Brüno (2009)

Whoa. This is not for the faint of heart or closed of mind--on a scale of 1 to 10, it has a cringe factor of 15. Jack liked Sascha Baron Cohen's (Cohen had cameos in Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)) Da Ali G Show on HBO, in which Cohen introduced his characters of Borat and Brüno (I didn't see it). We both loved the feature Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006), in which Cohen (who is Jewish, duh) plays Borat, who is anti-Semitic. In Brüno, Cohen (who is straight) plays the title character, who is gay. Both have been called one-joke movies. Both have Cohen out in public with non-actors who think they're being filmed for documentary or interview purposes. I would say Borat, the movie, had a cringe factor of only (!) 8.5, and showed many more hilarious reactions of Cohen's unwitting victims. In Brüno, Cohen's envelope-pushing is the joke, while the onlookers look on, usually in disgust. I think the envelope is torn now.

It's impossible to recommend this movie, because everyone's cringe limit is different, but many will find it funny (not enough, however, to keep it from diving in the box office statistics, but I predict a long life on DVD). After the fact, Jack & I keep thinking of gags that we'll laugh about later (e.g. the Smart car, the stage parents, his "luggage"), so we're not at all sorry we saw it. The music video at the end is great, too. Caveat emptor: This may be rated R, but should be NC-17, in my humble opinion.