Borat R2 UK DVD Available for Pre-Order, Released March 5th 2007.

Why the interest in the DVD release then? Well, completely missed it at the cinema. Intentionally. Because it’s not the sort of thing I fancied sharing with an audience, completely hidden away in darkness or not. I just didn’t want to experience the variety of ways in which people would react to a film that likely attracts both those entirely incapable of seeing the irony in it… you know, kind of just missing the points potentially hidden within it, or just accidentally not managing to see the point as it seems to have been easy to do. Don’t entirely have faith in my own ability to consistently do so either, just because the flow of material is going to be pretty fast and hard to keep-up with, and the range of possible ways to take any given scene (doubly hard for the writers, I suspect) or inadvertantly misunderstand it, is going to be huge.

Still, although there has been some refreshing and reassuring response to the film from critics, I do kind of agree that it’s also distasteful to enough of an extent to make me question the reasonably snide poke at American culture that’s easily fallen back upon by British Comedians (and the public, in all too generalised a fashion) that kind of forgets the broader picture intentionally or accidentally in a way that’s a bit fashionable since the issue of Americas world perspective came so actively into question post 9/11, the conflicts, policies, general behaviour - particularly questioned with great speed by the British and portrayed as being a much slower process of questioning over the same stances with regards how the American Public seemed to turn on their own political climate much more slowly.

Certainly in two minds about it all, some stuff still manages to confirm worst fears (for me, in 2006 it was, in film terms, ’Hostel‘ that did this more than anything else) and some stuff surprises me (again, the positive response, critically, to the film in America) but you also realise that the pictures always a lot less black and white than anyone perspective (such as a film like ’Borat‘) can necessarily even begin to approach - and why should it? I don’t know, but it’s possible to say it should have been less snide. I wait with interest to see the film I’ve experienced so much coverage of, and to see the DVD-only responses (very likely) that Borat himself will give to the various legal cases, controversy, negativity that came as a result of the films content - and there should be some impressive outtakes and extras too…

Pre-Order Borat on R2 UK DVD at Amazon.co.uk [Direct Link] for March 5th 2007 release.