Borat Movie

OK, so I have to admit -- it was a little disconcerting to see Sacha Baron Cohen without his "Borat" mustache.

As Borat might say, "\o7Niiiiiiice!"\f7 The raucous mockumentary with a mouthful for a title -- "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" -- was one of the 10 screenplays nominated Thursday by the Writers Guild of America awards. In all, five of the 10 films nominated were comedies, including "Thank You for Smoking," "Little Miss Sunshine," "Stranger Than Fiction" and "The Devil Wears Prada."

Maybe it's another sign of the approaching apocalypse or simply a signpost along the evolutionary trail of comedy screenwriting, but "Borat" -- a film that relies heavily on the unscripted reactions of nonactors -- had no fewer than \o7four \f7screenwriters, including the hit film's star, British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.

Does News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch know something his top lieutenants don't? Apparently so. The media mogul announced Thursday in New York that his studio "will do a sequel" to last year's surprise hit comedy "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," starring Sacha Baron Cohen. "He will first do something else ... then he wants to come back and do a 'Borat 2,' " Murdoch said at a media summit.

WHEN you think of Ken Davitian, you probably think of him naked, obese and pendulous, nearly suffocating the tall but waifish Sacha Baron Cohen in their famous naked hotel room fight in the hit movie "Borat." But there is so much more to Davitian, the 53-year-old actor who so completely inhabited the part of Borat's humorless Kazakh producer Azamat Bagatov that industry people with whom he is taking meetings \o7even now \f7don't realize he is a thoroughly local American actor.

The government of Kazakhstan wasn't happy with "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," the film in which Sacha Baron Cohen played a fictional journalist from that country who poked fun at Americans. But not everyone there had problems with the comedy.

Miss Kazakhstan said her country was preparing its own movie in response to "Borat," the hit comedy that portrayed the Central Asian nation as backward. Gauhar Rakhmetalieva, a Miss Universe contestant, said the government wanted to show the nation's positive sides.

Borat is dead. Sacha Baron Cohen tells the Daily Telegraph that he's retiring the clueless Kazakh journalist, as well as his alter ego, aspiring rapper Ali G. "When I was being Ali G and Borat I was in character sometimes 14 hours a day and I came to love them, so admitting I am never going to play them again is quite a sad thing," the 36-year-old actor-comedian said in the British newspaper's Friday edition. "It is like saying goodbye to a loved one.

Moviefilm "Borat" will not be in so much US and A theaters when it opening third of November. Twentieth Century Fox on Tuesday confirmed that it had slashed by more than half the number of locations where it hoped to debut the mock documentary about a boorish Kazakh TV journalist. On assignment in America, the fictional Borat offends virtually everyone he meets while mangling the English language.

Borat beware: Accept an invitation by a top Kazakh official to find out what the country is really like and you could be in for a nasty surprise. "I'd kill this impostor on the spot," said Eltai Muptekeyev, who makes his living in Almaty by posing for photos with a blindfolded falcon clinging to a thick leather glove on his hand.