Crazy Heart

I finally got to knock this one off my list. And I'm really glad I finally got to it. It's always fun to watch movies after they've received their awards and accolades and then assess them for myself. The main hype around this movie was the acting of Jeff Bridges as Bad Blake, a washed-up, alcoholic country singer. Bridges earned his first Academy Award, and it was very well deserved.

Maggie Gyllenhaal, who I almost always like, plays a reporter that Bad meets in Santa Fe. She asks him for an interview and movie magic ensues. Their romance seemed just a little strange to me. He easily has 20 years on her, if not more. And their chemistry, while apparent and unforced, just bothered me a little. Only a little though. She has a son named Buddy, apparently she's a fan of Elf, played by a cute little kid named Jack Nation. Which, by the way, is an awesome and sure-fire movie star name. Jack Nation. Yeah, I can see that name in lights. I hope it's not a weird stage-mom concoction.

You know, I was going to do a tidy little plot synopsis as a part of this review. But I don't think I will now. Because frankly it's unimportant. The movie was satisfyingly undeveloped. The plot was simple, the conflict straightforward. It was pretty much just about Bad. It starts off with him performing a show in a bowling alley piss-ass-drunk, even leaving the stage to vomit in a garbage can outside. You can tell he's unsatisfied. You can tell that he's broken. You can tell that he has a lot of skeletons in his closet, a lot of baggage. But you can still tell that he's hopeful. He loves his music. And he really loves to perform. You can just tell. A bit later in the movie he walks into a bar in Santa Fe where he's playing to find a piano player who's going to be part of his backing band for the night's show just ripping on the keys. The guy's really good. And Bad acknowledges him, and his talent, and says that it's going to be really nice to play with a talented pianist again. And he does it all with a big, sincere smile on his face. Then he goes back to his motel room and gets drunk. Alone. It's that kind of dichotomy that makes Bridges' character so intriguing. The broken alcoholic juxtaposed with the enthusiastic musician.

Very little is said about his past. Besides a couple jokes about his 5 ex-wives and the mention that he has a son that he's never met. But not of that matters. Bridges takes over the screen in every frame. Everything going on plot-wise simply serves to provide a platform for Bridges' performance.

Aside from Bridges, the best part of the movie was easily the music, written primarily by T Bone Burnett, known for his work with artists like Counting Crows, Tony Bennett and Allison Krauss and Robert Plant and for soundtrack contributions to O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Walk the Line, and Ryan Bingham, a bull-rider turned Americana singer/songwriter. Bridges sings and plays guitar and so does, wait for it, Colin Farrell. (Yes, that Colin Farrell! He even sings and speaks with a country accent. Very convincingly too. I was so surprised. Farrell has always interested me, his rise and fall as one of Hollywood's baddest bad boys. And then he stunned me with his brilliant performance in In Bruges, one of my top 10 favorite films to date. While this role isn't one of his best acting endeavors, it is really good. Especially considering that he has one of the heaviest Irish dock-worker accents I've ever heard.) Every song seems to come genuinely from Bad's soul. And Bridges plays a huge role in that. He's a great singer and I'd honestly listen to anything he put out there. Full of regret and dissatisfaction, his songs epitomize the character. Frankly, the movie wouldn't be half as good without the music. And I don't even like country music. I would venture to say that I hate country music. I've always liked bluegrass and folk, just not country. It seems to be generally uninspired, ignorant, and annoying. If someone try's to tell me that that "Big Green Tractor" song is any good I swear I'm going to go postal. But this brand of country is different. It's about something more. It's honest. It's genuine. The way music should be. Good music should speak to you. And if I'm to be honest, if "Big Green Tractor" speaks to you, I'll never speak to you again.

Remember Me

Yeah yeah, I'm the worst blogger ever. I just haven't seen any movies in awhile. You'll live. And yeah, yeah. I saw a Robert Pattinson movie. Don't judge me. Oh, and spoilers abound so watch yourself. When I saw the previews for this movie a couple months ago, I thought it looked good. And I wasn't that worried about seeing a movie with a Twilight actor in it. Then I tried to watch New Moon yesterday. Which was bad. The acting in that one was so rough that I couldn't make it through. So I was a little wary of the potential bad acting. But this movie was really good. I really, really enjoyed it. Girls kept telling me this movie was "Like amazing!" And that's usually code for, "I'm not going to like this." But I did. I really did. Robert Pattinson was very good. And Emile de Ravin, Claire from Lost, is also good. Despite her pretty bad American accent. The rest of the cast also plays their parts very well. Chris Cooper, October Sky, Breach, The Patriot, and a slew of other movies I really like, plays Claire's dad, a Sgt. in the NYPD. And Pierce Brosnan, James Bond, Mamma Mia, Mrs. Doubtfire, plays Pattinson's dad. An uptight lawyer with mixed up priorities. He does this great kinda "used to be poor Brooklyn guy trying to be uppercrust" accent.

