Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

Saw Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, the sequel to the original Borat film which now follows Borat around Trump's America.  This one has more of a plot this time.  Borat is trying to give his daughter away to someone important in Trump's orbit but learns a little something along the way: that maybe daughters aren't good gifts?

The Borat films produce comedy in two ways: by pushing people to see what they will accept, and how they will fight back, and by getting people to say the quiet part loud by making them think they're among friends.  This second bit produces the most conversation in the public when seeing his movies.  He gets a hardware store owner to talk about gassing Gypsies, and he stays for a while with some Trump supporters who are very kind to him, but who also admit that they are not allowed by law to do what they'd like with Democrats.

Recently however many people have been saying the quiet part loud, possibly because they believe it and possibly because they like the attention and reaction that they get.  This makes the views that people are willing to own less shocking, so this film relies more on the former sort of humor.  I thought the sequence with the bemused Fedex employee sending ridiculous faxes to the "Kazakh government" was pretty funny.  The same with an infinitely patient man getting a haircut via sheep sheers.

There's a sequence where Sasha tries to undo a little of the ironic anti-Semitism he generated/reinforced with the first film, and there's a sequence where he sings at a gun rights rally (which turned fairly ugly - there's behind the scenes footage on youtube) but the political stuff falls a little flat for me.  The reality is both more absurd and less funny than the film makes it out to be.  Yeah, it's shocking that the crowd croons along that they'd like to chop up journalists and inject Fauchi with covid, but half of them are just IRL trolling and the other half is deeply depressing and dismaying, like discovering adults who can't read.

I enjoyed the movie, but I don't really like thinking about it.  The stuff with the daughter is good and straight-forward.  Too absurd to be worrying but absurd enough to be funny.  The political stuff - eh.