What makes Brüno a better movie than Borat is not the quality of the gags, which have actually degraded from zany inspiration (the running of the Jews is a bit to make Woody Allen jealous, and Borat's clucking suitcase is comic perfection) to obvious shock tactics (a talking penis haw haw), nor the audacity of the stunts*, which to Cohen's credit are bolder and more pointed this time around. At play is the Bond principle, by which a movie is only as good as its villain, and homophobia in the US and abroad today is far more insidious than the reclining geezer of antisemitism.
The anger here at the ignorant and prejudiced is palpable, through not only the cruelty with which Cohen dupes and humiliates his unwitting participants but also the overall hostility toward the audience as again and again he rubs your face into his freshly bleached taint. Every bit of it is justified.
* Incidentally, fuck Ron Paul, an absurd secessionist and prolific publisher of bigotry.
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I still haven't seen Bruno, but I don't think anti-Semitism is quite as passe as you make it out to be.
ReplyDeleteRegardless I think Borat was more a mishmash of provincial/generic non-white than anything else. Speaking of which, did you know that in 1923 the US Supreme Court ruled that Indians, while Caucasians, are not "white"? Check it out:
United States vs. Bhagat Singh Thind
The slurpee was invented in the 1950s. Obviously the American people had no peacetime use for Thind.
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