Pattinson plays Pattinson. Brooding and angsty, he seems really comfortable as this character and may face typecasting for much of his career. He has no direction in life. He doesn't work, he doesn't go to school, but he does "audit" classes. Which means he attends and learns without being graded or paying for the classes. It's kind of the Good Will Hunting approach but he just goes into the classes instead of just reading in the library. He and his roommate, Aiden, played by Tate Ellington who plays a very traditional comic relief role with brilliance, get into a fight and are arrested by Chris Cooper after Pattinson mouths off to him. Aiden, as a dare, convinces Pattinson to ask Claire out on a date to get back at Cooper for being a dick. Words of wisdom, don't date girls as a dare. It never works out properly. They fall in love, as they often do in movies. Claire's dad finds out about their relationship and Pattinson finally confesses to Claire that their relationship started on a dare. She get's upset and storms out. I don't know how I feel about that response. I mean, I understand that he wasn't really honest with her, but whatever. Their relationship is really now. Why does it matter why he approached her in the first place? Whatever. Girls are tricky.

One of the more interesting story lines involves Pattinson's family. His brother committed suicide on his 22nd birthday and it tore his family apart. He has a little sister, Caroline, played very well by Ruby Jerins, a very cute little girl with a lot of potential as an actress, who thinks that Pattinson hung the moon. Her artistic talent makes her something of an outcast among the "pretty" girls in her class. Pattinson tries his best to support her, but there's only so much he can do. Their father, divorced from their mother, is simply a check to them. He values his work over everything else and Pattinson really resents him for it. The conflict really comes to a head when Brosnan misses Caroline's art show. Pattinson storms into his office and really lays into him. They almost come to blows before they're stopped by others in the room.

The movie's set in 2001, in New York. You know this from the very beginning. And I thought right away, 9/11 is going to be related somehow. I didn't know how though. After Caroline is bullied to the point of breakdown by the "pretty" girls, Brosnan starts to come around. Pattinson flips out one morning after walking Caroline to school and destroys some school property and is arrested for the second time this movie. After bailing him out of jail, Brosnan gets a fire under him and begins to stand up for his family. Pattinson agrees to meet Brosnan at his office to go over some information about his lawsuit.

Then the movie gets interesting. Pattinson and Claire had just started to rekindle their relationship, and his family situation was finally turning out well. Pattinson is early to his dad's office and as he stands at the window of the office, the camera pans out and reveals that he is in Tower One of the World Trade Center. And everyone in the theater thinks a collective, "Shit! No! C'mon! Really?" The screen goes black and cuts to scenes of the other characters, ash starting to fall around them, just cry and look up into the sky. It's powerful. Like really moving.

I guess I knew that this might be a 9/11 movie. But I didn't really know.

I don't know if it's too soon for a 9/11 movie. I don't think so. It's been almost 10 years. Which is crazy to think of. It's crazy to remember where you were. 6th grade, outside of Mrs. Ault's science class. I remember not knowing exactly what the World Trade Center was. I remember thinking some drunk guy got into his twin engine Piper Cub and ran into an apartment high rise. I wasn't prepared. No one was. This movie took an interesting angle though. It got us invested in the characters, and then shocked us with the tragedy. Which is exactly what happened to all of us. There were regular people in those towers. With regular lives. It was really personal. And just like September 9 years ago, we were initially all too shocked to be upset. And that's how it was with this movie. I was too shocked to be sad. This one's good. As long as you can get past "Robert is Boverred" and Claire's accent, you'll really enjoy it.

Shutter Island

Woah nelly. Watch out when you read this reveiw. Spoilers abound. This is one of the more fascinating films (Yeah, I'm saying now. Right off the bat. I'm going to snob out on you guys.) that I've seen in a long time. This may be one of Scorsese's best films to date. Everything about it was very, very interesting. Leonardo DiCaprio delivers one of his best performances too. Which is saying a lot considering The Departed, Gangs of New York, Catch Me if You Can, Blood Diamond, The Aviator, and Titanic. And that's only like half of his resume. He's an impressive actor. One of my favorites. And this may be his best. Ever.

DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels, a US Marshall investigating the disappearance of a female patient at the mental hospital for the criminally insane on Shutter Island in Massachusetts. As the film progresses, the viewer gains an increasing insight into who Teddy Daniels really is. He says that the reason he wanted this assignment was a result of his wife's death in a fire in their apartment. He says that a man named Andrew Laeddis set the fire, and was now a patient on Shutter Island. He wanted to find Laeddis, and somehow gain closure in his wife's murder. But it becomes clear, relatively quickly, that his story is flawed, or at least in question. He begins having these bizarre dreams of his wife, and a little girl. He flashes back to his days as a soldier in World War II, where he was a part of a company that liberated the concentration camp at Dachau, where he sees the little girl as a dead body in the camp. The dream sequences are some of the best representations of dreams I've ever seen in cinema. Scorsese does a great job making them look like actual dreams. Everyone knows that dreams rarely make sense. You do things you wouldn't do normally. You say things that don't make sense. You react to things in irrational ways, even though they seem to make sense at the time. Scorsese is able to capture the lunacy of the average person's dream in viewing the dreams that DiCaprio has.

Mark Ruffalo plays Chuck Aule, DiCaprio's new partner, a recent transfer to Boston from the Marshall bureau in Seattle. This is absolutely Ruffalo's best performance, and comes at a time in his career when he seems to be shifting from the romantic comedy type role of 13 Going on 30 to a new type of role. That of the serious actor who takes small parts in artsy blockbusters like Where the Wild Things Are and large roles in independent feeling movies like The Brothers Bloom (Which was great by they way, I highly recommend it). I was on to Ruffalo though. At one point when he and DiCaprio were questioning other inmate/patients in the hospital about the disappearance of Rachel Solando, who was committed after drowning her 3 children and the dressing them up in her home and pretending that they weren't dead, one inmate asks Ruffalo to step away and get her a glass of water. After he leaves, she violently scribbles something down in DiCaprio's notebook. I immediately turned to my buddy and whispered in the theater, "He's Dr. Sheehan." Dr. Sheehan was Rachel Solando's primary psychiatrist while on the island. He had, reportedly, left the same morning they arrived for vacation, a claim DiCaprio never believes.

Sir Ben Kinglsey, famous for his portrayal of Gandhi in a film of the same name, is magnificent as the Dr. John Cawley, the chief psychiatrist on the island. The entire movie he is mysterious. Giving half answers to all of DiCaprio's questions and remaining detached from everything that's happening on the island. He is nearly emotionless the entire film, not an easy thing to do. It becomes very clear, very early, that Kingsley knows much more than he is letting on.

It was pretty easy to see in the trailers that DiCaprio is a patient on the island. I knew this, not form the film being spoiled for me, it just seemed pretty obvious from the trailers. What you don't know, however, is if he is actually crazy or not. You don't want him to be crazy. It's Leonardo DiHottie-o after all. And you don't think he is. You think he's being set up. You think that he's been asking to many questions on the mainland, and that he's asking way to many questions on Shutter Island. But in the final minutes of the film, we learn otherwise. He killed his wife, because his wife killed their three children. Rachel Solando is a figment of his imagination. And so is Teddy Daniels. DiCaprio's real name is Andrew Laeddis, the name of the man who he says killed his wife by burning their apartment. He's created defense mechanisms in order to distance himself from the reality of his own life. Everything we saw was a part of an experiment by Kingsley, the only person who thought DiCaprio was still able to be saved. Ruffalo is in fact Dr. Sheehan (Boom, roasted.) and was posing as his partner so he could keep an eye on him while he was having his way around the island "investigating". The role playing exercise was to be the last attempt to help DiCaprio before he was given up on and lobotomized as part of government experiments.

I didn't see that coming at all. I was really taken aback. But it finally all made sense. This film is an incredibly interesting look into the human mind. And we think we see DiCaprio come out of it. He wakes, finally, from another one of his hallucinatory dreams appearing to know exactly who he really is, and what has really happened in his life. He tells Kingsley and Ruffalo all about his true name and life story. This is a good thing. This means that he's cured. Then, as he's sitting on the steps of one of the buildings on the island, smoking a cigarette with Ruffalo, he wispers to him, "What's our next move Chuck? What are we going to do next?" Ruffalo nods sadly at Kingsley across the courtyard and a few orderlies begin to walk up to him. Then, DiCaprio says something really interesting to Ruffalo. He says something like, "Is it better to live as a bad man, or die as a good man?" He the gets up, joins the orderlies, and walks away. Presumably to be lobotomized, effectively ending his life. It's so fascinating. But I'm not sure what to make of that last bit. The movie ends immediately after the aforementioned scene, leaving the viewer to wonder about DiCaprio's fate, and the meaning of his last statement. Think as you will.

