Posts Tagged ‘The Guardian’
News of the week
(500) Days of Summer
Widely celebrated in the US (ovations at Sundance; an opening weekend netting over 24 times its budget), this emocore indie monolith will soon reach these shores. I actually quite look forward to it – it has a guilty appeal, and for all its affected eccentricity (come on, just look at the title), derivativeness and nauseating too-cool-for-schoolery, it looks to be incredibly well written. Reviews so far have been mixed: see here and there.
Brüno ***
The third (and presumably final) cinematic outing of Sasha Baron Cohen, Brüno is alternately sharp and woolly, funny and painful. The second sub-character from his successful British comedy Da Ali G Show, Brüno is a GAY Austrian television personality and fashionista whose initial purpose was to provoke all kinds of inanities from models and designers, to puncture their pseudo-intellectual veneer of meaning. Yet this sound comic basis lasts all of one minute into the feature, when it descends into the same set-piece exploitation format which came to define Borat (and only re-emerges in a potent second act climax, when Brüno finds pushy parents eager to place their tots in hazardous, vile and inexcusable photo-shoots). Brüno also shares the same loose narrative structure of Borat, but without the ‘depth’ of characterization or any emotional investment (except for a general sense of unease at pathetic Brüno’s constant subjection to threat). And so ultimately, it boils down to little more than these sketches, which are at their best an appauling, grimacing experience, and at worst, stagey and conceited.
What a shame, then, that Brüno stopped drawing stupidity to the lips of some of the Western world’s worst air-heads (only to start spouting that same stupidity to provoke his targets’ prejudices, inhibitions and sometimes, strength of character – and make no mistake, every audience member is as much a target as are the barreled fish on screen). Unlike Borat, Brüno was always a flimsy character, essentially a more direct mouthpiece / weapon / vehicle for Baron Cohen himself – and this wasn’t a problem when his routine went along the same lines as Dennis Pennis. But when he says and performs outrageous things on film in the name of exposing the prejudice of others, he leaves himself as well as his character open for judgement. And I won’t bother going into depth on all the criticisms trotted out already (the duplicity of setting folks up while staging much of the content; of breaking the gag by getting Bono and the gang in on it; claiming to make quasi-ethical or moral points; a critical embargo excepting top marks from The Guardian; compromising some sort of integrity by snipping the film to get a 15 rating) but I will defend Baron Cohen on one count: he hasn’t really claimed to be exposing their (and our) prejudices.
