I always thought that the movie Brüno was a very ambivalent kind of thing. The people I watched it with definitely got a lot of laughs out of it. You have to admit, with the brain switched off, it’s quite entertaining. No? Fine, some found it boring at best.
Now, with the brain switched on, I had some trouble making up my mind. Either, the movie was great because it revealed people’s intolerance, immorality, stupidity, and so on. Or, it actually ridiculed gays and their efforts to be accepted as equal members of society. Either, Sacha Baron Cohen was a genius in pulling off these controversial characters, or he was just comfortably riding on Hollywood’s PR and marketing machinery.
The latest revelations about the making of the film certainly tipped the scale in favor of the negative point of view. Watching the movie, I was convinced some of the parts were staged. Fair enough. Turns out, they were not only staged, but the producers and Cohen tricked people into the interviews with Bruno by giving them false and misleading information. Okay, not so cool. But I guess we all knew that somehow…
What I didn’t know was that Cohen also publicly lied about how they shot some of the scenes, in particular the part with the alleged terrorist. On the Letterman show (see below), he described in all sincerity how they had to go through the CIA to find him and deploy bodyguards when interviewing him. Not really, sorry.
According to The Guardian the “terrorist”, named Ayman Abu Aita, is “a Christian Fatah representative – of the movement’s political wing, he stresses – for Bethlehem district. He is also a member of the board of the Holy Land trust, a non-profit organisation that works on Palestinian community-building.” The article goes on to tell quite a different story about how the interview came about.
After that, I find it hard to see anything but a well-staged PR and marketing campaign in Brüno. Some may think, “I hate to say I told you so…”
HerrHorn.com 