are obliviously making themselves part of the joke. Cohen is willing to improvise his way into people's racism too, and it is at those moments where the satire reaches its boiling point and the comedy surpasses all "boy meets girl" comedies of decades past.
For example, one of the men helping Borat at a rodeo advises him to shave his mustache so he can look less like the Muslims, whom he openly admits suspecting at all times of being terrorists. This is followed by wishing homosexuals would go straight to the gallows.
Although Cohen is a British Jew, he is not afraid to play an openly anti-Semitic character. When others are in the company of a flagrant racist, they let their guards down, and this is where Cohen exposes the deep-rooted biases of America.
Without spoiling surprising sentiments of Americans in the film, it illustrates the long, long way America has to go to reach cultural open-mindedness.
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