Borat

2006 saw the theatrical release of the controversial mockumentary comedy film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, written, produced by, and starring Sacha Baron Cohen in the title role as a Kazakh journalist who travels across the United States, recording real-life interactions with Americans.

Borat Sagdiyev is a popular Kazakh television personality who is tasked with making a documentary about the "Greatest Country in the World", the "US and A". Borat and his producer Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian) arrives in New York, where they start a line of interviews, but after seeing Pamela Anderson on TV and immediately falling in love with her, Borat convinces his producer that they should go to California. During the cross-country trip Borat meets and interviews a wide variety of Americans.

Most of the interviews in the movie are allegedly made without the participants interviewed knowing beforehand what the purpose was (they were required to sign long release forms agreeing not to take legal action against the creators of the movie).

This was a tough movie to watch for me, as I do not find this kind of comedy very appealing. There were some funny moments, but I am generally not a fan of hidden camera type humour and particularly not this type, where it is an attempt to shock and mortify people. Anybody can make people gasp by being crude enough, so I do not think the concept can carry a whole feature length movie.

The video of this release is presented in 1080p MPEG-4 AVC with an aspect ratio of 1.85:1. It should be noted that some parts of the movie is standard definition video upscaled to HD. This has been done to give the "archival footage" an authentic look, but there are also a few other upscaled clips, particularly the one at the start of the movie from the subway trip, where it does not fit in. I guess it is because that is filmed with a SD hidden camera, but as it is supposed to be filmed by the regular cameraman, it disrupted the flow of the movie for me.

The HD parts of the movie look like they were filmed with a fairly low-end camera, which is the point, but which also results in a lot of mediocre footage. Particularly indoor and night shots have a huge amount of noise in especially darker areas and blacks are generally crushed and show little detail. Daylight shots are generally more detailed and have less noise and artefacts, but they lack texture and depth. Colours are also drab and the contrast is not too good. DNR is not evident and the occasional EE is kept to a minimum.

This is not a Blu-ray you should use as reference material, but the video fits fairly well with the premise of the movie and it would have looked wrong if it was any better. This, however, does not change the fact that the video transfer of Borat is not reason enough to buy this on Blu-ray as opposed to DVD. I would imagine that the shift between the above mentioned low quality footage and the rest of the movie would actually be less jarring on DVD.

This release comes with an English 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track, but in reality it might as well have been a 2.0 channel track as the subwoofer and rear speakers are never really in use. This is, of course, in keeping with the documentary style of the movie, but it seems a little like false advertising. The most important part of the audio track, the dialogue, is fairly clear throughout the movie, although it lacks any sort of directionality, but occasionally the Kazakh accents combined with mediocre audio forced me to turn on the subtitles to catch every word. On a more positive note I did not hear any distortion and the lack of range of the audio is not caused by a faulty track, but by the source material.

This track fits well with the movie, but it is not good audio in any other sense and including a 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track on a movie such as this, only makes sense from a marketing point of view.

There is a fair amount of extras on this release, but unfortunately it is all in standard definition (480p) and encoded in MPEG-2, with 2.0 Dolby Digital Audio, except for the included trailer which is 1080p.

Censored Footages (24 min.) - 8 deleted scenes.
Global Propaganda Tour (16 min.) - Clips featuring appearances by Borat promoting the movie.
Musics Infomercials (1 min.) - Infomercial for a cassette tape with popular Kazakh music.
Selling of Moviefilm with Cow (4 Min.) - Interview with Borat where he promotes the movie.
FOX Movie Channel presents "In Character with Borat" (4 min.) - Borat is interviewed for FOX Movie Channel.
FOX Movie Channel presents "World Premiere Borat" (4 min.) - Featurette about the premiere of Borat.
Trailer

The extras included are all a continuation of the movies premise of being a real Kazakh documentary and as such delivers more of the same style of comedy. I would have liked to see Cohen step out of character, if even for just a moment, to give some information on the making of the movie or similar, but as it is, it will only appeal to those who find the movie funny (which, of course, is mostly those who buy it and watch the extras). I did like parts of the "Global Propaganda Tour", particularly the part with Jay Leno and Martha Stewart was fun, but otherwise it was not my cup of tea.

As mentioned earlier, I am not a big fan of this kind of comedy and I had rather low expectations going into this release. Unfortunately my expectations were not proven wrong, and even though I laughed a little a few times, it was generally based too much on shocking those interviewed with crude gags, which quickly grows old. The video and audio fitted nicely with the premise of the movie, but the capabilities of the Blu-ray format was wasted on this and I would recommend settling for the DVD version. The extras included were okay, but I would have liked to see something involving Cohen and not only Borat.