A Kazakh athlete recently took home a gold medal at an “international shooting event” in Kuwait (which, as I imagine it, involves shooting a goat carcass with a Kalashnikov then fetching it with a hawk), and during the official medal ceremony, she received her trophy to the tune of the parody anthem from Borat rather than her country’s actual national anthem.

She seems pretty calm about the whole thing, listening to lyrics like “Kazakhstan’s prostitutes cleanest in the region/Except of course Turkmenistan’s” and “Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan you very nice place/From Plains of Tarashek to Norther fence of Jewtown” with only a mild scowl. (Mind you, “mild scowl” is the official facial expression of Eastern Europe and Central Asia).

UPDATE:

The team asked for an apology and the medal ceremony was later rerun.
The team’s coach told Kazakh media the organisers had downloaded the parody from the internet by mistake.
Coach Anvar Yunusmetov told Kazakh news agency Tengrinews that the tournament’s organisers had also got the Serbian national anthem wrong.
“Then Maria Dmitrienko’s turn came,” he said. “She got up on to the pedestal and they played a completely different anthem, offensive to Kazakhstan.”
The film outraged people in Kazakhstan and was eventually banned in the country. The government also threatened Baron Cohen with legal action.
Reports say the film is also banned in Kuwait. [BBC]

Of course, it’s also likely that Dmitrienko didn’t understand enough English to even know what she was listening to. In Kazakhstan, we have saying. We say “Woman with education is like a monkey with a gun!”

[Arbroath via TheDailyWhat]

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In a deal that could very well change the way you look at life forever, Isla Fisher impregnator Sacha Baron Cohen has signed on to play Queen singer Freddie Mercury in a biopic about his life. The film will take place in the periods leading up to Live Aid, when Mercury was the world’s biggest rock star, spending sleepless nights in heaps of gorgeous female groupies… *handed misspelled note from Chodin* Really? Just dudes, you say?

Peter Morgan will write the script, which means it should be both factually accurate and ass-kickingly entertaining since he wrote Frost/Nixon and The Last King of Scotland. Fact: While reading Morgan’s script for Scotland, Forest Whitaker’s eyes went normal. But as soon as he opened the Vantage Point script – POP! – back to googly.

Hey Deadline, does Beezlebub have a devil put aside for me, for meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee?

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Sacha Baron Cohen has signed on to star in Borat writer Dan Mazer’s film about the Eurovision song contest, which he’s been developing since 2007.  The Eurovision song contest is basically like Miss Universe meets American Idol meets Sprockets, where groups representing European countries compete with comically overproduced song and dance numbers.  Past winners include Abba, and a Finnish goth band who dress like orcs (video after the jump).

Sacha Baron Cohen has signed on to join “Eurovision: The Movie,” in which he will portray a singer who enters the competition.  A source said: “Mazer and Cohen thought it would be better if Sacha dreamt up another character, and the scope for another oddball creation is huge.”
The new movie is expected to be another fake documentary in the style of “Bruno” and “Borat.” The script has already been written and the film is expected to appear in theaters by 2011. [WorstPreviews]

Well the source material is certainly rife. Or is it ripe?  Probably both.  Anyway, the only problem I see is that most of the Eurovision entries are already so ridiculous that it’s almost impossible to do a parody version funnier than the original.  Nonetheless, it’s hard to predict how Cohen’s entry will fare – tentatively titled Two Dudes Having Sex with the Holocaust.
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Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow up to Borat, has received an NC-17 rating in its first submission to the MPAA, the shadowy cabal with the power to basically torpedo your movie if they want, since most theaters won’t show an NC-17 film.  In this case, however, since Bruno comes from a major studio (Universal), it will just get re-cut a few more times until they can get an R.

Among the objectionable scenes is one in which Bruno appears to have anal sex with a man on camera. In another, the actor goes on a hunting trip and sneaks naked into the tent of one of the fellow hunters, an unsuspecting non-actor.

Cohen is currently appealing the decision while simultaneously struggling with cutting the film to suit the ratings board. But the ratings board, a secret panel of parents appointed by the studio-owned movie association, is notoriously inexact about what it requires to move from an NC-17 to an R.

Audiences saw 20 minutes of Cohen’s latest foray into high-wire comedy at the South by SouthWest festival this month.

In one scene showed at the festival, Bruno auditioned children for a subversive movie with a number of offensive acts. Clueless stage moms agreed to the increasingly absurd requirements set forth by the actor, including one woman admitting that her infant daughter could lose seven pounds in a week to fit the part.

Finally, Bruno told her about the scene, in which the child had to dress as a Nazi pushing someone into an oven. [thewrap via theplaylist]

I’m so glad that there’s a group of unemployed moms in Burbank with the power to determine what kind of movie I get to see.  Without them we’d probably all be lining up for Air Bud 7: Doggy Shoots a Snuff Film.  Admit it, you’d buy a ticket.

Subjoke: Simulated anal sex and holocaust references?  Sounds like the time I went speed dating.

As reported by, uh, fashionweekdaily (is that an oxymoron?), the release of the Bruno movie, Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow up to Borat – which people are still referring to as Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt even though I guarangoddamntee you that isn’t the title – has been pushed back, from May to July.

No reason was given for the delay, but you have to wonder if it had anything to do with everyone knowing who he is by now.  Like in the video above from his runway crash in Milan.  It’s less than 10 seconds before people start yelling “Sacha!”  I loved Borat, but I don’t know how funny Bruno will be when he has to shoot half of it with the cast of the Whopper Virgins commercials.