Willa, your question about why I ascribe a "seriousness of purpose" to Bruno's insanity is a good one. I expect Sacha Baron Cohen to be more than just a shock jock for two reasons: because he has been annointed as a cultural genius by some, and because Baron Cohen himself has said he aims to expose prejudice and apathy. There was a Rolling Stone interview with the real Baron Cohen, out of character, around the time that Borat came out. Neil Strauss, who wrote the piece, calls Borat one of the "greatest comedies of the last decade," and asks Baron Cohen about his motivations in creating the film. Here's what he had to say:

I always had faith in the audience that they would realize that this was a fictitious country and the mere purpose of it was to allow people to bring out their own prejudices ... I think the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist. Borat essentially works as a tool. By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice, whether it's anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. I remember, when I was in university I studied history, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, "The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference." I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic.

There's something else that has been bugging me about Baron Cohen, and it's that he pushes all these boundaries in character, not as himself. I agree with you, Nina—it felt fresher in Borat but now has become stale. Say what you will about Howard Stern and his ilk, but the "characters" they play on air are not in costume with different names. They take more responsibility, ultimately, for their actions. "I've been trying to have my cake and eat it, too—to have my characters be famous yet still live a normal life where I'm not trapped by fame and recognizability," Baron Cohen said in that Rolling Stone interview. Time to take his cake away, I think.

Photograph of a Bruno billboard by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images.

Tags: Borat, Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen

Jess, Willa—I agree: Bruno did not rock my umlauts off, either.

Mostly the film just felt flat to me, which may simply be a function of the fact that you can't capture lightning in a bottle twice. Can we ever be as innocent as we once were, pre-Borat?

But my friend had another interesting theory, which is that Bruno is just too self-centered a character to work in this kind of improvised film. Someone who's always hogging the spotlight can't generate situations that are very interesting or organic—their narcissism tends to shut down any sense of free play, of give-and-take. After all, Borat was just as campy and ridiculous and offensive a stereotype as Bruno, but the whole premise of that earlier movie was that Borat wanted to go to America and learn about Americans. He was genuinely curious—which meant listening to and engaging with his (unwitting) scene partners. Even when the scenes were cruel, they were also oddly generous: Baron Cohen wanted his marks to have all the best lines.

But Bruno's goal is to become famous at all costs, which means that his general M.O. in every scene is to yell, "Look at me, look at me!" It was exhausting. Maybe that's why the scene that worked best for me was the excruciating and hilarious bit with the stage parents—which, you'll notice, is one of the few scenes where SBC really sits back and lets someone else command the screen, even if they don't quite realize it.

Final (for now) unrelated thought: Did you know that SBC's first job after graduating Cambridge was as a male model? True story, according to Richard Corliss at Time.The mind boggles. Anyone know where we can get some footage?

Photograph of Sacha Baron Cohen as Bruno by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images.

Tags: Borat, Bruno, sasha baron cohen

Jess, I think you picked up on the two most damning scenes in all of Bruno. Unlike you, I laughed for much of the film, but when I left the theater it was both the Ron Paul and the Alabaman hunter gags that stuck with me, because they are both so mean-spirited and fall so flat, and in doing so, expose an emptiness and vacuity at the core of Sacha Baron Cohen’s project.

SBC recently appeared on David Letterman—shockingly, as himself. He told a very charming story about how one goes about booking an interview with a terrorist (a scene that appears in the film), and said that the idea had occurred to him because he was wondering, "What could people see that they’d never seen before on film?" This is his guiding principle, not some larger aim to "expose" America’s core hypocrisy. He’s a shock jock not a sociologist. He’s not even a comedian with a mission. (As Dana said in her review, "it's become common wisdom that [SBC]’s elaborate hoaxes are part of some larger mission to expose American racism and homophobia. But Baron Cohen's comic truth seems simpler: He will do anything for a laugh, and we will pay $10.75 to watch him do it.")

