Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. This Week: - The Borat breakout star.
- Just say no to Halloween.
- An epic Shonda Rhimes story.
- Miley & aliens.
- Blake Lively's shoes.
The Reason Borat Works Isn't Actually Borat Who had the Borat sequel on their list of possibilities for an October surprise?
By now you've likely heard about the film's shocking Rudy Giuliani segment, one of those all-time great exposés that make it seem as if the floor and your jaw are magnetized.
 The Trump toad agrees to be interviewed by an attractive, blonde foreign journalist. He giddily flirts with her, accompanies her into a hotel bedroom after the interview for a drink, lies on the bed, and starts to reach for his penis (one can only imagine what he had in mind) when star Sacha Baron Cohen bursts in to stop the escalating situation.
"Rudy, Trump would be disappoint, you are leaving hotel without golden shower!" Borat shouts after him as Giuliani retreats, his hand literally caught in his pants.
There's been a bit of talk over whether critics who were given an early preview to Borat Subsequent Movie Film, the sequel coming 14 years after the original comedy, ruined things by spoiling the unbelievable scene. It's true that there's no accounting for the out-of-body experience of watching the Giuliani sequence unaware of the horror to come. But there's an argument that the scene is news, not a spoiler, and needed to be reported on as soon as possible.
But here's the real surprise: It's not even the most shocking, or most searingly relevant, accomplishment of the film.
Borat Subsequent Movie Film introduces actress Maria Bakalova as Tutar, the 15-year-old daughter of Cohen's notorious lead character. She's the movie's secret weapon (actually secret; the studio went so far as to call Bakalova by a fake name in early press notes in order to keep her identity hidden), and, in truth, the only reason why it works.
Borat Subsequent Movie Film could have been a tired retread of lazy gotcha moments; who needs a mustachioed buffoon to pull the curtain back on America's intrinsic racism when these people are telling on themselves every day?
I was fully prepared to think there was no discernible value in making light of our country's ugliest truths when, so long after that first film, these things are no longer hiding in plain sight but parading with pride. Exposing it has become its own political-comedy cottage industry, worth nothing more than the smug pat on the back the creators give themselves. Another Borat movie focused on that would be akin to screaming "mah wife!" in an echo chamber.
There's a sweetness to Borat's relationship to Tutar that grounds Subsequent Movie Film. But there's an outrageous ugliness to just about every other man's relationship to her that gives the Borat mission a new life—and all of us watching a horrifying view into the casual misogyny and abuse that thrives when men think they're in a safe space. (And, oh, what a low bar there is for that. The safe space is everywhere.)
When Borat discovers that he has a 15-year-old daughter, Tutar has been living in a tiny shack, the oldest unmarried woman in Kazakhstan. She dreams of one day graduating to a more expansive cage for women who are married, and maybe one day even one similar to that enjoyed by Melania Trump, who she assumes is the happiest wife in the world.
She stows away on her father's trip to America, eventually becoming his purpose: he will deliver her as a gift to an important American politician, absolving Kazakhstan of the disgrace he reaped while making the first Borat film.
Here are a series of things that happen while Tutar, a 15-year-old girl, is standing next to Borat:
He asks a Texas store owner what size cage is best to keep her in, and he happily shows them his stock.
She swallows a plastic figurine of a baby and goes to a clinic to "take" the baby out. It's a setup and the miscommunication is the point. Yet it's certainly something to watch the pastor who, in the midst of counseling her against getting what he thinks is an abortion, is told that it is Tutar's father, Borat, who "put the baby inside her" and does nothing to protect her.
 Later, when she "births" the baby in a men's bathroom stall, none of the men who go in to use the urinal bother to investigate what's happening.
At a debutante ball, Borat asks another teen girl's father how much Tutar could get as a prostitute, and the man grins while swiftly answering, "$500." He's loud enough for his own, mortified daughter to hear.
When Borat brings her to a plastic surgeon to get breast implants explicitly to make her more desirable as an offering to older men, the staff happily schedules the procedure as long as he can pay the bill.
It's not reading too much into Borat Subsequent Movie Film to take notice of how integral Tutar's transformation is to the big Rudy Giuliani moment everyone is talking about. When we first meet Tutar, she is so feral she eats a live monkey for sustenance. But in her time in America becoming wise to the rights and freedoms she's been denied and trained to not even want, she becomes less of a tool in Borat's antics and more of the mastermind herself.
There's a physical makeover that happens, to the point that she could be a double for Tomi Lahren by the time she meets up with Giuliani. But there's also, finally, agency. She's in control throughout the entire sting. In fact, it's her idea.
The filmmakers behind Subsequent Movie Film clearly intended for Bakalova's performance and Tutar's arc to be this major revelation. The Bulgaria-born actress was originally credited as "Irina Nowak" as a red herring before the film's release unveiled her to be Maria Bakalova. The 24-year-old actress has appeared in a handful of Bulgarian films, but has been unknown to American audiences until now. She's sensational, essentially carrying the second half of the movie—and every nuance in the plot—on her shoulders.