A Serious Man

This one was strange even by Coen brother standards. And you know, I didn't get it. Like at all. Which doesn't really happen to me often. I don't know. I watched it with a couple friends of mine, both just as "movie snobish" as I am, and none of us got it. and we're all pros at turning nothing, or next to nothing, into something. And we didn't get it.

Let's start with what I do know. Michael Stuhlbarg, who's resume includes a couple random TV episodes and a few movies I haven't heard of, is very good. Even though I'm not sure what he's good at. He plays a Jewish physics professor at some very small, almost community seeming, college. And I think he might be brilliant at it. But there's very little talk of that. He seems like a good guy I suppose. No terribly obvious flaws. But his life seems to be somehow spiraling out of control. His wife wants a divorce, and then wants to immediately marry a family friend, even though she insists that there has been no infidelity. And he believes her completely and steadfastly which I find strange. Then one of his students, unhappy with a failing grade, tries to bribe him. One of his next door neighbor's keeps mowing some of his grass, insisting that the property line is further towards Stuhlbarg's house than Stuhlbarg thinks it is. And his other next door neighbor, a cougar by all accounts, sunbathes naked in her back yard. His wife's "fiance", isn't that weird to say, then dies in a car accident and he's stuck paying for it. All the while, he keeps trying to see different rabbi's to get advice. A lot of other weird and incongruous happens too, but it would take several more paragraphs to aptly describe it all. It's just all really strange. I don't know. I don't like this feeling. I guess this is how regular people feel when the come out of "deep" movies.

I really think that everything has meaning. Especially Coen brothers movies. But I can't siphon meaning out of any of this. It all just seemed like it had meaning, I just couldn't glean what that meaning was. I can't even really come close. Some parts of me want to come to the conclusion that the movie is about meaninglessness. But I hate stuff like that. The point should never be that there is no point. That's just really stupid. That doesn't make a statement. That doesn't say anything. Except for saying that you're an ass for trying to say that everything is meaningless. I like the Coen brothers too much to think that they played that card. I mean I really like the Coen brothers. Burn After Reading, No Country for Old Men, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, all great stuff. I've never seen Fargo, but it comes highly recommended. By everyone. So I don't think they did that. The "Life is Meaningless" card is so 1960s, anarchy, apathy art. And that stuff is lame.

This movie's shot really, really well though. One of my friends, who's a photographer, remarked that every single frame of every single scene in this movie would be a great photograph. And he's really right. It's one of the prettiest Coen movies to date. They do a great job of framing closeup shots, and they're lighting is always great.

I think I liked this movie. I wanted to like it. I'm a sucker for Academy Award nominations and this one's up for Best Picture and Original Screenplay. And I don't really understand those nominations actually. The story is too ambiguous to be the Best Screenplay of the year and I don't think it stands a chance up against Up in the Air, The Hurt Locker, and Avatar (which I really, really hope doesn't win), among others, for Best Picture. I think the Academy likes the Coen's just as much as I do and so they give them courtesy noms. Which I'm OK with I suppose. This movie really just baffled me. Every component, good and bad, just didn't add up to anything that I could figure out. I just didn't get it.

(Footnote: I'm going to do this one as I rewatch it. One thing we all picked up on right away has to do with the student who's unhappy with his grade. One of his complaints is that he understands the anecdotes, but that he doesn't understand the math involved with the physics. This is almost the same exchange that Stuhlbarg has with one of the rabbis later on in the movie. Stuhlbarg say's to his complaining student that it's the math that matters, and that the anecdote's are just that, stories, fables, they don't really matter. One of the rabbis gives a similar answer to Stuhlbarg's questions about why all of these things are happening to him, the rabbi starts telling this long story that ends up being completely meaningless. The rabbi says, "We all want answers, but Hashem (God) doesn't give us any." I think that's what this is. An answer free movie. I actually think that this movie is about nothing. The Coen's, already having won their Academy Awards, just turned in some nothing. I tried reading some other reviews online, something I don't normally do when writing my own, and they all came back one of two ways. In paraphrase: 1) The Coen brothers deliver their most personal, dark, and humorous film to date. A modern day Job. A masterpiece. 2) The Coen brothers made a beautiful, empty movie. Unfunny, and ultimately meaningless. I'm obviously in the latter category. In one of Stuhlbarg's bizarre dreams he's teaching his class about the Uncertainty Principle of physics and he exclaims, "We can't ever know anything!" And I guess with this movie, we never really will.)

