A Numbered List About Bruno

Ok. Bruno. Shallower observations first.

1. As a lot of people have noted, Bruno's premise is much like Borat. Crazy foreigner infiltrates middle America and exposes their latent (or blatant) prejudices. Sacha Baron Cohen is of course a fantastic character actor, and I'm sorry to anyone who talks to me on a regular basis, but I'll be saying things like"Schting" and "und" for a very long while.

2. SBC is also pretty hot in this movie. He definitely has been hitting the gym, and he has a fabulous gay coif--although the highlight patterns leaves something to be desired. It's amazing that this is the same guy who played Borat. It's a complete transformation (which was probably necessary since Borat was such a hit).

3. A lot of this film seemed staged. I know the same was true in Borat, but there were a few times when you could totally tell everyone was in on it. I really don't like faux-candid things.

Alright.

4. I have a feeling that SBC is going to need to do something else if he's going to make another movie. Borat was hilarious, but Bruno borrowed a lot of set-ups and plot devices from it. I still laughed, but not quite as hard (more on this later). A third movie doing essentially the same thing would be too much. It's like that Simpsons episode when Bart was the "I didn't do it" kid. Hilarious for a while, and then one day Krusty slams the door in his face. If there's a next time, I'm Krusty.

5. This movie made me cringe a lot more than I thought I would, and not necessarily in a good way. I think some cringe movies can be fantastic. (Did anyone see The Aristocrats? Jesus.) But here, a lot of the time the cringe-inducing set up was just uncomfortable for everyone. Without spoiling too much, the hunting scene made me want to die. I wanted to disappear into my chair. I get that SBC likes to get bigoted people to reveal their bigotry in an organic way, but I actually felt sympathy for some of these guys. I think some people have the potential to be hostile to gay people if the right buttons are pushed, but would otherwise have a live-and-let-live philosophy. That was sort of my sense with a lot of these set ups: guys who weren't proactively homophobic, but who got to the point where their little homophobic ember was fanned too much. That isn't to excuse homophobia, but maybe to understand it a little better.

(Spoiler here if you haven't seen it)

6. And here's where I get really uncomfortable. Tied into the last point, at the end of the film there is a ridiculous wrestling scene where Bruno and his assistant start making out and PG-13ing each other in the ring in front of an obviously clueless redneck audience. People in the audience start yelling "fag" and throwing beer, food, and, at one point, a chair into the ring. By the end of the scene, Bruno and the assistant are covered in garbage and the people remaining in the audience seem like they're ready to lynch. People were banging on the cage, screaming epithets, trying to inflict harm.

Their reaction was vicious, and it was chilling, and it focused me on where gay people stand in 2009. We're making remarkable progress in a lot of areas (no thanks to our president). But when a group of people react the way they did to the sight of two gay guys making out, it really demonstrates how far we have to go to win hearts and minds, as the Honorable George W. Bush would say.

The typical response is to say that well, duh, no one expects to see simulated fellatio when they go to a wrestling match. I get that. But if it were anything else unexpected, I don't think there would have been such a violent overreaction. It struck me as cathartic, freed of the bounds of politically correct behavior and embracing their inner Glenn Beck. Those poor straight white male Christians have had it rough lately.

7. So, was Bruno good or bad for the gays? I don't know. I know the conventional wisdom for Borat was that it was generally a net positive for the Jewish community to expose anti-Semitism, in however sophisticated a way. I guess you can spin Bruno the same way for the LGBT community. Maybe Bruno is beneficial in showing the kinds of ridiculous provocations that get the people most likely to exhibit anti-gay violence, to actually exhibit anti-gay violence. On the other hand, maybe inflaming anti-gay passions--even among the few people not in on the joke--just to make Sacha Baron Cohen a fast few million isn't necessarily the most responsible thing to do in this political climate.

Or maybe Bruno is just a silly movie not worth all of these pixels. But it's definitely worth seeing--if for no other reason than to be able to talk about it around the water cooler. Good movies have been in short supply this summer.

8. Speaking of film this year, I saw a preview for an alien sci-fi movie called District 9, and I'm totally going to see it. The website is amazing too. Check it out. (Don't even get me started on alien movies. I'll die.)