Above, workmen install a billboard featuring Sacha Baron Cohen's gay Austrian reporter Bruno on Oxford Street in Sydney, Australia. The film opens there on Monday. No doubt Bruno will be there, likely in some bawdy kangaroo outfit.
Here's a portion of a review from Hadley Freeman in The Guardian:
former Mossad agent if his biggest problem is pitta bread, not Israel:
"Hamas! Not hummus!" barks the agent – is that it is, in fact, an
unexpectedly moral film, which is not something that one might expect
to say of a movie in which the second scene involves sex with a pygmy.
But once you get past the outer crust of slapstick, far from being
homophobic, the movie satirises homophobia.
"This is not a
tedious example of postmodern liberal columnist twisted logic: the
movie actively points a chubby finger at homophobes and laughs at them
with a Nelson from The Simpsons-like 'ha ha'. And frankly, I'm far more
offended by movies in which the gay character is, yet again, the
neutered sidekick, there purely to provide a support and witty
sidecracks to his single girlfriend (Bridget Jones's Diary, any comedy
starring Rupert Everett) than anything Brüno does.
"Unlike Borat,
Brüno has not only a plot, but various points, the main one being the
idiocy of the pursuit of fame in LA via the adoption of African babies
and charity causes ("Clooney has Darfur – what is Darfive?") followed
closely by the stupidity of homophobia. The only people who might come
out of cinemas feeling hard done by are Paula Abdul, Latoya Jackson and
a preacher whose life purpose is to "convert" gay men and, for some
reason, I find it hard to muster much outrage on their behalf."
