Brüno

The ladyfriend and I went to see Bruno this past Saturday. Has anyone else seen it yet? I knew it was going to be pretty outrageous, a "Hard R" as Ebert called it. Well I was pleasantly surprised to find out what a hard R meant. There are penises within the first five minutes of the film. I thought that was NC-17 stuff. Anyways, I was already familiar with the character of Bruno from Da Ali G show days. Back then Bruno was there to satirize the vacuousness of the fashion industry - like the one interview where he asks some employee at a high-end Rodeo Drive clothing store what celebrities shop there. When the employee can't name anyone terribly interesting Bruno stops filming and asks the guy to mention some bigger names, like Britney or J-Lo. They begin filming again and the employee changes his story, stating that Britney, etc. are all regular patrons. Funny stuff.

Unfortunately the film "Brüno" wants to deal more with (homo) sexuality. While I'm not against exposing people's bigotry and ignorance towards the subject, I was hoping for more of the old Bruno. Besides a slight bit at the beginning where Bruno hilariously manages to make it onto a fashion runway in Milan, there's really not much about fashion at all. Instead it's all sex-sex-sex. There's funny bits at the beginning where there's some obviously faux sexual acts going on, but later there's a few scenes with some very real sex going on, with just the tiniest bit of black censor bars editing out the naughty bits. While none of this made me feel uncomfortable, I was just more pretty astounded that they could get away with this with just an R. It was like watching the end of the Brown Bunny all over again.

There are a few fairly memorable bits, like when Bruno is naming a bunch of celebrities and Germanizing their names (my favorite - Will Smith becomes "Wilhelm Schmidt"), or when Bruno brings out his adopted black baby on a talk show dominated by an all black audience. Then the movie ends with a closing song wherein somehow Sascha Baron Cohen, I mean Bruno, has managed to wrangle up the biggest talents from the British and Emerald isles to sing a song with him, somehow even getting one of LE's favorite artists to sing a line about "anal bleaching". How they got that poor man to do that I have no idea. All in all, not as good as Borat, but it still has its moments.