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Just saw it.
~Funny~ movie. -- But best you have a thick skin:

-- The enigma that is Borat --

HOW DOES THIS FAUX KAZAKH NEWSMAN GET AWAY WITH HIS OUTRAGES?

By Carina Chocano

Sacha Baron Cohen in "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan."

Borat Sagdiyev is a gawky, overeager Kazakh TV reporter in a bad suit and worse mustache, who travels across the United States doing lifestyle pieces.
Neither really Kazakh nor really real, Borat is the second-most-famous alter ego of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, whose best-known character is the pea-brained ``gangsta´´ interviewer Ali G.

Borat makes his big-screen debut Friday in the comedy ``Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.´´ (No, that is not a typo.)

Crass, anti-Semitic, homophobic, misogynistic and outrageously impolitic, Borat has a cluelessness about how other countries live, talk and think that is rivaled only by his ability to sniff out grandiloquence and prejudice. Though they have traits in common -- notably their encyclopedic ignorance and obliviousness to social norms -- Borat is more likable than Ali G. For one thing, he would rather be liked than respected or admired, and his innocence makes his satire stealthy and powerful.

If Ali G skewered all that is ridiculous about big media's obsession with ``youth culture,´´ from his own absurdly baroque persona to public figures so disconnected they can´t spot a parody when it´s right in their face, Borat goes after bigger game. The idea, ostensibly, is to extract lessons in sophistication from the most powerful country on Earth for export to a country most Americans couldn´t locate on a map.

In the movie, Borat travels to New York with his producer, catches a rerun of ``Baywatch´´ on TV, falls hopelessly in love with Pamela Anderson and winds up making his way to California alone. I won´t say much more about it other than it follows the basic format of the TV episodes, adds an emotional arc and offers a perspective on contemporary American society unlike any other. Directed by Larry Charles, the movie takes Borat on a series of cross-country adventures of the type that will be familiar to fans.

Over the past couple of seasons, regular viewers of ``Da Ali G Show´´ have watched Borat plumb the mysteries of American house buying, dating, etiquette, wine tasting, campaigning, target shooting, country music singing and baseball, to name but a few. His encounters with average, small-town Americans, Southerners more often than not, are gems of fish-out-of-water buffoonery. Cohen has a gift for physical comedy and an inspired sense of the absurd and can turn something as mundane as accepting a stemmed wineglass into an absurdly protracted and awkward exchange.

Borat's interviews fall into roughly two categories. He seeks out self-consciously genteel, almost impossibly schematic ``life coaches´´ of one kind or another -- people whose job it is to tell others how to date, tell jokes, find work, etc. -- and barrages them with questions, requests and opinions that, despite being completely outrageous, consistently fail to get a rise or a reaction stronger than ``We don´t do that here in America´´ or ``That´s not a customary thing to do in the U.S. at all.´´
On the one hand, you have to admire his interviewees´ tact and even keel. On the other, you can´t believe that they don´t react more strongly than they do.

He also hangs out with ``normal people´´ who happily reveal their prejudices.
Shopping for a house, in one TV episode, Borat asks a real estate agent about a windowless room with a metal door for his mentally disabled brother, whether he may bury his wife in the yard if she dies and whether black people will move into the neighborhood. And he does all of it with a wide-eyed, kiss-you-on-the-cheek, ``America is No. 1'´ insouciance that lowers everybody´s guard.