Brüno Will Brew No Tempest in a Teapot

You know that cliché about that freight train carrying a couple thousand tons of iron ore, pulled by four locomotives, bearing down on a Japanese subcompact car? You know, something that's in no way a pretty sight, but you keep looking anyway, for its sick entertainment value?

That's Brüno for you. You might as well skip this movie if it's not too late and you watched it already. (In case you've been living on the moon, the movie chronicles the misadventures of the eponymous gay, Austrian fashion reporter, embodied by Sacha "Borat" Baron Cohen.)

There's nothing good about that movie: I didn't expect a plot, but even the "acting," costumes, and mock German dialogue are too silly and over the top to be entertaining or credible to anybody but maybe to Palinesque hillbillies. You only keep watching and laughing at the reactions of allegedly real people that have to bear the brunt of this shit load of bad taste. (Whatever they paid that medium wasn't nearly enough.)

Unfortunately (?), nothing much happens. If there's one thing you can learn from this movie it's that these days even the worst kinds of people are more tolerant and less violent than I would have thought.

Or am I the only one who's not in on the joke here? I can't shake the feeling that those "real" people were mostly actors. Those references to Milli Vanilli must be Cohen's way of thumbing his nose at his credulous viewers.

It's hard to believe that that homophobic (mostly) white trash from Alabama and beyond let themselves get hit on and provoked by "Brüno" without killing him. But if that footage is genuine, it's fair to say that some day soon Cohen will probably get himself killed for his antics.

Whatever laughs you get out of Brüno are certainly too few to justify the movie's spreading of silly homophobic stereotypes. Dude, not funny.