Original "Bruno" ending gay-bashes for laughs.

There's such a thing as good, smart satire in the world, but Sasha Baron Cohen isn't it. I turned Borat off after 15 minutes because I just didn't find it funny. I also don't find Chris Rock's racial humor funny either.

Repeatedly beating the audience over the head with offensive stunts, stereotypes and phrases isn't satire - which is defined as:

the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc 

 

SBC's humor is, if anything, the opposite of satire - it's a cheap parade of stereotypes without the benefit of a lens to focus the lesson.  At that point, to me, it's just bigotry disguised as commentary.

The fact that he had originally thought a bashing with permanent brain damage was funny just goes to prove the point.  

SBC won't get my $12 this weekend, or any weekend in the future. 

I most certainly will not be seeing Brüno, primarily because it's not my type of humor. I don't enjoy watching people unwittingly being made the butt of a joke. It's on the same order as Candid Camera which I also didn't enjoy watching. It makes me cringe to see people go through the unpleasantness of dealing with this guy for no reason other than to entertain an audience.

Second, I fear that Brüno is going to add fuel to the barrage of insults that people with the mindset of teenage boys like to hurl at people who are different from them. If the intent of the movie is to make fun of homophobes, rather than The Gays, I feel that point will likely be missed by a fair chunk of the audience. We'll all likely be hearing quotations from the movie ad nauseum.

I'm not above laughing at stereotype-based humor, but there is such a thing as going too far with it and Brüno seems like it will probably do that. The jury is still out though.

~ Dave

It's not Satire, it's a cheap floorshow performed by an attention whore. I'd rather gouge out my eyes with a Grapefruit spoon. I wouldn't even watch it if it were given to me on Blu-ray DVD with a $100 dollar check inside.

Here's to hoping he disappears back into whatever cesspool he crawled out of a couple of years ago.....

 

I'm going to keep an open mind on this one...like I always do ;).  I mean I can't judge it until I see it anyway. But I wouldn't be surprised if I do come out the cinema very offended...especially when gay people still use homophobic slurs to describe themselves and I bet there will be slurs aplenty in this film.

this is my point. i'm all for laughing at ourselves, but it's like SBC does it to the extreme of not even saying "come on guys, laugh at yourselves" but instead, "come on everyone else, laugh at the stupid gay people! see how silly they are with their sex obsessed lives and stupid babies and hahaha, brain damage!!"

....cuz a gay person being brain- ok, whatever. hilarious.

 

 

 

I probably won't see the movie because it just doesn't look that funny to me.  But I'll reserve judgment on whether or not it is offensive without having seen it.

I will say, as awful as this may sound, that no subject should be off-limits in humor.  ANYTHING can be funny if it is done well.  For example, "Heathers" is one of my all-time favorite movies and it is a very dark comedy about suicide.  Granted, the description of the scene with Bruno's fiancee as a victim of gay bashing sounds awful, but so would many scenes from "Heathers" removed of the context of the film.

I doubt I'll be seeing this in theaters.

Although depending on the outcome I might watch it once it's airing on HBO or something,  it doesn't look too good though and I'm expecting that if I go to see it in theaters I'll ruin it for anybody else watching by shouting about how bad and offensive it is.

 

But I'm still open to the idea that it might succeed at being good satire as it was a little funny when in the comercial he tricked the soldier into shouting "Stop putting your fingers in my alley!".

 

But not enough to convince me to go see it =/

And most of the jokes seem to make Bruno himself the butt rather then the homophobes. 

I believe Cohen thinks he is doing something great with Bruno and Borat. The problem comes when the people who go to see it aren't evolved enough to understand Bruno is meant to be a cartoon character and nothing like your average gay man.

I think people who are already homophobes will stay far away from Bruno for the most part. Just the trailer is probably enough to scare them away since it looks so *gay*. I worry about th young audience. The audience who doesn't know any gay people and aren't grown up or smart enough to know it is satire.They are the ones who could leave the theatre profoundlychangedby this film. We will have to wait and see.

I firmly believe that SBC made Bruno with the same spirit as Borat- it is satire, with a biting message. However, if not stopped, some people can take a joke too far. Perhaps he meant to show that gay bashing DOES still happen and can have crippling effects, just as he wanted to show how awkward people can become around the LGBT community with the character itself. However, did it translate? No. And it's not in the final cut of the movie, so I won't make an issue of it.

Where's Sacha?  If he really wanted to make a statement, he could easily take off his Bruno face, appear as himself at this event, and tell the world what he really hopes to accomplish with this movie.  Whatever happens, he's going to make a mint--maybe even enough to pay off his legal costs.  Meanwhile, I'm celebrating by going to an Ute Lemper (if she's not a gay icon, somebody's not paying attention) concert at the Barbican and Sondheim's "A Little Night Music."  Plus, I hope to see a couple of films at the Pout Festival. 

"The mountain has wings."

So I'll be sure to check in here with my reaction.

