"Borat 2"? No thanks

First things first: I'm afraid I have nothing at all to say about Anna Nicole Smith except that I've been to Hollywood, Fla, exactly once in my life. They have a great dog track.

What I of course like to talk about is movies, and these days, that means talking all about sequels. And thanks to Rupert Murdoch, we've got a doozy. In honor of H.L. Mencken, I'm just gonna go with this as being true, even if no paperwork has been signed.

In an interview in which he also cut down Hillary and all but endorsed NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg for president, Murdoch let it slip that Fox had lined up a sequel to "Borat" with Sacha Baron Cohen. The only problem was it wasn't true ... yet.

Sources close to Cohen said there was no deal on the table for "Borat 2," and a News Corp. spokesman told Daily Variety that Murdoch "was under the mistaken impression that we had signed a deal."

Still, in my rather demented view of the world, rumors are at least as fun as facts, so let's just run with it. Why wouldn't Fox want to make a sequel to "Borat"? The movie cost just $18 million to make, and has thus far grossed more than $225 million worldwide (before, of course, even hitting DVD.) I know about as much about investing as I do rocket science, but even I'm fairly certain that's a nice return.

Now, they'd have to pay a lot more for "Borat 2", of course. Fox passed on "Bruno," another SBC vehicle about his Austrian fashionista character, and Universal scooped it up for a fairly ridiculous $42 million. So a "Borat 2" might cost Fox as much as $60 million, but so what?

The bigger question is should there even be a "Borat 2"? My gut says no.

Sure, there are plenty of people left in this country who are stupid enough to still fall for SBC's gambit. My problem lies instead with whether or not I would want to watch it, and I think not.

Don't get me wrong. I loved "Borat." SBC's style of shining a mirror on America's dark side is as entertaining as it is enlightening, but by the time we got to that disgusting scene of those two horrificly hairy dudes wrestling on the hotel bed, I had had enough. "Borat" was a one-shot deal for me.

"Toy Story 3" set

In a Thursday conference with investors, Disney Animation announced that Pixar will indeed be making a "Toy Story 3," with eyes on a 2009 release, but John Lasseter won't be in the director's chair.

Lasseter, who directed the first two flicks along with Pixar's most recent flick, "Cars," will pass the baton to Lee Unkrich, who served as co-director on "Toy Story 2," "Monsters, Inc." and "Finding Nemo" but has never been "the man" before.

What makes all this news even better is that Michael Arndt, the very funny, Oscar-nominated scribe of "Little Miss Sunshine," is penning the script.

Now, I've been pretty hard on the most recent Pixar flicks. To me, both "Cars" and "Finding Nemo" were just plain boring for long stretches. This summer's "Ratatouille" however, being directed by the great Brad Bird, is the one Summer flick I'm looking forward to most.

And now, Pixar's near future is pretty much set. Either before or after "Toy Story 3" they're set to make something about "Wall-E," a robot who gets lost in space.

Either way, even when they bore me, Pixar's animated movies never make me feel stupid and almost always make me laugh more than a few times. Now I've got a real hankerin for some "Ratatouille."