REVIEW: “Brüno” (2009)

MATT: Well, the press couldn’t get enough of calling Brüno a “controversial” movie, and even though I completely hate that word, I guess it’s pretty accurate. There’s lots of stuff star Sacha Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles put in there designed to make the audience uncomfortable, and at least at the showing we went to, it was enough to get a group of people to get up and leave with only about 15 minutes of movie left to go. Why they would leave after already seeing an hour-plus of the movie, and how they couldn’t tell it wasn’t for them in as little as five minutes (or from, I dunno, the ads), I’ll never know.

Was it funny? It was. But to be perfectly frank, the parts that were specifically meant to get a rise out of viewers were kind of hit-or-miss for me. The male nudity was funny, if a little overused. It got some laughs out of me, too, when they showed just how homophobic MMA fans — people who pay to see sweaty men touch each other in a ring — can be, though it didn’t seem to say much more than, “Hey, some people are homophobic and hypocritical.” Which isn’t exactly news. A lot of the stuff with the African baby Brüno adopts fell flat for me, though. And his interview with a terrorist, while ballsy, wasn’t a laugh riot.

Really, the funniest parts were some of the least controversial, like the great bit of physical comedy Cohen does right at the beginning when he ruins a fashion show. Or his misguided peace talk with an Israeli and a Palestinian about hummus.

MARLENE: Or hum-masque as he was calling it.

Sure this was a “controversial” movie. Interviewing a terrorist? Scary and funny. Male nudity? Always funny, always over used.  Trying to help Israel and Palestine break their feud while making a social comment on celebrities who attempt to fix the world they know nothing about? Hilarious.

Yet, the comment Sacha Baron Cohen wants people to see is America’s ongoing anti-gay, homosexual bashing society.  The gay community, while understanding the point of the film, may only feel the negative effects. Like polo shirt wearing fraternity guys coming out of the theatre, uncomfortable and unnerved about their “cum on a cracker” games, only gaining more homophobia rather than understand that the subjects in the film are a.) stereotypes used for satirical purposes and b.) caricatures of homosexuals.

This movie is not for those who don’t get satire. Since 82% of the public falls into that catagory, unfortunately, movies like this will always be pegged as ” controversial.”

MATT: I agree that those people who didn’t like the movie for whatever hyper-sensitive reason needs to lighten up and enlighten themselves, but the fact remains that Brüno, while funny, was no Borat. I think that’s partially because the character is simply not as inherently funny or likable as a doofus Kazakhstani reporter who means well but does consistently ridiculous shit. Brüno, as a character, is nearly impossible to like — he’s venal, he’s way, way self-involved and he clearly doesn’t much care about anybody. Borat, you couldn’t help but like. Even on Da Ali G Show, I always liked the Borat and Ali G stuff more than the Brüno stuff. It was just funnier, and well, I appreciated the cultural and political jokes more than the fashion stuff.

It doesn’t help, either, that Brüno followed the exact same plot structure that Borat did. I mean, to the letter. Not that the plot was all that important or anything, but, wow, if that was the same story but with a gay Austrain instead of a ignorant Kazakhstani. Oh, and the love interest was a small German dude instead of a big black hooker.

MARLENE: It totally did! And re-reading this review only makes me want to pop in our DVD of Borat.

I mean, I couldn’t help but love the Borat character when I first watched Da Ali G Show. But I really like the fashionista stuff, because I can’t stand those horrid style shows, like your “What Not to Wears” or your “Project Runways” (even though the clothes on that show can be awesome sometimes). Making fun of the fashion world is always funny, partly because they always ask for it. And this is coming from a lady who loves fashion. Only it’s affordable fashion, like Target and Urban Outfitters.

Anywho, the movie. Yeah, it was the same script formula. But honestly, how many other prank-the-public-with-uncomfortable-humor movies do you have to model after?

Thanks to Sacha Baron Cohen, there are now two.

MATT’S RATING:

MARLENE’S RATING:

DEVOURED: Banana-flavored Grass Jelly Drink

MARLENE: One of the benefits of working at an Asian restaurant is that they give you free stuff they buy at Asian markets. A lot of it can be really really sweet, like tasting cake soup or something. A downfall is not knowing how to cook it or whether to refrigerate it because it’s all in Vietnamese.

My boss handed me this jelly cake drink thingy and told me to refrigerate it, then drink it. She told me not to be jarred by the bowl of brown jelly on the front of the can; it’s actually a tasty treat.

Well, holy crap. This banana-flavored Grass Jelly Drink was like tasting liquefied, cold banana Runts. You know, those little candies that look like fruit but will give you cavities? Yeah.

It’s not like it was bad or anything, it was pretty tasty. Just little too sweet.

Couldn’t have been all that bad. I mean, I got this one to try it (points to Matt).

MATT: It did, in fact, taste like liquid Runt. Or the filling in those banana Oreos that they were making for about a second last year. I actually liked it a lot.

The weird thing about it, and what Marlene’s boss did not inform her of, was the fact that quite a bit of that purplish jelly stuff on the can was, no joke, at the bottom of the can the whole time, which gave us both a pretty icky feeling after we sipped out most of the juice.

I guess if we were more adventurous, we would have actually tried eating it, but, well, it was gross-looking.

COMING SOON: More taste tests of Asian stuff we can’t read the packages for.