This doesn’t mean SBC doesn’t sometimes expose subjects worthy of all our scorn (like the parents of child actors willing to let their 10-year-old have liposuction), or get at interesting tensions (a largely African American talk show audience is very hostile to a gay Bruno long before he exposes himself as a racially insensitive child neglector), but it does mean the sketches are wildly uneven, and far more desperate to show you something new than they are necessarily to be thoughtful or meaningful. This does make me wonder why we feel the need to ascribe such a seriousness of purpose to SBC’s antics. If it’s not serious, is it just homophobic, as you suggest Jess? Or are we just so used to stupidity, that when someone does something smart, we lose our perspective? A truly talented shock jock is a rare, hilarious thing—why can't that be enough?

Tags: Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen

Willa, those flaccid penises you mention in Bruno were the only thing I found funny about the film. In fact, I almost walked out, because the movie was so deeply mean-spirited in so many ways. (Spoilers ahead)

Choire Sicha at The Awl already explains how Bruno, a single movie, cannot be good or bad for the gays in our media-inundated culture. But if Sacha Baron Cohen's extreme "gay face" was not meant to root out and condemn homophobia, then what was the point? One could argue that comedy is about pushing boundaries, and that Baron Cohen's hyper-sexual Austrian fashionista is meant as an antidote to mainstream complacency. But when Baron Cohen pushed the limits by trying to trick an unwitting Ron Paul into making a porn with him, it wasn't edgy—it was just mean. Ron Paul didn't do anything to deserve such public humiliation except have a guilible press agent. As A.O. Scott noted in his review of Bruno, it's hard for Baron Cohen to argue that he's fighting against the milquetoast when he has megastars Sting, Bono, and Chris Martin playing along.

If boundaries are pushed and the result is neither funny nor thought-provoking, then it makes for a terrible movie-going experience. There was one part where a group of Southern hunters had hospitably agreed to take Bruno out on a camping trip. He repeatedly makes passes at them, and they do not react to his provocation. In the middle of the night, Bruno goes up to one of the hunters' tents, completely naked, and asks if he can come in because a "bear ate all his clothes." The hunter told him to fuck off. On one hand, the hunters come off better than almost everyone else in the movie, because they refuse to rise to the bait. But again, they didn't deserve to be screwed with in front of millions of people. I also wondered: What would the audience think if the hunters had been women? And they had been accosted by a naked man while vulnerable and asleep in their tents? I bet Baron Cohen would never have crossed that particular line.

Apparently I'm not the only one who is disgusted by Bruno. While the film dominated the box office overall, the number of people going to see it plummeted by Sunday. According to EW, "that considerable ... drop may also indicate poor word-of-mouth."

Photograph of Sacha Baron Cohen as Bruno by Sergio Dionisio/Getty Images.

Tags: A.O. Scott, Borat, Bruno, gay face, Homophobia, Sacha Baron Cohen

From my many years of writing about evangelicals, I often get e-mails from conservative Christian sites. One I got yesterday labeled: “WARNING: Protect Your Children” caught my eye. Bands of child molesters? Gay teachers? More abortions? No, worse. Sacha Baron Cohen. The e-mail is a classic in the genre of scold while titillate:

"BRÜNO is the most vile, perverse movie ever made by a mainstream movie studio,” the e-mail from the Christian review site Movieguide begins.

This disgusting, abhorrent movie contains (among other things) extremely graphic scenes of heterosexual and homosexual sex acts, explicit scenes and extended close-ups of full male and full female nudity, an extended scene of a totally nude heterosexual woman repeatedly whipping a homosexual man in his bikini briefs, partial nude scenes (including full rear male nudity) where body parts are partially covered up with black bars placed in strategic places, obscenely graphic verbal descriptions of perverse sex acts in dialogue and conversations with real people, and images of a male black baby from Africa in a hot tub with white adults who are clearly interested in doing some kind of sex acts with one another.

This movie is going out to thousands of theaters in neighborhoods like yours. Many of these theaters are located in shopping malls and movie multiplexes where children of all ages congregate, with and without parents or adult guardians.

Time is short, so we have to act now!

Photograph of Sacha Baron Cohen as Bruno by Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: Borat, Bruno, evangelical christians, Sacha Baron Cohen