As anticipation for Sacha Baron Cohen's cinematic ode to recreational dog shooting and sister-pimping builds steadily, the Kazakh government is showing no signs of backing down in their PR-reparative counter campaign. Realizing that abducting Borat's website in the middle of the night and subjecting it to a series of pillow-case-hooded humiliations was perhaps not the most mature way of handling things, Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev is now using more diplomatic means to promote his country as a kinder, more humorless place than Cohen's buffoonery portrays:

In what will probably prove to be the only truly interesting thing that will emerge from the Toronto Film Festival, Sacha Baron Cohen arrived in character to the midnight premiere of Borat: Cultural Learnings from America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan last night on a rickety cart pulled by a quartet of the finest peasant women that Canadian background casting agencies have to offer, much to the delight of the assembled throng of fans. Their excitement was short lived, however, as a projector malfunction so severe that not even on-call technician Michael Moore could restore it to operability ended the screening about forty minutes in. Cohen, Moore, and producer Larry Charles did their best to appease the crowd with an impromptu Q & A, but once it became apparent that no amount of stalling would provide sufficient time to repair the projector, the film's star offered each member of the rowdy audience "five minutes for sex-making with my nice cart-pull prostitutes," a promise that resulted in a hefty hike in his already put-upon peasant day-players' rates and ruined the surprise he'd been saving for Borat's U.S. premiere.

Disney's Cast Member Massacre started in earnest with a round of layoffs yesterday. But in a happier note, studio chairman Dick Cook seems to be getting a hang of the termination business, as Buena Vista exec VP Karen Glass was let go nowhere near a delivery room. [Variety]
Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence has signed on to adapt and direct the prequel to Fletch, Fletch Won. His friends have instructed him to not "fuck it up," a directive made all the more challenging by the planned miscasting of Zach Braff in the title role. [Variety]
In Hollywood, everything old is senselessly new again: 50 years after its Broadway debut, ABC plans a musical version of Peter Pan for television. [Variety]
Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat movie will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival and maybe we've already gulped the Kazakh Kool-Aid, but even the title has us excited: Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. [Variety]

Continuing today's ethnic humor theme, and coming to a sharpie-defaced poster near you: Borat backlash. Because satirically clueless, inbred, rural characters are only appropriate when targeting American hillbillies.