By: E&P Staff From the earliest reports on the movie earlier this year, officials and pundits in Kazakhstan have been railing against (or even threatening to try to halt) the now-famous "Borat" movie and its creator Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays the bumbling Kazakh journalist. Now it has received a rave review -- from a surprising source.
A review in the Kazakh newspaper Karavan called it the "Film of the Year" in a report on Friday, according to Reuters.
Actually, the reviewer, one Andrei Shukhov, repeated an interesting point that has been made in recent days in the U.S. by columnists such as David Brooks and John Tierney: more than anything, the film is "anti-American," or at least critical of ignorant/gullible/racist Americans.
Baron Cohen finally stepped out of character this week to announced that, indeed, "the joke is not on Kazakhstan."
On Friday, Shukhov of the tabloid Karavan reported that he'd seen the film in Vienna and asserted tht it "is certainly not an anti-Kazakh, anti-Romanian or anti-Semitic ... It is a cruelly anti-American movie." He added: "It is amazingly funny and sad at the same time."
Echoing Borat in the movie always trying to calm his producer, the reviewer said that Kazakh officials should "relax."
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