Thursday, November 16, 2006

Borat Redux

I think Somerby's general take on Borat is in rough agreement with mine. Mostly it was just a very (to me, your mileage may vary) funny movie. There's enough there to make people want to overthink it, or elevate it into a highly complex social satire, to have it be greater than the sum of its parts. There's the obvious parallelism, or similarly Somerby's basic "Borat is us" take, with a bigoted misogynistic man from a backwards culture coming to wonderfully enlightened America only to find bigotry and intolerance in a backwards. But, reaching too hard to find a grand political message or intellectual foundation for the comedy is mostly a mistake. It was funny. People laughed.