DVD Pick: 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 both the crude slapstick and observational humor which define the film. 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.