Sacha Baron Cohen is just not seeing eye to eye with the remaining members of Queen who have script and director approval over that biopic on iconic lead singer Freddie Mercury. That film had Cohen circling the role but I've just learned he's now pulled out. The reason is that the band wanted to make more of a PG movie about Queen while Cohen was counting on a gritty R-rated tell-all centered around the gifted gay* singer.
Please please please let this be true. Cohen does indeed have an uncanny resemblance to Mercury, but I can't think of a worse person to play him, for a lot of reasons.
Just for the record, if I have to see this advert for Sacha Baron Cohen's new film The Dictator one more time, I am going to lose my shit.
Male voiceover, over the scene of a parade from the film: Time magazine raves The Dictator is "infernally funny." [Quoted text appears onscreen.]
Cut to a scene of Sacha Baron Cohen as The Dictator working in a deli. A fat white boy tells him, "Shut up, loser." SBC kicks him into a stack of boxes; the kid yells and SBC laughs.
Voiceover, over scene of crowd cheering for The Dictator: Roger Ebert says Sacha Baron Cohen is today's "best comic filmmaker." [Quoted text appears onscreen.]
Cut to a scene of SBC as The Dictator delivering a white woman's baby. "Bad news—it's a girl," he says. "Where's the trashcan?"
"No!" cried the father. "That's the one we wanted!"
Voiceover: The Dictator. Rated R.
I agree that narratives, attitudes, and beliefs resulting in widespread female infanticide need to be challenged. I don't think that ironic "jokes" at which murderers of female babies could laugh without a moment's discomfort is the way to do it.
And not to get all What About the Menz? about it, but SBC's characters function as stand-ins for entire classes of people, and the men of Arabic extraction who love and value their daughters are being disappeared under the weight of this outsized stereotype—which, you know, doesn't actually help the cause of valuing daughters.
It's not that I don't get the joke, even though I am the Most Humorless Feminist in all of Nofunnington. I get it. I just don't think it's funny.
Pauly Shore, who I'm fairly certain found his way back from the wilds of oblivion by following the scent of this post, just showed up back in civilization in order to consult with an attorney about suing Sacha Baron Cohen for, I shit you not, allegedly stealing Shore's idea of adopting an African baby as a plot device. (No word on whether Shore will also be suing Madonna.)
In any case, this story was reported at, among other places, the gossip site In Case You Didn't Know, where the accompanying picture of Shore was emblazoned by a pop-up ad...
...for Brüno, featuring an image of the titular character holding, natch, his adopted African baby.
I'd almost feel sorry for Shore, almost, if he weren't, ya know, effectively arguing: "Hey! That totally racist joke was mine first!"
lolsob
If I hadn't already quit the world today, I would now.
Last night, while KennyBlogginz, Iain, and I were hanging out watching Dance TV*, we saw an advert for Brüno, which naturally prompted me to groan and splutter and rant about how filled with loathing I was for it.
Liss: ARGH! I hate everything having to do with this film! Fucking Brüno!
KBlogz: Looks like you're quite the homophobe over there.
[Iain and I burst out laughing.]
Iain: She hates Borat, too.
KBlogz: You hate Kazakhs, you hate gay people… I can't wait to see what kind of character Sacha Baron Cohen does next so we can see who else you hate.
So, Spudsy and Deeky and I have already parsed the megafail that is the premise of Sacha Baron-Cohen's upcoming trainwreck Brüno, in which the straight actor purports to expose homophobia by portraying a mincing gay stereotype, without a trace of irony.
Now that the marketing for the film is in full-swing, the collection of idiots that is the American media is playing along, with MTV giving Baron-Cohen the opportunity to do his predatory gay shtick at the MTV Movie Awards, and various outlets allowing him to do interviews as Brüno, complete with all the gays-are-funny double entendres that are a hallmark of the character.
Today I see that GQ is featuring Brüno on its July cover:
[Click to embiggen.]
My first thought was: When was the last time they featured an actual out gay man on their cover?
The answer is possibly never. I went back through every cover since Jan. 1990, and among the hundreds of actors, singers, athletes, politicians, and other famous men pictured, not a single one of them is gay and out.
It would rock my world if, on July 10, the day Brüno was scheduled to open, Sacha Baron-Cohen instead announced that the entire thing was a scam, designed to reveal the depth of the American media's hostility toward real, ordinary gay people, and every scheduled showing of Brüno would actually be a screening of The Celluloid Closet.
But somehow I don't think that's going to happen.
Instead, it will just be another straight dude being a hugely offensive wanker and calling it edgy, dismissing his critics as humorless losers. Rinse. Repeat.
Rare is the day when you will find me mounting a vociferous defense on behalf of Eminem, who, despite the fact that I find him an extremely talented performer, regularly makes my skin crawl with his insistence on using that talent to pen tracks rife with misogyny, homophobia, fat hatred, and rape fantasy. But here's the thing: That doesn't give anyone the license to molest him for comedy.
(I can't actually believe I have to write that sentence, but that's the sort of thing I've had to write a lot during the "Rape is Hilarious" series, the latest installment of which can be found here, with the rest linked at its bottom.)
