Monthly Archives: October 2020

To Make Sexy Time with Moviefilm

Borat 2: Sacha Baron Cohen is back to mess with your head — and heart | Star Tribune

There is no reason a Borat sequel should work.

It comes 14 years after the surprise original — a lifetime and a half in movie metrics. Borat’s fish-out-of-water schtick should be a one-trick pony, just as SNL films are glorified sketch jokes. And everybody should know Sacha Baron Cohen’s chameleon mug by now; he’s already punked Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney and a raft of unwitting stars, TV reporters and dim bulb politicians. His goose should be cooked by now.

And yet, Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm is a small wonder. While not the seismic discovery of the 2006 original — and what could be? — the follow-up is laugh-out-loud funny, surprisingly touching and still remarkable in its ability to get citizens, particularly elected ones, to act like asses for the camera.

Or, in Rudy Giuliani’s case, like a child molester.

Like the first film, the sublime Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, the sequel has a knock-knock joke simplicity. Cohen plays a correspondent and unofficial statesman from Kazakhstan, and he uses the ruse to get America to drop its guard and describe itself, assworts and all.

Cohen takes a bead on some of his favorite targets: gun rights advocates, evangelicals, and just about any country bumpkin willing to sign a rights waiver. And there are a lot.

But it’s the politicians who always make the best bait (Palin was skewered on Cohen’s Showtime series, Who Is America?) This time around, Giuliani is in the crosshairs. and Cohen nails him the way Bob Woodward nailed Donald Trump in Rage.

Borat releases new video statement about Giuliani scene

Actually, exactly like that. If you remember, this site criticized Woodward for saving a news story about the president’s COVID subterfuge to help sell his book. Here, the stakes aren’t nearly as high, and Cohen rightly used the scene for the, ahem, climax of the film. But Cohen could have made news with the footage alone — if it’s legit.

The scene begins with Giuliani seated on a couch, answering questions from Borat’s “daughter,” an adult actress playing a 15-year-old. When the actress asks the former mayor if they can continue their discussion in the bedroom. he agrees, and is then shown sitting on a bed, as she appears to take his microphone off and he appears to pat her. The segment then cuts to the image of Rudy, reclining on the bed, placing his hands down his pants. Borat then bursts into the scene, screaming “She’s 15-years-old! She’s too old for you!”

Giuliani has vociferously denied any wrongdoing, and accuses the filmmakers of doctoring the scene, which may be true. This is, after all, a feature film.

But Cohen strikes a documentary-like chord every time he turns on a camera, and Moviefilm is gloriously no exception. Perhaps the film’s biggest surprise is its tenderness. Namely, Jeanise Jones, an African-American babysitter who is stunned and offended when Borat instructs Jones to feed his daughter water from a dog bowl if she’s been a good girl. Jones ultimately gives the daughter a sincere, near-tearjerker about the girl standing up for — and finding pride in — her unpolished self.

borat-babysitter-1603552123189.png

There’s nothing new or earthshaking to Moviefilm. It is, after all, a direct-to-Amazon sequel, and you probably got it free with your order of bulk paper towels.

But given the year, the disappointment of $250 million movies like Tenet, and our junk food overload on crap like Tiger King, Borat couldn’t be more timely or welcome. He addresses everything from COVID to religion to gender roles in an hour and a half that seem to time warp by.

Very niiiice.

To the Mutt in Us All

The Cost of Love | The HollywoodBowles

I came across your collar today
Sorting what remains
So faded
These eyes
Can barely make you out
But pretty in pink I breathe you in
And jingle jangle
For a moment I think you’re here
To know me
No me
Into the drawer to fragrant past days

In honor of National Make a Dog’s Day, let’s do so with four-pawed Factslaps (E&T Remix):

  • As of 2018, Americans own 89.7 million dogs.
  • The world’s oldest dog died at age 29.
  • Dogs poop in alignment with Earth’s magnetic field.
  • Humans and dogs first became best friends 30,000 years ago.
  • Every dog’s mitochondrial DNA is 99.9% the same as a gray wolf.
Gray Wolf | National Wildlife Federation
  • In English-speaking countries, the most popular names for dogs are Max and Molly.
100 Great Names for Dogs and Why Pick Them
  • Dogs have 13 blood types, horses have 8, cows have 9, while humans have only 4.
How do Human Blood Cells Differ from Animal Blood Cells?

Paul McCartney recorded an ultrasonic whistle audible only to dogs at the end of “A Day in the Life.”

A Beatles hit. It's rumored that, at the... - Skyview Animal Clinic | Facebook

A Quarter-Million

“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” — Stalin

To: The Lincoln Project

From: The HollywoodBowles

To whom it may concern,

First off, a caveat and compliment. I wear the liberal title proudly, and am ethically opposed to most of what you represent: non-choice, non-diversity, non-tolerance, non-science, non-environment. That makes your party a non-starter for me.

BUT. You make great commercials! Much better than anything we libtards can concoct. I don’t know why, but we suck at catch-phrasing. As the president would say, it is what it is.

And it’s in that spirit I offer you a new campaign in the presidential homestretch. It’s not nearly as clever as your brilliant Wake Up ad, but it beats the hell out of “Lock Her Up” or “Sleepy Joe.”

I call it the Quarter-Million Campaign. As you know, the U.S. will be approaching 250,000 American casualties from COVID — around the week of the election, perhaps a few days later, if rates and estimates maintain.

There are not many political leaders who get saddled with the word “million.” And when they are, it’s never positive. Stalin, Lenin, Castro, Hitler, Mussolini sported the figure, too.

And soon, Donald Trump. His handling of coronavirus — more than his affairs, finances, Russian collusion, government shutdown, etc. — synopsize in just three words (two if you drop the article) his incompetence. The virus has exposed just how out of his depth Trump is, from handling crises to calming a nervous nation to providing citizens with basic medical information.

An effective ad wouldn’t even need all of the words used in the above paragraph. Simply an ever-rising Johns Hopkins fever chart of casualties, played to the soundtrack of Trump’s rosy forecasts for the pandemic: “It’s going to be gone in summer”; “It will magically go away”; “If we did less testing,” yaddy. Then fade to a black-and-white photo. Maybe something like this.


You could probably run an ad as long as Wake Up, given how much snake oil we’ve been sold in the last eight months. My favorite is his latest: “We’re rounding the corner.” Like, into an alley?

It’s not fair to lay 250,000 deaths at his feet, I know. In truth, we are as much to blame for the catastrophe as he, if not more. Even in my own state, an allegedly educated one, even my friends, even my own mother — my mother! — seems determined to play with fire when it comes to a global pandemic. Because, you know, it is what it is.

But the president trades in hyperbole, so let’s speak his language. The beauty of the concept is that it’s evergreen: It will last well beyond the election, far into 2021, when the courts are being lobbied over how to call the race. You’ll want public opinion in your corner in that final dash, and A Quarter-Million can be easily modified as the body count rises. It’s a self-working magic trick: Each new title — A Half-Million, A Million — is more astonishing than the previous.

A Quarter Million. We’re not rounding the corner. We’re rounding off.