Agreed, I was hoping that the time that had passed since I saw Borat would mean I'd find Bruno hilarious, but although I did get some great laughs when it hit the mark, a lot did fall flat.
The problem for me was that it was trying to make fun of people's reactions to his nudity and/or homosexuality, but I didn't really blame them for their reactions. The focus group, the hotel staff, even the hunters - they were just ordinary people put in uncomfortable situations, which I guess some people will find funny, but I just felt sorry for them more than anything. It's hard to laugh at people who don't deserve to be laughed at.
Then when he comes across the Westboro Baptist Church, who do deserve to be laughed at, he's there for less than 10 seconds!
What he should've done was more stuff like the scene with the fashion designer. I was anticipating a sequence of pretentious designers and airhead models being goaded into making fools of themselves on camera, all in the name of fashion and self-promotion. That would've killed, but it wasn't to be.
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johnnywalker2001
14 years ago
Totally agree. With Borat, the people were genuinely shown to have despicable opinions and ideas, set apart from Borat himself. Even for the few people who weren't shown in that way, it was their own ignorance about what someone from the Middle East would behave like, that essentially made it ok to laugh at them (to me, at least).
Also, Pamela Anderson was in on it (obviously).
Bruno felt much more scattershot and random. It missed the mark a lot of the time because people's reactions were understandable (and I don't mean the cage fight riot). Bruno's TV show WAS awful, he WAS a bad parent, etc. With Borat, you'd have to be incredibly stupid to think that just because a man was foreign that he'd have the mental capacity of a peanut, but with Borat, he was just genuinely unlikeable -- and that had nothing to do with him being gay.
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inhospitable
14 years ago
I think he was trying to avoid just remaking Bruno from the tv series because that's where they mostly lampooned pretentious fashion industry types and hit the nail squarely on the head. Unfortunately they must have been goaded into focusing on homosexuality knowing it would trigger a stronger response with the American audience and participants.
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