If you can't view the video, it's a clip from the 2009 MTV Music Awards in which Sacha Baron-Cohen (aka "Borat"), in his Bruno (a gay fashionista) persona, is swinging out over the audience on a harness dressed as a "dove of peace" in feathered wings and skirt (under which he is wearing only an ass-bearing jockstrap) when his harness appears to get caught and tangled. He is lowered face-down on Eminem's lap, at which point his (clothed) balls and (naked) ass are directly in Eminem's face. Eminem looks horrified and, in my estimation, scared, as he asks, "Are you serious?"
Eminem and his entourage roughly shove Baron-Cohen off of him, as Baron-Cohen says, "Hey, don't touch me, guys! I've already got a boyfriend!" and the audience roars with laughter while Eminem walks out.
All of this, of course, is hilarious—and has further been justified because it "exposed Eminem's hypocrisy" since he can "dish it out, but can't take it." ("It" being his habit of being an asshole to other people, which he is, but I've not heard he routinely molests people in public for yuks, so it's a pretty weird construction.)
The rationale also goes back to the ostensible raison d'être for the Bruno character, which is exploiting people's homophobia and holding it out for ridicule—a dubious proposition given that Baron-Cohen is not himself gay, thus allowing homophobes the opportunity to laugh unironically at the gay stereotype being played by a straight man. It's a caricature which, by the way, relies heavily on "the predatory gay" narrative, which is in conspicuous evidence here, and not only demonizes gay men as rapists, but casts straight men as the primary targets of rape (thereby also effectively disappearing the reality that they are the primary perpetrators of rape).
That alone would make it a total clusterfuck, but then there's this: Eminem has alluded to, on multiple occasions, having been molested as a child. (His new album contains a widely discussed track in which he imagines a child being raped by a stepfather.) I don't know for certain whether he has been, although I suspect it's likely given his fascination with the subject and his evident anger surrounding it. It's really incidental, except insomuch as how much worse this will have been for him if he is a survivor of sexual abuse.
And because there was more reason than usual to stop and think about how fucked-up this "joke" really is.
Baron-Cohen certainly is aware of the same almost-but-not-quite admissions Eminem has made about his childhood that I am, and he went ahead with this stunt, anyway. Most of the people in that audience, and probably most of the people who have viewed the video and found it hilarious, are aware of the possibility that Baron-Cohen was sticking his genitals and butt into the face of someone who is very likely a survivor of sexual abuse.
Yet it's all so goddamned funny—because most of us won't even make the connection between what Baron-Cohen is doing and sexual abuse.
We aresoaking in a rapeculture where a dude sticking his balls in someone else's face without his consent as a "joke" seems normal.
In which I substitute an email conversation between myself, Spudsy, and Deeky about Sacha Baron-Cohen's upcoming film Bruno for an actual post…
Liss: Oh this sounds GREAT. Doesn't sound AT ALL like he's playing on gay stereotypes and trying to justify it with a few scenes that expose people's homophobia. Sigh.
Deeky: You mean like the scene where he sneaks into someone's sleeping bag in the middle of the night?
Liss: That (predatory gay) and the stuff with the baby (recruiting gay). This sounds like more Deathbed Confession Cinema, without even the obvious, hit-you-over-the-head ending.
Honestly, the justification for this film is rooted in a rationale as mendacious (and/or naive) as believing that the most memorable part of a rib dinner is the handiwipe you're given at the end. So NOT.
Spudsy: How do you "challenge homophobia" by "embracing" it? I'm sorry, I have real problems with a straight man making this film.
Liss: Why would you be sorry about that, lol? It's like insanely narcissistic—as if he knows so well what it's like to be gay that he can tease out the subtleties of being a gay man in order to expose homophobia, instead of just playing on it. And, clearly, he doesn't.
Spudsy: Honestly, I'm not all that comfortable with his Borat character either, and I hate "predatory" comedy. Seriously, Alan Funt beat that horse to death a long time ago. Who the fuck is he to "expose homophobia?" Live it, then come talk to me.
Liss: Right. It's like when Gwyneth Paltrow puts on a fat suit for 6 hours then claims she totally understands what it's like to be a fat woman in this culture. Uh huh. Except I don't get to take off my fat ass at the end of the day, so not really the same at all, is it?
What's most irritating about this stuff is that they wouldn't ever give a movie to a real gay man who wanted to "expose homophobia." No, instead it's a straight guy who won't, in his real life, ever suffer any blowback from perpetuating gay stereotypes or fomenting gay hatred.
Meanwhile, he'll insist it's all a joke, it doesn't really perpetuate stereotypes or foment hatred because he's just playing a character, an argument which is predicated on nuanced thinking from the very homophobes who are such ignorant, bigoted rubes that they fell for his shtick in the first place.
Spudsy: Exactly, it's only safe to make a gay-empowering movie if it's a straight guy making it. Not that this is "gay empowering" at all. And like it's really hard to get a big reaction out of someone if you sneak in their tent to supposedly have sex with them. Christ.
Deeky: "Right. It's like when Gwyneth Paltrow puts on a fat suit for 6 hours then claims she totally understands what it's like to be a fat woman in this culture. Uh huh. Except I don't get to take off my fat ass at the end of the day, so not really the same at all, is it?"—Which is, if you remember, the very lesson of Soul Man, starring C. Thomas Howell.
Liss: I'm going to have to go on record at this point suggesting that every Hollywood studio immediately institute the Soul Man, Starring C. Thomas Howell, Rule: If a pitch does not pass the enlightenment threshold set by Soul Man, starring C. Thomas Howell, do not, repeat DO NOT, greenlight the project. It is made of fail.
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