Some days it's like Christmas here: FedEx packages show up from movie studios and DVD companies, and I tear into them in anticipation, utterly in suspense as to what's gonna be inside. Sometimes it's, you know, What's New, Scooby-Doo? The Complete 1st Season, but sometimes, like yesterday, it's Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. DVD jackpot!

I've got piles of DVDs sitting here waiting patiently for their turn in the player, but I just left them waiting and popped Borat right in for the third viewing of my No. 2 movie of 2006 (I saw it twice on the big screen), and it made me laugh just as hard as ever. Actually, it made me laugh before I even got the disc into the player with its clever packaging. It comes with one of those cardboard sleeves over the jewel case that always seem so wasteful to me -- what's the point of two identical covers on the damn thing? Except here, the covers are not identical. The cardboard sleeve is the usual stuff: a couple quotes from critics and notices about awards, a sticker announcing the extras, that kind of thing. But slip it off, and the wrapper of the jewel case is a joke in itself. It's in Kazakh, of course (or fake Kazakh, maybe -- my Kazakh isn't so good), but much funnier is how it looks like a bad color laser, as if this were a bootleg of the film. And inside, the disc itself does indeed look like a bootleg, like a recordable disc -- brand: Demorez ("Is Life? No. Demorez.") -- upon which someone has written "Borat" in Sharpie.

There's about 30 minutes of excised scenes from the film included in the extras, and while I can see why they were cut -- they wouldn't have contributed to the overall story and would have slowed everything down -- they are absolutely worth seeing. I won't spoil them for you, except for one (and it'll still be funny): Borat is visiting an enormous American supermarket and gets a tour from a manager, and they stop at the cheese refrigerator case. Not real cheese, mind you, but those blocks of Cracker Barrel cheddar and baggies of shredded Sorrento stuff -- and Borat stops at every single individual product on the shelf and asks what it is. "It's cheese," the manager tells him, over and over again -- he doesn't even seem to lose his patience with Borat after the twentieth time. (Which is what, I suspect, prompted Baron Cohen to keep at it -- would this guy never tire of saying "That's cheese"?) It becomes a pointed commentary on the orgy of excess that is America ... do we really need three dozen kinds of shredded mozzarella?

That's the only cheesy thing about Borat on DVD.

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