Brüno

[New Feeling]

I thought this was pretty great.

[Pas]

I wouldn't say it's genius but not entirely stupid.

My favorite parts are the one where people are really humiliated for a good cause, like the crazy parents that sell their babies for crazy pictures. Also the Jamie Lynn Spears (whatever the spelling is) baby where the victim says it should be aborted because the feotus' arms are supposedly ''too big'' hahahahaha

Also when Paula Abdul sits on people and talks about helping others it's priceless. They shouldn't have brought the nude guy and just went on humiliating her.

I think I liked this better than Borat, but the TV show is on a whole other level of funny.

[Alexandro]

No doubt in my mind this was mediocre at best.
Despite some brilliant moments there is too much in this film that is just boring. Specially the first half, where I was trying to laugh, but there wasn't a lot to laugh about. It was just stale and boring. Everything in the first half felt scripted and staged, but worst of all, it wasn't funny or insightful in any way. How many homosexual / sexual / kinky acts can you portray in 20 minutes without becoming repetitive? I mean unless you are 14 years old, there is just so much of that you can find "hilarious". I felt it was too easy for Baron Cohen and Larry Charles to depend so much on the discomfort that certain idiots feel about seeing penises or simulated sexual conducts.

SPOILERS
I didn't believe for a second the whole velcro suit debacle, it was just lame. Pretty much the whole intro of the film feels like that, as if they just settled with whatever they got.

The stuff with the agent in LA was terrible, as with the tv pilot. There are a lot of scenes where the film tries to mock this people but there really isn't anything to mock them about. These people just react like any normal person would react. One of the fun / insightful things about Borat was watching normal people put up with absurd behavior in the name of political correctness. No one puts up with any of the Bruno crap because everything he does is so unbelievably insane that he is not given the benefit of the doubt by anyone. Sometimes he seems to be just delusional (this is where it works) but most of the time he doesn't even seem naive enough to not realize what he's doing, so the people around him get impatient and don't allow him to take the jokes where they would actually be funny.

The Paula Abdul / mexican chairs scene was too short, as were a lot of others, for this very reason. When he takes the politician to his room and tries to seduce him he goes too fast for the big payoff and comes off as nothing but a mean harasser. I mean the guy gets out of there running and who wouldn't??? What's so funny about that? What's so insightful? That the politician calls him a queer? Is that supposed to be revealing the underlying homophobia of western civilization...what??? There's nothing going on except some poor guy who has the misfortune to be trapped in a bad stunt.

Thank God, the second half has more meat to eat. Even though the stuff in the middle east feels cheap and wasted as an opportunity, once he adopts the baby things get better. In fact, a lot of the film should have been about that baby. Even the staged parts worked (the baby listening to hip hop, the almost car accident). The stuff with the kids and their insane parents was also fantastic, and that was the kind of thing that really puts the whole homophobia / moral majority scenario in perspective, as opposed to people acting disgusted because someone shows them their pubes. The fun is in seeing people get so worked up for nothing, as when they wake up handcuffed in the hotel room and the hotel clerk is in full rage just because he had to see it, a scene in which no opportunity is wasted (he didn't wanted to pay for Mr. Magorium!!).

For a film this short, it felt like it was dragging forever. They kept coming back to the gay converter as if that particular scene was interesting (a similar scene in religulous puts this one to shame). Some parts, as I mentioned before, are too short, and then are others that extend themselves way past their welcome, like the military episode, and the hunting sequence. The swingers party is one big yawn because, even though the aim is to show that among the more sexually open minded there is homophobia too, you can't help but sympathize with those poor people who are trying to fuck while Bruno is there bothering them. The girl says something like "why would he look at you when he's looking at a pussy?", but really, that's not enough to put anyone in evidence.

I agree that the climax of the film is perfect, it is actually a fantastic piece of cinema because they go all the way, and works better than anything else in the whole movie.

I wanted to like this a lot because Borat is easily one of the best films of the decade, but Bruno needed another approach, and it needed to be tougher with itself instead of pretend being tougher with the audience. They should know you don't have to be a homophobe or a prude or a hypocrite to be turned off by watching crude acts of anal penetration every five minutes.

[Stefen]

^excellent review. It had some good parts, but the whole sum of the film is just so dumb and annoying that it's hard to like it at all.

Borat, as a character was loveable in a way that you kind of felt bad for him so it was always fun to see people try and be polite to him in spite of how awkward he was. Bruno on the other hand is just annoying and fucking stupid. 

[Gold Trumpet]

Haha, it's still the best film of the year for me.

[Stefen]

Yeah, but you have weird (read: but not bad) taste.

[Jeremy Blackman]

That was a good review, Alexandro, and it explains perfectly why Bruno is inferior to Borat. But I'm not convinced Bruno is a bad movie. I agreed in my original review that Bruno is vacuous as a character. But I like the movie for other reasons. It's an issue film. It deals with celebrity and homophobia, and it does it well. I agree that it could have been made differently, and that Bruno could be a better character. Then it might have been a classic. As it stands, it's just a good movie with some amazing moments, in my opinion. Many of the gags are disposable, but I think the power of some of the gags (quoted below) more than justifies the film.

1. The wrestling match. Epic and even iconic. Perfectly executed with powerful results.
2. Mexican chairs. Elegantly simple and totally potent.
3. Talk show / baby models. This is all the film needs to say about celebrity.
4. Focus group. Flawless use of the extremes.