Story Created:
Jul 9, 2009
Story Updated:
Jul 9, 2009
There's all sorts of funny business at your local multiplex this weekend with Sasha Baron Cohen terrorizing innocent bystanders in Bruno or the lame-o teen flick I Love You, Beth Cooper.
Cohen, of
Borat notoriety, is back as one of his wacky characters that evidently captures ordinary people off guard with his bawdy behavior and offensive humor. This time it's as Bruno, a gay fashion correspondent from Austria who peruses the United States trying to catch people in bouts of bigotry and homophobia.
While Cohen's humor is certainly not for everyone, he does a brilliant job of making these situations as satirical and edgy as humanly possible. While purporting to all be real, some of the material in this looks a little too dramatic and a little too staged to take seriously. You can tell what's real because those are the people filing lawsuits.
If this is your thing, Bruno is rated R for pervasive strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity and language.
I Love You, Beth Cooper hopes you are nostalgic for those '80s teen comedies and don't remember them for bad character development or underwhelming plots. A nerdy kid -- played by Paul Rust, who looks too much like the Front Row at 5 critic -- declares his love for Beth Cooper -- as played by the she's-so-good-looking-it-should-be-illegal star of Hero's Hayden Panettiere - during his valedictorian speech.
What follows is, as the previews promise, a night neither one of them will forget. Whatever, because you will easily forget after director Chris Columbus beats you over the head with every dorky-teenager-gets-the-girl-of-his-dreams cliche in the book.
I Love You, Beth Cooper is rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content, language, some teen drinking and drug references, and brief violence.
