Brüno Review – No Borat This

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Borat came with both laughs and class (yes, the crass movie had a certain class to it).

Alas, while Brüno serves up the laughs in abundance the class aspect has surrendered to the crass element.

After a while, you get more than a little tired of the nudity, the anal bleaching, the dildos, the sex machine, the homosexuality, getting whipped, the homophobia and truth be said you get tired of the movie itself.

Following the Borat framework, in Brüno we have Sacha Baron Cohen once again coming to America.

Only this time, he plays a gay man from Austria in search of celebrity status.

In pursuit of his celebrity goal, we have Brüno trying his hand at various things like becoming an actor, talk-show interview host, taking up a charity cause, solving the Middle East crisis and bringing peace between Israel and Palestine, attempting to get kidnapped, adopting a black baby and toward the end even trying to become straight.

While some of the acts do raise some laughs (the warring parties in the Middle East are Jews and Hindus), the whole movie lacked the coherence, spontaneity and the life of Borat.

Besides playing the role of Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen (along with a few others) was responsible for both the shoddy story and screenplay.

Making a good comedy is a hard act but delivering a worthy follow-on to Borat is a harder act. In Brüno, while Sacha Cohen succeeds to some extent in the former because of his weird attire and weirder antics, he fails at the latter goal.

And the movie certainly did not seem like a spoof on homophobia in America.

Sex in the right dose, whether on bed or on the big screen, is fine but an overdose of it a la Brüno becomes a pain in the ass.

Just like this movie Brüno turns out to be in the end.

Overall, our ticket money ($9.75) for the midnight show of Brüno was not money well-spent.

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12 Responses to "Brüno Review – No Borat This"

  1. raghavendrav   July 10, 2009 at 11:02 am

    You saved my day yet again.. I wanted to watch it tonight but will avoid it after your review..

    SearchIndia.com Responds:

    We had high hopes too. 🙁

  2. Albert Camus   July 10, 2009 at 1:33 pm

    Rav, I know SI is going to get mad at me.. but will tell you this.. SI doesn’t like any midnight movies.. he/she/they didn’t even like The Dark Knight.. The surprise element in Borat will probably be missing in this one.. but I still think it will definitely be worth at least one watch.. Cohen is super-smart.. I’ll wait for the DVD.. Eminem probably knows the best..
    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=eminem+bruno

    which took me to
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=127_zhfui-M
    interesting coincidence.. the guy who is doing the jumping is called Bruno

    SearchIndia.com Responds:

    1. Midnight movies by the very time of the show raise expectations.

    Plus because of the cast (as in Dark Knight), or sequel (as in Indiana Jones or Terminator Salvation or Dark Knight) or follow-on (Bruno) or theme (Quantum of Solace) they again lift expectations and when they fail to live up to the heightened expectations we feel more let-down than we’d perhaps be if it were a regular show.

    2. Our feelings on Dark Knight were not the simple, bland SI didn’t even like The Dark Knight. They are far more complex.

    Here’s what we wrote in our Dark Knight review:

    With a hideously disfigured white face, a red slit of a mouth and a knife in his hand, Ledger is a gorgeous blood-dripping sundae, lip-smackingly good.

    Ledger cuts a more terrifying figure than Jack Nicholson after his fall in that vat of green chemicals in Batman (1989).

    ….To miss the Dark Knight is to miss one of the finest performances by a rara avis of Hollywood in recent years.

    Yes, we also wrote in the same review:

    Sadly, The Dark Knight movie itself doesn’t live up to the hype and heightened expectation.

    All the razzmatazz and special effects in Dark Knight cannot mask the absence of a strong, gripping story. The futuristic cars or the snazzy motorbike (in the case of Dark Knight), the jumps from towering buildings, the quiet flapping of the bat’s wings are no substitutes for an interesting, novel storyline. If you have watched Batman Begins, then it’s hard to shake off the deja vu feeling that creep by in Dark Knight, filmed mostly in low-light or semidarkness.

    The violence sometimes seems gratuitous and senseless, even if it’s perpetrated by an unhinged character and the fast chases soon induce ennui.

    3. As for Bruno, beyond a point you do tend to tired of the language and/or visuals centering around penis, asshole, blowjobs et al.

    A little bit of sex in a movie titillates and excites the senses, a surfeit of it irritates and grates on the nerves.

  3. nakul   July 10, 2009 at 4:18 pm

    Sania married ?

    SearchIndia.com Responds:

    Engaged, we think but we haven’t been tracking her marital status closely. 😉

  4. Dr.UnkHaf D. Aktar   July 11, 2009 at 12:30 am

    Sania is pretty but the nose ring is a turn-off. Wonder why she wears it all the time.

    SearchIndia.com Responds:

    It’s most definitely a turn-off.

    But she probably wears it as a good luck charm (which hasn’t worked in any case) or just to distract us into not looking further down at her orbs. 😉

  5. nakul   July 11, 2009 at 10:59 am

    Dear SI, understand its a kinda personal thing, but like to know u wear a nose ring or not.

    SearchIndia.com Responds:

    Obviously, time hangs heavy on your hands.

    BTW, did you watch Brüno?

  6. nakul   July 11, 2009 at 11:58 am

    tomorrow for sure. not enough stressed yet.

    what does he say about harry potter ? is the scene there in the movie ?

    SearchIndia.com Responds:

    During the Brüno screening, the theater did not show any previews of Harry Potter: The Half Blood Prince. Only that of Orphan and some other movies whose titles we can’t recollect now.

    Can’t remember if Brüno said anything about Harry Potter. Doubtful.

  7. nakul   July 11, 2009 at 12:56 pm

    sorry, i was confused with this.
    http://digg.com/dialogg/Bruno_1

    he says something like ‘you guys out there, keep away from him ….’

    SearchIndia.com Responds:

    Not in the movie.

    This looks like a Digg thing.

  8. StrYngLad74   July 11, 2009 at 3:14 pm

    Akhtar said: “Sania is pretty but the nose ring is a turn-off.”

    Opinions vary, but I have a thing for women with nose rings and studs ;), but none that involve piercing the septum. THAT’s a major turn-off for me.

    SearchIndia.com Responds:

    Back in the old days, Sridevi a.k.a. Thunder Thighs used to wear a nose-stud and that used to drive a friend up the wall.

    Savages, he used to thunder (referring to girls with a nose-stud).

  9. StrYngLad74   July 11, 2009 at 5:08 pm

    SI Said: “Savages, he used to thunder (referring to girls with a nose-stud).”

    Bandar kya jaane adrakh ka swaad? (How can a monkey appreciate the taste of ginger?)

    SearchIndia.com Responds:

    If our Tamil friend in Mumbai were to read this, he’d find it amusing.

  10. nakul   July 12, 2009 at 4:40 pm

    he says in one of the interview, “This is the most powerful documentary after Lion King”

    SearchIndia.com Responds:

    Rub-piss.

  11. monnu   July 16, 2009 at 4:27 pm

    am bit cornered, no other good movies.
    i think, mostly i have to watch this.

    SearchIndia.com Responds:

    We are going to watch an old Hollywood movie Love in the Afternoon (Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn) in a short while.

  12. niramay   October 20, 2011 at 3:00 pm

    I haven’t seen Bruno but i have seen Borat…the movie was an awesome work of art (no matter what Kazakhstan,Russia and middle eastern countries said about it) .

    I would have never expected Bruno to come even close to the standards Borat had set.

    SearchIndia.com Responds:

    Bruno was junk! Poor writing screwed it up completely.

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