 

Over the past few days I've been getting a lot of calls from different reporters asking about what "gay audiences" are going to think about it? Apparently that's the hook for press interest. Well we'll just have to see. Can't say I'm exactly "looking forward" to it. But things have changed significantly over the past few years. Whatever Sacha Baron Cohen comes up with no one is likely to mistake it for the "real" story of what Teh Gheys are "actually like."

I'm going to see Bruno at midnight and can't wait. My mom and brother are going along with a group of friends. We love Borat and Cohen is a hilarious genius.  I can't wait.  It's meant to offend, and if you take it personally then you're reading into it waaay too much.  The main point of the movie is to see how ordinary people act around him and watch them make fools of themselves in front of america.

One should have to pass an intelligence test before they are allowed to see the film. If you are able to consume and not duplicate the behavior, IE if you are not a child or a retard, you can see it.

This movie is not for the sort of person that wont' get it. Though I'm prepared for all the homophobic groans from the straight audience.

I'd rather see Bruno than listen to another MJ song!

http://themenstruator.podOmatic.com

Never in my life will I ever go and see Brüno. I've seen bits of Borat and I thought it was deranged. I can't see Brüno be any better. It's just so NOT AT ALL my kind of humour.

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R.I.P.  Heath

JEFFREY WRIGHT for "MLK Jr" biopic!

but I won't see it.  In another blog, I alluded a comparison of Bruno to a gay minstrel show, and was shot down by other bloggers that said my impression was deluded and trite.  Guess what, I don't care! I think its wonderful that we can agree to disagree. 

If Cohen, or anyone, built a movie he thought was satire about a Downs syndrome alzheimer paraplegic bedwetter, I wouldn't find it funny either (not comparing the Brumo or Borat characters to the former in any way). 

Satire to teach is one thing, but if he thinks Bruno will teach something, he is overly optimistic about the intellect of the average moviegoers - who don't even turn off their cell phones and carry on extended (loud) conversations during a movie.

...

But I thought Cohen did a Great Job as the barber, Sr Pirelli in Sweeny Todd with Depp.

I will not be seeing Bruno in the theaters. I'll do what I have done with other shows that I think i SHOULD see but don't really WANT to see and that's borrow a copy from a friend or bit-torrent. 

Borat was stupid and while it showed some of the insane for what they are it mainly pandered to a lot of low brow garbage and I try to hold myself above that kind of crap.

The face that SCB has to put on a disguise to be funny should tell you more about his work than anything you will read in the tabloids or a biography.  

Under what criteria could Cohen and Universal think it was funny to show a gay bashing and then a victim of same crippled and brain damaged?

What would the reaction be of the audience (and feminists) if a female rape victim had been shown in this way?

I've tried to take a sophisticated and optimistic view of the movie but now I'm not so sure after hearing about this original ending, and I wonder what Nukely thinks about that particular plot device. 

Looking on the bright side, at least they edited this ending out, because the only two gay male members of the test screen audience spoke out against the scene.  But there was some reluctance and apparently some ire from the other members of the screen audience.

I don't get this, apparently Universal have said the intention was to lampoon or satirise homophobes.  But it just seems like it's the gays who are upset (with some justification) and the homophobes are not saying boo.  If they are they;re probably laughing.

So exactly what are Universal saying to defend themselves?  What is the weather like on their planet, if they thought for one moment that a gay bashing was a laugh a minute? 

 

 

 

I was an OK movie.There were some really shocking scenes though.I can not believe that they were allowed to show that kind of stuff on big screen.

The current ending was quite weak, several people in my audience were like: "That`s it?" Maybe I should be happy that they didn`t use the original one...

Despite legitimate concerns over the original ending, and it's good that went, the actual film when you see it is not so bad for us at all.

There was one scene that I found depressing, around the time they show Phelps people for no apparent reason, but apart from that, if anything Bruno's sexuality is reinforced by the end of the movie and the penultimate scene comes across as a confrontational statement about American homophobia at its most dark and dreary.

But even though my view about the film is now MUCH more optimistic, having seen it, I still think there is some legitimacy in concerns about too many stereotypes.  As long as we don't harp on that too much.  Because it may well be the film really is trying to slam dunk homophobia. 

 Here's a cut and paste of my "review" on another forum:

 Yes, a group of us saw the movie last night, and it seems most of us quite liked the movie. My taste in humour is more Monty Pythonesque than that, but I have to admit I did get some laughs out of some of the black humour.

It's hard to generalise, because some scenes worked and others didn't work so well, at least for me. Very subjective type of humour. One scene made me feel quite icky and depressed - it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But I got a few laughs out of the Jerry Springer style TV show, the "swingers party" woman, and I like the sheer subversiveness of the cage fight ending, which saved the film a little.

So people like that cage-fight audience actually exist? A bit of a worry. http://www.newsweek.com/id/205872

T thought it was a 7/10 and I'd give it 6.5