we saw Borat last night. lots of fun, bring the whole family. indeed it was pretty funny. the matter of taste and the appropriate does come up. I'm probably pretty fuzzy on that topic. I don't think good comes of touchiness, but I also believe in a moral or ethical rigour. when I saw Michael Richards pop his cork, I saw flop sweat. he desperately grasped the possibility of street edginess to save him, if that's how you want to quantify it, and it played unnaturally. Borat certainly locates right in the mess of things. Borat is comfortable in the midst of that risk. it is interesting to see when Borat goes over the edge for his victims. at the rodeo, it wasn't when he said Bush should drink the blood of every Iraqi, it was when he sang how Kazakhstan is the number one country, with the best potash in the world. and the party at Secession Drive doesn't get ugly until the black prostitute that Borat invited showed up. but others, like the sweet Jewish couple (from whom Borat and his producer cower in terror) or the auto school teacher, are pretty accepting. as a movie it gets normative a few times, like the tender moments with the prostitute and his boring dark night of the soul after his producer leaves. the scene in which he and his producer fight nude rides on an exceeded sense of slapstick. do I want to see Borat and his hairy and obese producer wrestle sloppily in the nude? can I look away? the movie goes awry because of lack of movie making vision. those normative moments, for one. and is it supposed to be cinema verite or not? supposedly he's being filmed but there are moments when apparently there is no person manning the camera. Comedy Central had a promo show a while ago for the movie, which I saw. not long movie, so it turns out I saw a goodly portion of the flick beforehand. I never saw Ali G, so I'll be letting Youtube fulfill that necessity. I've caught, so far, Ali G interview Dr Norman Chomsky, in which Chomsky doesn't have the footwork to keep up with the joke. Andy Kaufman should be getting some residuals from Sacha Baron Cohen.