Interesting.
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2009/07/09/bruno_rakoff/_snipped_
Baron Cohen's Brüno is a gay minstrel, in the most literal sense of the word. Just as the characters of the burnt-cork vaudevillians had, bound up ineluctably with their dark complexions, traits like being shiftless, lazy, and "a-feared of spooks" as their eyes bugged out in Neanderthal, superstitious terror, Brüno's homosexuality comes bundled up with a lot of unattractive software. He is an open hydrant of empty, venal ignorance, a fame-chasing, grandiose fucktard, all because he is a cockaholic (his term). The repeated pistoning of sucking dick has scrambled his brains, just as surely as a muddler pulverizes mint leaves. Make no mistake: It is gay sex that has made Brüno stupid. Perez Hilton has the sobriety, moral rectitude and class of Lewis Lapham by comparison.
Unlike Borat's evident naiveté, with his cheap suit and wide-eyed wonder at American plenty, unfamiliar with the felicities of monied, first-world civilization, Brüno, a successful Austrian talk-show host, cuts a figure of slippery, continental media-savviness. The power dynamic is completely reversed here. The obvious class differences between Brüno and his American subjects initially obliterate the sexual ones. It is, by now, a tired given that the presence of a camera has the taming effect of a curare dart, making people do things they would never normally agree to, but with the exception of brief interviews with Paula Abdul and Ron Paul (who really didn't deserve this, if only for his having catalyzed the downfall of the vile Rudy Giuliani's national political aspirations), most everyone else Brüno encounters is poor.
He interviews parents who are agenting their infant children for film work, asking them if their tots are comfortable working with dead or dying animals, mixing harsh chemicals, portraying Nazis ... you get the picture. Later on in the film, there is a shot of a baby Jesus on the cross, with little tyke centurions milling around at the base. But it's clearly been done with Photoshop. It's insult upon injury to make people degrade themselves in theory, and then condemn them as if they'd actually done so in practice. Three men of demonstrably modest means in Alabama, their cheeks sunken with Appalachian want like Dust Bowl portraits, agree to take him hunting. Brüno, trying to pass, engages them in some enthusiastic banter about how much he loves "vah-ghee-nas." The men look mildly amused, but again, they don't take it and run with it. There is no trash-talking about women. Later that night by the fire, he relentlessly gender-fucks them, trying to liken the four of them to the "Sex and the City" girls. He compares the multitude of stars in the sky to how many hot guys there are in the world. This is followed by an excruciatingly long silence in which the men, humiliated and high-hatted, are unable to even look at one another.
_snipped_
More often than not, people are merely mute with discomfort, politely waiting for the moments of childish provocation to pass. The Christian "therapist" who counsels men away from homosexuality, who it should be pointed out never once touts a "cure," will not rise to the bait when Brüno tells him that he has perfect blow job lips. (It seems the height of perversion and merely an indication of how noxious the film that I should be defending an evangelical charlatan whose actions only increase the torment of already tortured gay men, but there you go.) A karate instructor demonstrates a series of evasive moves while Brüno is armed with dildos, teaching him how to avoid attacks from homosexuals. The instructor does his job gamely and with great dignity. The only victims in this joke are rape-minded, cock-drunk fags.
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