Word: film
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...they've cracked the code. This has to be the single greatest existence in the world." In the first couple years I worked at the A.V. Club, I'd tell people that I was a critic. My family members would say, "Your cousin Lloyd wanted to be a film critic. Now he's a hot dog vendor at Wrigley Field." But then after a few years, my life kept having these strange parallels. I grew up in the same neighborhood as Siskel. I decided to go bald just like him. We went to the same elementary school...
...late-night stoned discussion of Seattle's annual HUMP! - a film festival for amateur pornographers - Andrew makes his "you, me and a camera" proposal. The film will be "beyond gay," and a likely festival winner, he thinks. But primarily, it's an insult to Ben, a gauntlet thrown down in the battle of the lifestyles, with the subtext, You're too square for this. (Andrew's main defense in life is that he's resolutely not square...
...turns out to be unfurnished, Brüno recruits some Mexican laborers to get down on all fours as human benches. What kind of person would actually sit on other people? Now we know: Paula Abdul, warily, and LaToya Jackson, with gusto. Jackson's scene was cut from the film after Michael's death, so unless it's restored on the DVD, you won't get to see that what really offends her about the situation is not the humiliation of the workers but Brüno's persistent attempts to get her brother's phone number...
...Baron Cohen's comic characters are as dumb and deplorable as the people they mock. Ali G is a self-deluding white guy who yearns to be a black rapper. Borat is a rube and an anti-Semite. This is why the inevitable debate over whether the new film is a critique of homophobia or an incitement to more of it misses the point. Brüno sees everybody in the pejorative, including Brüno, who is trivial, narcissistic, mean to his devoted assistant and obsessed with cheesy fame. But even so, he's preferable...
...could be looked at as the third in a trilogy of films that Baron Cohen has devoted to each of the three characters he developed first on British television and then on HBO. Though Ali G Indahouse was a hit in the U.K., it went straight to video in the U.S. Borat was, of course, a global cultural and box-office phenomenon, except maybe in Kazakhstan, where some people got a bit sniffy. Both characters are too famous now for Baron Cohen to use them anymore as a lure for the unsuspecting. Before the summer...