Word: barone
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...That appears to be the lesson from the studio estimates issued on July 13 for the weekend box office. Brüno, the Sacha Baron Cohen docu-comedy in which an Austrian fashion journalist shoves his flamboyant gayness in the faces and other body parts of unsuspecting Americans, won the weekend with $30.4 million, a bit above most industry expectations for an R-rated provocation whose star was unknown to the mass audience until his Borat became a surprise hit in 2006, earning more than $260 million at theaters worldwide on an $18 million budget...
...Baron Cohen, whose first job after graduating from Cambridge University was as a fashion model, deserves credit for pushing further than he did in Borat. He's beyond brazen in his forced marriage of suicide raids on homophobes and the cartoon mockery of rural Southerners - sort of al-Qaeda and Al Capp. But he and Universal (which paid a hefty $42.5 million for rights to the movie and launched a worldwide marketing campaign that brought the pre-release tab to about $100 million) had two hints that things could go wrong. One was the death of Michael Jackson, which spurred...
...other was the reaction by the gay community to the movie's depiction of an asinine, predatory homosexual. Baron Cohen probably figured that if anyone can take a joke, it's gay people. But the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation was not amused. The film "decreases the public's comfort with gay people," GLAAD president Jarrett Barrios said, adding that some scenes "hit the gay community pretty hard and reinforce some damaging, hurtful stereotypes" - an observation that was recirculated in the Twitterverse. Barrios noted that GLAAD staffers had seen an early cut of the film, and "unfortunately, the scenes that...
...Read "Brüno's Sacha Baron Cohen: More Than a Comedian...
...TIME's review of Sacha Baron Cohen...