Without her, the film would likely be a swing-and-a-miss. Because of her, it's influencing international political discourse. Bakalova deserves the lion's share of the credit, and hopefully will make her way to stuffy awards voters' radars.
As Christopher Rosen notes in Vanity Fair, Cohen as Borat turns to Bakalova and says "you were amazing" in the final moments of the film. "It's arguably the only time he breaks character."
Someone asked me this week what I was going to dress as this year for Halloween. In a twist worthy of a horror movie, they were not kidding.
It has come to my attention that, even now, even in a pandemic, even with everything going on, people still plan to celebrate the worst holiday of the year, Halloween.
 In normal times, the whole enterprise is annoying: the Hocus Pocus trivia nights, the straight people arguing over which Nightmare on Elm Street is the best one, the Twitter name changes, and the people whose entire personalities are spending too much money on costumes. (Make your personality spending too much money on wine like a grownup.)
The one nice thing about it being a life risk to be around other humans at the current moment was supposed to be that we were going to skip over this nightmare this year. Apparently that is not the case. Actual adults are figuring out how they can finagle COVID-safe Halloween hangs, or throwing caution to the wind and not worrying about social distancing at all. The threat of an Instagram feed wallpapered with costume selfies is real, and it's terrifying.
I'm not a total spooky Scrooge. I insist you dress your children and dogs in adorable costumes and I insist you send me the photos. What a fun time of year for kids! It's heartening to hear that communities are trying to find ways to responsibly allow trick-or-treating. It's almost too much to comprehend how much joy has been zapped out of children's lives because of the pandemic, and they deserve this sliver of normalcy and fun. The rest of you are out of your minds.
I haven't always been this way. There was one year in my twenties where my friend and I went to a party dressed as Dead Danny and Sandy from Grease, with face paint to look like zombies and the whole thing. A cute boy asked me if I was a sexy ghost, and it is a memory I will cherish forever and one day tell to my grandkids.
But as the butt groove in my couch threatens to swallow me whole as the time I've been trapped in my one-bedroom apartment drags on because the president is a moron and the people in this country can't be bothered to sacrifice any inconvenience so that this pandemic will go away, it sends me into a rage-spiral to hear that actual adults are planning to celebrate Halloween. Get a life! Boo, bitch!
The Tale of Shonda Rhimes and Disneyland It's been three years since Shonda Rhimes signed her groundbreaking deal with Netflix, which paid her the kind of millions where the endless zeroes start to resemble eyes bulging out of your head. It meant leaving ABC, where she had created Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and basically saved the network.  The money was one thing, but it turns out that the last straw that motivated the exit from ABC was an epic display of pettiness from Disney, which owned the network.
As Rhimes revealed in a new Hollywood Reporter interview, she was given an all-access Disneyland pass as a perk for her work making 719 shows for ABC and earning Disney billions. The labor required to do that, of course, meant she was unable to use the pass herself, so she asked for an additional pass for her sister so that she could take the family to the park. The exec she called (allegedly) replied, "Don't you have enough?"
Well, the most valuable showrunner in television swiftly called her agent, said "get me to Netflix or you're fired," and now there is a Disney executive sitting somewhere in Hollywood whose soul left their body and made a beeline to the moon after reading this interview. Imagine being the asshat who lost Shonda Rhimes because you didn't want to let her family ride Splash Mountain for free. Who is this person? Call Harriet the Spy because I need this fool to be named and shamed.
The Truth Is Out There, Y'All! Miley Cyrus revealed this week that she and a friend were once chased down by a UFO while driving through San Bernardino, Calif. "The best way to describe it is a flying snowplow," she said. There was a being in the front seat piloting it, and she and the alien made eye contact. "I think that's what really shook me, looking into the eyes of something that I couldn't quite wrap my head around."
She also revealed that she had just bought weed wax from a man in a van in front of a taco shop before this sighting, conceding that perhaps the two incidents just might be related.
But the point is Miley Cyrus is a weirdo-celebrity treasure, and her brilliant cover of Britney Spears' "Gimme More" as part of MTV's Unplugged series should indeed be the piece of American culture we send to aliens to make them think we're actually a worthwhile people. Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds voted this week and posted photos on their respective Instagrams to celebrate the civic deed. Yay for them! One quick question: Why did Lively choose to, for her photo, draw a pair of heels on her feet, with all the technical prowess of me using Microsoft Paint in the middle school computer lab? -
Borat Subsequent Movie Film: Very nice! (No, really, it's actually that good.) (Friday on Amazon) -
The Undoing: Watching Nicole Kidman play a rich lady whose life spirals out of control is a passion of mine. (Sunday on HBO) -
The Queen's Gambit: They finally made chess fun! (Friday on Netflix) -
Time: One of the best documentaries of the year. (Friday on Amazon) © Copyright 2020 The Daily Beast Company LLC
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