Kathmandu:

The hilarious Will Farrell and Adam McKay wrote the most successful American Box Office comedy this year, Talladega Nights, which is a satire about NASCAR culture but not NASCAR racing, which means the film attracted speed audiences as well as people into comedy.

Every cliché is taken and bent — from the birth of Ricky Bobby (Farrell) to his friendship with Cal (John C Reilly) to Farrell’s coming up against French rival driver Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen). Marriage, fatherhood, depression all come under Farrell and McKay’s knife-like gaze and that look will have you laughing.

Writes critic Brian Marder, “Ricky Bobby (Ferrell) has been hotdoggin’ since the day he was born — when, legend has it, his momma (Jane Lynch) popped him out of her belly in the back seat of a car. Now grown up and living his dream as a NASCAR driver, he takes his swagger out onto the tracks, with mixed results. Even though he and lifelong friend Cal (Reilly) usually end up in first and second place respectively, his owner deems him a financial liability after he finishes a race in reverse. Consequently, a prim, proper and gay French F-1 driver (Da Ali G Show’s Sacha Baron Cohen) is recruited as a new investment, and Ricky gets in a horrific crash trying to beat him, winding up paralysed… in his mind. After a long road back — which sees Cal steal Ricky’s lady (Leslie Bibb) and limelight and Ricky reunite with his estranged racer dad (Gary Cole) — Ricky learns to leave showmanship, homophobia and pyrophobia (fear of fire) in his dust, and just drive the damn car!”

My favourite scene is when the “Formula un” driver Girard tells Ricky “Booby” that he wants him to win so that Girard and his husband can go to Sri Lanka and teach the natives Hamlet. And all this in fractured French.

Outrageous, rude, crude, revolting, bawdy, cringe-inducing, jaw-dropping and hugely funny, Borat is this year’s much talked about Golden Globe winner and Oscar Nominee. Borat is of course Sacha Baron Cohen who acted in Talladega Nights and has a TV show called Da Ali G Show where he plays rapper Ali G, gay Austrian fashionista Bruno and a reporter/refugee from Kazakhstan, Borat.

Borat and all other Ali G pieces are filmed without the people being filmed knowing they are on candid camera. Borat is a hilarious series of sketches bound together by the consistently horrific laugh machine Sacha Baron Cohen, who has a bunch of law suits against him lodged by unsuspecting participants in his movie.

Borat has a sub-title, Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefits Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan and Borat is as uniformly unintelligible throughout.

Over to Jessica Letkemann, “He tries to buy a gun for killing Jews and only gets turned down because he isn’t American. 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 Pamela Anderson with whom he wants to have a sexy time. In short, he turns every American sensitivity and cultural stereotype on its head, leaving a trail of scandalised, mortally offended citizens in his wake.”

You will either love Borat or end up jumping up and down on the DVD.