Weekend Watching
Monday, July 13th, 2009Brüno
Familiar with the character from Da Ali G Show but never particularly taken with his antics, I feared that Brüno would be a weak and very much one-tone follow-up to the shocking cultural offensive launched in Borat a few years earlier. Borat as a character worked on a number of levels, he weaseled into his guest’s good nature with an innocence before provoking reactions of racism, intolerance, prejudice, often to hilarious effect, and his general set-up had horribly racist overtones to begin with, however there was always a sense the audience was in on the joke so the edge wasn’t there.
Sadly, Brüno does not live up to Borat in that respect - unless you generally have a sense of homophobia or squeamishness with male nudity, you’re probably going to find it just plays to the range of extremes that you could rhyme off before entering the theatre. I laughed a lot but there’s little to recall. There’s a swingers party, there’s a spinning (talking!) circumcised cock, there’s a reality tv show review panel, there’s a BLACK talk show (BLACK capitalised because of all “AW HELL NAW” reaction shots), there’s a “cage fight” where the audience outside the ring is guilty of more violence, and these are the funniest parts of the movie. They are a mixture of staged/scripted fun and unscripted/reactionary mess, however only so much of it hits. There’s a section on the Middle East which is just tonally all wrong and seems more like a Borat bit, there’s an attempted seduction of a presidential candidate which is just very awkward without being terribly funny, there’s a sequence on child-model parents that comes off like a segment from Brass Eye and is more shocking than funny, and there’s a bit with some rednecks that comes off ENTIRELY scripted and acted as there’s no lead-in and an unbelievable outtro to the events (similarly, I believe they melded genuine footage of a swinger party with the fakery of the scary-titted-and-tatted BDSM blone that wasn’t actually ever there).
As a result, there are moments where it would’ve been just funnier if Bruno had been let loose in a general audience of middle America and tried to be that barometer for homophobia and prejudicial hatred, but at the same time I can understand why he didn’t do that - it’s been done, and probably better too.
Funny in places but also strangely lethargic or weak in others. B-
The Ice Harvest
Still not sure how I ended up stumbling across this movie but it stars John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton in a Harold Ramis directed neo-noir comedy about two guys ripping off the mob and taking off with a ton of money. Sounds good in premise but execution is just plain awful - there is no real plot beyond what I laid out above, the tone is completely muddled, the performances are phoned in, the characters are paper thin or incomprehensible in an attempt to appear quirkily complex (such as the lawyer buddy who’s married to Cusack’s ex-wife who hates her for some reason and wants to leave his step-family, Cusack’s family I should add, and run away with Cusack), abundant in noir cliches that don’t actually go anywhere or add anything, there’s also the repeated usage of a phrase that’s seemingly just a wanky reference to some obscure album.
Yeah, not much to recommend about this really except a good line after Thornton shoots a mob-hired assassin and says: “You’re dead… Stop standing there pretending like you aren’t dead” as the man totters on his feet, clearly dead.
Avoid. C-.
Old School
A recommendation. Never a big fan of “frat boy comedy” (Road Trip, American Pie and its ilk) this did little to sway me in its favour - sure, the laughs are there (squeamish laughter at Will Ferrell’s horrible body running naked through the streets, a huge fat guy getting pulled from the roof by a breezeblock attached to his pecker as part of a frat pledge, one or two sight gags and one or two lines, Will shooting himself up with pony tranquilisers and Sean William Scott’s mullet) but everything inbetween is interminable pain of a terribly acted love scenes, morality lessons learned and, most bizarrely, an ugly sequence during the credits where two unlikable characters are rather brutally killed. I guess that’s preferable to the semen/shit/piss gross-out humour that often litters others in this movie’s genre.
At the end of it all, not a patch on Blades of Glory, a comparable “blokey” type comedy that’s actually genuinely funny and also hits all the requisite “frat boy” low notes. C.
The Wire (Season 3)
The most critically acclaimed show on TV already had me as a die-hard fan, but season 3 just outdid itself - the quality of writing, the scope of the story arcs, the comprehensiveness of character and the loving detail in which the rise and fall of an empire is charted is quite awesome to behold. This is the season that says goodbye to many characters (literally and figuratively) and those who return (not rising from the grave) will be different people, completely changed by the events that unfolded over this season. Uncompromisingly honest at all times and featuring some of the most insightful writing about the horrors of the drug trade and even greater atrocities carried out in the name of political “progress”, with each passing season I become more and more a raving proselyte.
SEE THIS FUCKING SHOW. A++++.
