Firstly, let me say that Mr. Otter and I really wanted to like this movie. Okay? we did not rent it ready to hate it or to heap vituperation on its head, we really wanted to find out what all the hype was about and see for ourselves if it was funny or not.

Answer: Not.

The problem is not that Borat makes dupes of unsuspecting people. Remember, they had a WHOLE CAMERA CREW in each of those places. No matter what they told those poor gullible people, no matter how much they must have edited the footage to make them look even more bigoted and foolish than they really are, one fact has been made abundantly clear in this wired world of ours: if you allow anyone to point a camera at you for any reason, you'd better not whine about it later.

The real problem with this movie is that they didn't know what kind of movie they were trying to make. It started off as a sort of homage to Monty Python and their sketches about clueless foreigners, and actually this was the funniest part of the movie. Then Borat comes to America, and the story vacillates between reiterating jokes that have already been told, a sort of Leningrad Cowboys Go America odyssey (but not nearly as well done) and the kind of mean-spirited comedy that Mr. Otter and I despise.

And it just kept getting worse and worse.

You may like it...but we certainly didn't, it was pretty stupid. And so were the idiots who not only did and said foolish things on film...but afterwards tried to redeem themselves by filing lawsuits. Talk about pointless...there is such a thing as bad fame, and asking for more of it is simply unbelieveably stupid. Get on with your lives, folks, and just try to quietly live this down.

*But here is where I do have to pass on an anecdote from my misspent youth. This otter does not only love films. Oh, no. She also loves...board games. And many years ago, she knew a bunch of people who also loved board games. And one of them had come up with a variant of a game called Risk, that many of you will remember from when you were kids: a game of world domination, not too complicated but vicious. (Otter still has her original set with the wooden pieces...).

Well, one of these people liked Risk, but didn't think it went far enough. And this person (and it was so long ago, 25 years or so, that I can't remember who actually did this) came up with a game called something like Global Conquest. It was Risk, but included oceans and fleets, nuclear weapons, and about twice as many countries. We loved this game, although it literally took about three days to play out, it was so complicated, and I have one of the only surviving copies of it. We nicknamed it Fred, for short.

In this game, there were made-up countries like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and, of course, Kazakhstan. And I need not say how completely smug I was when the Soviet Union broke up and all those oddly named countries nobody had ever heard of, including the one mocked in this movie, Kazakhstan, came into existence...and I already knew where they were and how to spell them!