Bruno

In what must be the most shocking and audacious American film in recent memory, Sacha Baron Cohen solidifies his status as gross out comedy’s golden god, and rare intellectual auteur. The brainiest, bawdiest, most jaw-dropping-est festival of dirty jokes and cultural satire since Borat broke, Bruno is like nothing else since, and certainly equal to its predecessor. There are more gasps per frame than any film I can think of and at least a handful of moments so drenched in muckraking social satire that you wonder how a single mind could conceive of both pieces of the puzzle. Director Larry Charles (Borat) is once again at the helm documenting Cohen’s outrageous behavior, partly scripted and partly improvised with real (unaware) participants in the fiction. Hewing close to the Borat mold, Bruno, the flamboyantly gay Austrian TV host, makes the exodus to America to learn how to become a big time celebrity. The result is an absolutely hilarious and uncannily perceptive piece documenting the hell of American celebrity media and the nation’s ongoing discomfort and homophobia.

The film lures in celebrity stooges such as “Gastineau Girls” socialite Brittny Gastineau (yes, that’s really how she spells her name) and “American Idol” judge Paula Abdul (who, in a film highlight, brags about her charity work while using a Mexican worker as her personal stool) and also engages in some of the most uncomfortable and unbelievable footage imaginable when Cohen travels to Israel to “solve the conflict with Palestine.” The results are too good to spoil even in passing and must be seen to be believed. The film climaxes most perfectly in an extended and absolutely fantastic sequence exposing the nadir of America’s cultural muck: machismo drenched homophobes attending a cage match. “My Heart Will Go On” will never be the same.

Grade: A