The Mothman Prophecies

You know those movies that aren't any good, but you remember them anyways because the movie watching experience was good? Snakes on a Plane is one of those for me. So is Marley and Me. The next addition to that list, The Mothman Prophecies. This movie was so lame. A movie is almost surely off to a rocky start when these words flash across the screen: "Based on a true story." You can hear the death knell of ringing softly in the distance. What those words should actually say, more often than not, is this: "Loosely based on a frequently misreported and misinterpreted story." And I'm pretty sure that's what happened with this one. The movie is based off of a "nonfiction" book by John Keel. The screenplay, however, seem to have changed the main character's name to John Klein, portrayed in this movie by the ever jazzy Richard Gere. Listen, I'm by no means a Richard Gere hater. Chicago was good and Runaway Bride and Pretty Woman, no matter how weird and 90's, have their place. But he was just bad in this one. Not horrible, but not good. Laura Linney, who I really like, especially in The Truman Show and the HBO miniseries John Adams, was fine. Will Patton, Coach Yoast from Remember the Titans (who inexplicably doesn't have a picture up on IMDB) did the best job acting, I think. He plays this crazy guy who's been seeing things and starts hearing voices et cetera, et cetera. But he's pretty believable. Debra Messing's in this one too but only for like 12 minutes while she's alive and like 40 seconds after she's dead. I don't know what the most terrifying part of the movie, which supposedly was supposed to be scary in some kind of psychological way, was the 1 second jump scene when Richard Gere turns over in bed to find his dead wife laying next to him or the fact that the studio ponied up the money to pay "Grace" for under 13 minutes of work. Whatever.

The storyline was pretty ridiculous. In summary:

Successful investigative reporter's wife gets in a car crash, sees crazy stuff, then dies. Same reporter, two years later, finds himself in West Virgina in a town of people seeing the same crazy stuff. Successful investigative reporter investigates. He starts hearing voices. Cute cop lady thinks he's going crazy. He visits a paranormal author in Chicago who absolutely is crazy. A big bridge collapses and 36 people die. Successful investigative reporter thinks he could've stopped it.

That's it. There are no explanations, no conclusions, no closure. It's weird. It would be like if LOST started it's final season but didn't even start to answer the questions that a devoted follower has had for 5 seasons (oh wait, that's happening now!). I just don't get it. I guess they somehow wanted to be truthful to the book it was based off of, but I get the feeling that they fudged a lot of stuff, so why couldn't they have just fudged an appropriate ending? By the way, the previously mentioned bridge that collapses looks exactly like that Universal Studios ride "Earthquake" where they put you in this car and show you how they used to do disaster special effects back in the 80s and 90s. The ride is fun because your little car rocks and your dad might get a lap full of water from some sort of tidal wave. Not because it actually looks cool. That's kind of how this whole movie was actually. It was fun because jokes and not cinematic masterpiece ruled the room and because there was a chance someone who gets too scared at unscary movies might get a lap full of water of some kind. Not because it was actually a good movie. (And the sorry the movie poster is so creepy to look at.)

It Might Get Loud

I really like documentaries. I always have actually. And this one was very, very cool. And it's about something I really like, the guitar. I'm no virtuoso, I'm just a dabbler. But I really enjoy playing and this movie made me want to be a better musician. It highlights the playing styles of three really revolutionary guitarists. Jack White from The White Stripes and The Raconteurs, The Edge from U2, and Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin. Three guys who couldn't be more different. Jack White's style, I think, was summed up in one of his explanations about his playing. He was talking about the kind of guitars that he plays, plastic guitars and really old beat up guitars with bent necks that won't stay in tune. He says, "I like it to be a struggle." I think that's so cool. And you can really hear it in his sound too. Everything sounds like it's taking just a little bit more energy than usual. The Edge is the total opposite. He is a true student of music. The professor of music actually. A carefully calculated technician. His moment most indicative of his playing comes at the beginning of this movie when his guitar tech is talking about his whole big guitar system. It's this giant, super computer that he runs his guitar through and creates these incredibly complex sounds. Everything is very precise. Jimmy Page's sound is about innovation. He always wanted to do things that other people didn't do. Create styles and techniques that no one had ever heard. He's the classic old time innovator.

