As I predicted last week, Sacha Baron Cohen’s Brüno continued its precipitous decline at the U.S. box office this past weekend. A week after finishing first during its opening weekend on the strength of audiences’ appreciation for Cohen’s previous film, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Brüno fell to fourth this past weekend, with a stunning 73 percent drop in audience numbers from the previous week.
Even though critics did their best to pretend this turkey was a pheasant, audience members obviously were spreading the word of their disappointment with the boring and beyond-asinine Brüno, as the film was neither consistently funny nor amusingly iconoclastic. On the contrary, Brüno slavishly gave allegiance to contemporary social-transformation pieties while unintentionally making homosexual behavior and the attendant lifestyle look appalling.
Audiences aren’t buying it.
–S. T. Karnick
Quite right, Warren. It’s a rather adolescent attitude. Satire has a great tradition, but it’s all about conveying a thought. Pouring contempt on people’s values is indeed merely insulting and ultimately isn’t effective.
Pushing the envelope doesn’t always mean insightful. Sometimes it’s just plain insulting.
Thanks for your comment, Peter. No, they perceive their job as being to educate the ignorant masses, using the movie beat as their soapbox. That is why they call awful films good and good films awful. It’s all about the indoctrination.
I’m interested to know – why would the large preponderance of critics be interested in telling people Bruno was good if it wasn’t? Isn’t their job to be critical?