Bruno G型教主

Like Borat, Bruno is taken from Cohen's TV program "Da Ali G Show." He's a gay Austrian host of a fashion show who, as "Bruno" opens, falls on hard times. An attempted fashion coup of a suit made of Velcro results in a disaster on the catwalk, and the hapless, lederhosen-wearing protagonist is, in his words, "schwartzlisted" from the industry. ("For the second time in a century," he somberly intones, "the world had turned on Austria's greatest man, just because he tried to do something new.")

Fazed but undaunted, Bruno attempts a comeback, first by going to Hollywood to host a TV show and, eventually, traveling to the Middle East to broker Arab-Israeli peace. (Confusing the Gaza leadership with hummus, he asks an Israeli at one point, "Why are you against Hamas when pita bread is the real enemy?")

After making a stop in Africa to swap an iPod for a baby, he finally lands in Cohen's favorite hunting ground for cultural extremes and religious oddities: The American South. Here, Bruno enlists in a National Guard training camp (he adds a scarf to his fatigues, declaring them "too matchy-matchy"), signs up with an evangelical "converter" who heterosexualizes gay men, takes a martial-arts lesson using anatomically graphic sex toys as props, and finally spends an evening with a group of self-described swingers.

These are all quintessential Cohen moments, and in "Borat" they possessed the vertiginous sense of spontaneity, danger and unwitting honesty that made that movie a cross between Jonathan Swift and Andy Kaufman. But in "Bruno," the skits don't add up to anything substantive, and even his swipes at U.S. politicians here seem gratuitously cruel (his quarry this time is presidential candidate Ron Paul, whom Bruno tries to lure into making a sex tape).

1|2|Next Page>>

SharePrintEmail

Write a Comment

Terms

Enter your comments - 3000 characters max

Type in image code

Submit

 Receive China Post promos
 Respond to this email