They're background stories also came across as diverse. White grew up in South Detroit in one of the only white family's in his neighborhood. He grew up surrounded by blues and later hip hop, the former of which is very clearly present in his music. Especially his Raconteur's stuff. He talks about how his mission with The White Stripes was to distract viewers and listeners from the fact that he was playing electric versions of what otherwise would be blues songs. I thought that was really interesting. How he felt like he had to create an aesthetic to mask his true mission. The Edge grew up in Ireland during the height of the turmoil between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. He wrote one of U2's most popular songs, "Sunday Bloody Sunday", out of his own feelings of that turmoil. Page grew up in England and made his start in music as a studio musician recording every different kind of music you can imagine. His desire to innovate with the guitar, he says, came out of his growing distaste for the bland studio work.

The film itself (yup, I'm saying it for this one) is really brilliantly done. It was directed by Davis Guggenheim, of An Inconvenient Truth fame. Guggenheim's directorial work is fantastic in this one. He blends the usage of archival footage from Page's and The Edge's early years with photographs from that time. As well as putting in old live music videos from bands who these three guitarists considered influential, both positively and negatively, in their own playing. But the really masterpiece can be seen in all of Jack White's portions. Every one that he's in, or that focuses on his story, comes off as an art piece. I'm not sure why. Maybe White's character made that easier. Or maybe that's the only way you can show White. It seems like everything Jack White does is some kind of weird, almost esoteric, art. He's the most fascinating musician of the bunch, for sure. At least for me. And maybe that's because I really like all of Jack White's music. Especially his Raconteurs stuff.

I'd recommend this film to anyone who's really into music. And it's accessible to a lot of different generations too, because the 4 decade scope of the artists. I think anyone can watch this film and be thoroughly interested and inspired by one of the stories. This is the best documentary I've seen since Confessions of a Superhero. Take a look at it. It's easy to find. I got it from a Red Box.

Bruno

Haha, alright. Relax. This movie is ridiculous. And it's not anywhere near as good as Borat. But whatever, it's funny. Like really funny. Word of advice to guys, don't watch this with girls. Don't watch it with moms. Watch it with guys. Even though that makes it so much gayer.

So many shenanigans in this movie. Ron Paul, the Swingers Party, the Gay Counselor, the Middle East (yes, you read that right, the Middle East), OJ, Paula Abdul, the Psychic. The list just goes and goes and goes. But the best gag, absolutely, is the Hunting group. Sacha Baron Cohen, revising is Da Ali G Show character Bruno, goes hunting with three good ole boys from Alabama. The hunting itself isn't very funny, but that night, while they're sitting around the campfire, Bruno is as Bruno does. He say's, "Look at the four of us; we are so like the Sex and the City girls!" To which, one good ole boy says, "I ain't any one of them. I'm Donny." Bruno replies, "That is such a Samantha thing to say!" Gosh, I couldn't keep it together. Then they just sit there, in silence, for like 2 minutes. Which for dead time in a movie, is a long, long time.

Another really good moment is the series of interviews with the parents of toddlers who they want to put into movies. He starts asking them the most ridiculous questions like, "Is your child OK with antiquated heavy machinery?" "Yes, absolutely." "Does your child like phosphorous?" "Yes, he loves it." "Does your child have to be in a car seat or can she just free-style it?" "Oh, car seat, free-style, whatever." "Could your baby lose 10 pounds in the next week?" "Sure, I'd do whatever I had to do if that was what the job required." "And if the baby couldn't lose the weight, would you be OK with liposuction?" "Yes, if that's what it took." It's absurd. This is the closest Bruno gets to one of those brilliant Borat moments. And it's what made Cohen's first movie such a success. He has the ability to find people who let themselves be totally honest, even if their honesty is atrocious. And in spite of the bizarre circumstances, it's really an interesting look into human nature. Don't get all crazy with me. Everything that is honest, no matter how ridiculous, tells us something about human nature. It really does. And Bruno is no exception.

The reason this movie wasn't nearly as good as Borat is because there were only a few of those really honest, unscripted moments. Too much time was dedicated to things that the scripted out. All of Bruno's interactions with Lutz, his assistant played by Gustaf Hammarsten, are way to planned out. There just isn't the spontaneity and improvisational nature that we saw in Borat. There will probably never be another movie like Borat. And Cohen tried, with this one. It just fell way short. Reminder, don't watch this with girls. That's all I'm saying.