spoilers ahead, perhaps? i'm not sure what counts as a spoiler these days. can this movie really have spoilers?
i enjoyed
bruno a lot. i thought the scenes with the gay-cure fundamentalist folk and the pageant moms were pretty brilliant, and i very much enjoyed seeing ron paul humiliated, but i agree with a lot of
a.o. scott's review:
Still, the arrow of satire flies straighter and lands harder when it is aimed upward, and poking fun at the powerful and the entitled is no longer something Mr. Baron Cohen is inclined to do. Why should he? He’s A-List all the way, showing some leg on the cover of GQ and able to wrangle the likes of Sting, Bono and Snoop Dogg into a music video tacked onto the end of “BrĂ¼no.”
i don't understand why the filmmakers felt the need to superimpose this weak plot over the film; i didn't understand it with
borat (which has a really similar "plot") either. i would have enjoyed both movies more if they had cut out every scene where everyone involved was in on the joke. especially in this film, so many of those scenes (the scripted bits), if not homophobic (?), fail to add much satirical punch to the movie. i don't need plot, i just want to watch sacha baron cohen make bigoted and stupid people look hilariously awful. again and again. compared to
borat, this film felt like it had a lot fewer interviews of that sort.
all that being said, i laughed myself silly. also i think it's hard to see how this movie would have a net negative impact in the united states, even if some frat boys manage to see it as a 90-minute gay joke. it's a lot weirder and more culturally challenging than anything else that such a large number of people are going to see (except for the truly baffling
ice age: dawn of the dinosaurs), and that's a triumph by itself. also i really disagree with a.o. scott about the cage match, that scene was fantastic.
i just happened to see a stupid little bit about the "bruno controversy" on local tv. they interviewed a couple people coming out of the early shows at the metreon. one lady wanted her money back because it was "nasty." the person that liked it said it was "gross, but [she] enjoyed it." kron-tv presented the "controversy" not as being about whether or not the movie promoted homophobia rather than ridiculing it, but about how gross and outrageous the movie is. because he's gay! and even though this is stupid local tv, it's
san francisco local tv. that's not good.