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"A Plea for Tolerance in Tight Shorts"

By Ethan Brown

Strange article in the NYT this morning about Sacha Baron Cohen's upcoming film, Bruno.

The basic premise of the NYT piece is this: is the Bruno character--a flamboyant Austrian TV host--a homophobic caricature and will the Bruno film be seen by audiences as a re-affirmation of stereotypes or as an Out Magazine editor tells the NYT, a "two hour lecture" about the perils of homophobia served in an easy to digest comedic form?

I find this whole discussion strange and uninteresting on a number of levels: [More..]

I don't think art of any kind has to be socially responsible, in fact I think that great art is often deeply offensive;

The framing of the discussion around Bruno in the NYT piece is too simplistic--it's basically 'is/isn't' the film homophobic. What if the answer isn't that simple? I saw the Bruno trailer and thought that it seemed not all that funny, overly broad in its humor and worried that Cohen had overly camped up the character.

But I'm also curious to see the film because I'm fan of Cohen's and the NYT piece mentions a few moments that seem pretty fascinating, like Ron Paul walking off the set of an interview with Bruno muttering, "this guy is a queer."

The last and most important point is that the writer of the NYT piece doesn't at all discuss the Bruno character on Cohen's great HBO series "Da Ali G Show."

Bruno was by far my favorite character on the show because he exposed the rampant vapidity and stupidity of LA and NYC publicists, hairstylists and club promoters. I liked that Cohen's targets via Bruno were powerful East and West Coast types, not the Southern folks he made too easy fun of in the not very funny Borat film.

So the question for me re: Bruno is not whether or not it's homophobic but this: is Cohen willing to target the powerful or is he just going to make a safe and ultimately not at all challenging film like Borat? We'll see...

Full post as published by TalkLeft on June 14, 2009 (boomark / email).