Review of Brüno (2009) by Chads. — 10 Jul 2009

At any given moment, unflappable you, cerebral you, the you who laughed without apology throughout "Borat", is bound to be disconcerted by the lengths that the comedian/performance artist will go for a laugh.

Always an equal opportunity offender, Sacha Baron Cohen, trying on his latest outsider naif persona, an Austrian male model named Bruno, arrives stateside(like his Kazakhstanian predecessor with the gray suit) to disclose the ugly truth about American people.

With some heavy-duty instigating, however unfair, Cohen gets to the core of plain old folks' sensibilities towards race and sexual orientation, quite brilliantly, in typical gonzo style, at the taping of a daytime talk-show where a pre-dominantly African-American audience expresses their disapproval towards Bruno for adopting one of their own.

Oblivious to the minefield that lays ahead of him, in this scene, Cohen actually has the balls to set the gay agenda back, since Bruno shouldn't be anywhere near a child, while simultaneously presenting black people as hypocrites for denying homosexuals their civil rights.

Sure, the "Eurotrash" fashionista provokes the studio crowd with some outlandish race-baiting, but they boo him before his racist provocations. The breadth of Cohen's madcap chutzpah will set off explosions in your summer blockbuster-addled head.

Supporting gay rights with Bruno as its criterion is like being a Two Live Crew advocate during the eighties when Tipper Gore and the PMRC went after the misogynistic rappers. Cohen, who is Jewish, with his talent for getting unaware subjects to say the darnedest things, ironically(because of the anti-Semitic streak in "Borat"), evokes documentarian Claude Lanzman, whose dishonest interviewing techniques in "Shoah", got SS officers to talk openly about the Holocaust.

On a different scale from processing Jews for liquidation, but shocking in its own right, Cohen captures on film, a showbiz mother willing to cast her baby as a Nazi officer who pushes another infant, a representational concentration camper, into an oven.

Political correctness(supporting gay rights) collides with common sense(but not Bruno's rights) in this incendiary, but brilliant satire about the f****d up world we live in.