Spoof Kazakh reporter Borat - aka Ali G comedian Sacha Baron Cohen - is expected to score a box office hit by offending and humiliating real Americans in a new movie.

When a gangly foreign reporter with broken English, bushy moustache and crumpled suit turned up at artist Linda Stein’s New York studio, she thought she was helping spread the word about women’s rights.

Ms Stein, with two other members of Veteran Feminists of America, agreed to be filmed for what they thought was a documentary to help third world women.

But then the reporter started talking about his wife’s farm work (”she pulls the plough”), women walking three steps behind men (”it used to be 10 steps, my country is advancing”) and asking how to contact Pamela Anderson.

[…]

“We’re all primed to do an academic dissertation, we did our homework,” says yoga teacher Grace Welch, another member of the three-strong feminist panel.

“And as we’re talking, out of the blue, he says: ‘Do you know Baywatch?’

“I knew something was going on but I didn’t know what it was. I’m looking at the cameramen and everyone was stony-faced. And then he would come out with outrageous things.”

Ms Stein first tried to throw Borat out when he started talking about women having smaller brains than men.

The producer persuaded her to carry on, apologetically explaining that Borat did not realise he was saying anything wrong.

But the final straw came when Borat asked the women to lift up their shirts at the end of the interview.

The full story is here.

Premiere also has a review of the film online:

Any movie that lists someone with the job of feces provider in the end credits is either going to be a disaster or one of the funniest, most outrageous films of the year. Borat is clearly the later, 82-minutes of the uber-outre antics of Sacha Baron Cohen’s hapless, casually racist, sexist, and faux Kazakhstani TV reporter alter-ego as he road-trips across America in an odyssey of bears, rubber fists, chocolate faces, and naked Greco-Roman wrestling.

Cohen’s character Borat Sagdiyev debuted on his hit cable show Da Ali G Show a few years back now. But what was then an amusing recurring sketch involving a Kazakh journalist completely, unashamedly ignorant of American ettiquette “unintentionally” making real interview subjects — politicians, church and community leaders — who are not in on the joke squirm, has been energized by the longer format, narrative structure, and larger budget of becoming a feature film.

Borat has come to New York to film a documentary about the U.S. (the film’s comically long subtitle is Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan), and after a romp with a few friendly guys from the gay pride parade who he mistook for folks who understood him culturally until one of them tried to put a rubber fist up his butt and other misadventures in the big city, Borat discovers Pamela Anderson on a rerun of Baywatch and heads off to California to woo her.

He and his rotund producer (Ken Davitian) buy a junker ice cream truck and sputter off into the American heartland, stopping for interviews for his documentary along the way. He interviews Alan Keyes in Washington D.C. and calls him a “genuine chocolate face.” He tries to buy a gun for killing Jews and only gets turned down because he isn’t American (Cohen himself, meanwhile, is Jewish in real life). He goes to a dinner party in the South and the hostess instructs him in the ways of wiping himself instead of bringing a clear plastic bag of his poo to the table. He kisses men socially but rails against gays. He jokes about retarded brother raping his taunting sister, leads a rodeo crowd in a cheer about killing every living thing in Iraq, and eventually prepares his wedding sack for Pam (using it gets him tackled by a team of store security guards). In short, he turns every American sensitivity and cultural stereotype on its head, leaving a trail of scandalized, mortally offended citizens in his wake and four beery frat boy types and one portly prostitute with warm memories.

The full review is here.