After weeks of brooding, I finally got the chance to take out a girl who I’d been waiting to become “available” for the last six months. To say the least, it was an experience I’d rather forget.
Things started off well enough; we had Japanese food, coffee and pie and a nice stroll down Rockwell Power Plant. I was all giddy and bursting with that youthful enthusiasm which I’ve lost most of over time. Then I took her to see The Hangover.
While the film itself was highly enjoyable (I laughed so hard people behind us started to snicker at me instead of the jokes), I noticed my date looked quite nauseous. I initially thought it was the smell of my cheap aftershave, until I got home and she sent me as message explaining that she was a “conservative girl” and was very offended by the movie. I swallowed hard. I’ve had some disastrous results with women in the past (mostly because of my, uh, “indecisiveness”), but this was the first time that I actually had nothing to do with it.
She even went as far as to rant that I had “destroyed her innocence” and suggested I go to confession before even thinking about calling her up again. Needless to say, I’ve done neither.
Last Monday, my friend Mark paid me a visit to help “jolt me out of the blues.” And while I hate the pop-ins, I was rather glad to see him and even more delighted when he winningly held up a copy of Brüno — Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest flick after Borat.
After convincing me that the copy was “legitimate” (claiming his dad’s friend was a member of the MPAA), I excitedly loaded the thing and watched in anticipation what kind of nuttiness was in store. You know the feeling that you’re so excited to see a movie it never really lives up to the hype? Kind of a letdown, huh?
So I’m happy to say that Brüno surpasses anything I ever expected — or imagined for that matter. Without a doubt, the film, directed by Larry Charles, shows Baron Cohen at his best and worst.
The character of Brüno is a self-absorbed gay Austrian fashionista who is as delusional and sexually ambiguous as he is hilarious.
He sets the stage for his off-the-chart antics to come, by scolding humanity because “for the second time in a century, the world turned against Austria’s greatest man, just because he was brave enough to try something new” — a direct and obvious reference to fellow Austrian Adolf Hitler.
Things are going great for our hero until he’s fired from his TV reporting job for disrupting a Milan Fashion week catwalk, and his lover Diesel (Clifford Bañagale) leaves him for another man. Accompanied by his assistant’s assistant Lutz (Gustaf Hammarsten), Brüno travels to the United States to become “the biggest gay movie star since Schwarzenegger.”
What follows are the most outrageous, hilarious and offensive scenes in movie history. It also follows their Borat-style of guerrilla filmmaking and borders on porn, wherein Paula Abdul gets scared out of her wits being offered some food served on top of an overweight Mexican, wearing nothing but a condom. There is also the bizarre “celebrity max-out” video Brüno offers to an appalled focus group, where after dancing around in a skimpy outfit, he proceeds to show an extreme close-up of his penis with his urethra doing a shout-out at the end. Priceless.
In the course of it, he also tries to seduce an unsuspecting Ron Paul, visits a swingers’ party, and seeks help from a minister whose mission is to convert homosexuals into straights. The grand finale is set at an extreme cage-fighting match where the drunken, bloodthirsty fans get more than they bargained for. (Heh, heh… I’m actually laughing while writing this thing.) But the showstopper, at least for Mark, is a sequence in which Bruno seeks to communicate with a dead lover through a psychic. It was sick!
In any case, apart from setting up a series of Baron Cohen’s characteristic cons, the movie unveils its real purpose, too. According to Prairie Miller, that is, to mock and expose, literally and otherwise, an assorted menu of American phobias and contradictions, many of which render Brüno’s freakish posturing ironically tame in comparison.
All in all, the movie does push the boundaries of every moral issue in the book. And with political correctness now at its peak, it makes the film even funnier. Brüno is a filthy masterpiece, and I hope Baron Cohen’s genius for the comedic macabre doesn’t change.
There will certainly be a lot of people that will get offended by this one, so I do advise you to keep an open mind to it. By comparison Brüno makes The Hangover look like a Walt Disney cartoon. And I can’t help but wonder what my date would have said if we had watched this movie instead… Darn.
* * *
Email estabillo_rt@yahoo.com.