TOP FIVE x 2: Mistake CD Purchases

Admit it: You bought some shitty CDs when you were younger. Music that you would never listen to now, let alone spend your money on. We know we did. Here are the biggest examples of our worst music-buying judgment.

MATT:

5. Group X, “Stepping on the Crowtche of Your American President”

I should have known better. I laid down eight bucks for this album all of last year, in the midst of a “I want to remember what it was like to be a freshman in college again” kick. I wish I hadn’t. It’s funny, sure. The first time. The third or fourth time you hear any of these songs, you just find yourself talking like the dudes and hating yourself.

4. Kenny Wayne Shepherd, “Live On”

I was 15. My brother was a big Stevie Ray Vaughan fan, and I figured I’d find my own three-named guitar prodigy to follow. So I bought this skinny-armed dude’s record. Instead of, you know, a Stevie Ray Vaughan album. Which is what I should have done.

3. Del Amitri, “Twisted”

Life lesson: Never buy an album just because one song on it is kind of catchy. Especially when that song isn’t even that good to begin with. Luckily, our iTunes-fueled society of album-hating has eliminated the likelihood of that mistake occurring. (Also, nobody listens to albums. So it’s a give and take.)

2. Dave Matthews Band, “Crash”

My reaction upon listening to it: “Hey! Wait a minute! The Dave Matthews Band sucks!” So, in that sense, it did me a favor.

1. John Mellencamp, “Dance Naked”

This was one of the first CDs I ever bought. I bought it because of Mellancamp’s cover of Van Morrison’s “Wild Night.” So not only did I violate the rule up there in entry number three, I could have just bought a Van Morrison record instead. This is why 11-year-olds shouldn’t be allowed to have money.

MARLENE

5. Collective Soul, “Collective Soul”

I was desperately trying to be cool in my middle school formative years, but after this album was purchased, I knew it was better to be the uncool quiet girl. Thanks Circuit City for taking money from my 11th birthday.

4. Aerosmith, “Get a Grip”

All these hits sound the same. I was 10, heard Weird Al’s “Livin’ in the Fridge,” and realized good parodies were better than bad singles.

3. Bush, “Razorblade Suitcase”

Ok, this was actually given to me as a gift. But I still listened to it. And it was still awful.

2. The Spice Girls, “Spice”

Yes, I was a preteen girl at one point. In the late 90′s. Shocker. The fad was over before it made its mark on me.

1. Hanson, “Middle of Nowhere”

Again, preteen girl. This fad, however, lasted unitl I was at least 17 (cough cough). Hey, at least they tried and made their own music. I credit them.

I know. Shut up.

CULTURE CURIOUS: The $5 Value Meal Krystal Ad

MARLENE: Anyone who is from or who has ever lived in the mid-South has heard of Krystal fast food restaurants. Their commercials are usually fairly cheesy and low-budget, but ad this caught our attention due to some interesting pronunciation of the word “angus.”

MATT: It sounds like anus! It sounds like he’s saying anus! “A big anus, so big and juicy.”

MARLENE: Yes it does. Also, the guy looks a lot like he might be a Jerry Lee Lewis impersonator.

MATT: I actually went to the dude’s website earlier today, and he is apparently a real-deal musician from Memphis who basically apes The Killer, but doesn’t out-and-out impersonate the guy. But whatever he is, I’m just glad we’ve gotten to the point in our society where a professional recording artist can pronounce his love for big anuses  in a regional fast food commercial.

MARLENE: You know, fast food has gotten really dirty. Burger King has Burger Shots, Hardee’s has their Biscuit Holes, and now this. I thought “Super Size Me” made me never want to eat fast food again, but this takes it to a whole new level.

MATT: Come to think of it, the title “Super Size Me” is pretty dirty, too.

POPVERSATIONS: Mariah Carey Earworms

MATT: Do you ever get a Mariah Carey song stuck in your head, even though you don’t really ever want one there?

MARLENE: Yes! I do get that.

MATT: That is happening to me right now.

MARLENE: Which song?

MATT: “Always Be My Baby.”

MARLENE: Oh, that one definitely gets stuck in there sometimes. But for me, it’s usually her cover of the Jackson 5′s “I’ll Be There.”

(Note: Shortly after this conversation, Matt’s Mariah Carey earworm was replaced by Steve Winwood’s “While You See a Chance.”)

REVIEW: “Away We Go” (2009)

MARLENE: It was cute.

MATT: Yes it was.

MARLENE: I liked Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski together. They made a nice on-screen couple. Not as cliché as it sounds; it’s not like Rudolph is a manic-pixie-dreamgirl or anything, which seems to be a staple with independent romantic comedies (i.e Garden State, Juno).

MATT: I can’t tell you how glad I was that there were no manic pixie dreamgirls (or MPDGs, as they’ve come to be known) in this movie. And, despite the oh-so-quirky hand-drawn advertising for “Away We Go,” the eccentricity on display in this movie didn’t choke me nearly to death like it did in “Juno.” Really, the only super-quirky parts were near the beginning, when the Rudolph and Krasinski went to meet his parents (Catherine O’Hara and Jeff Daniels) and her old boss (Allison Janney), who is in a poopy marriage with Jim Gaffigan.

As that last sentence indicates, the movie is pretty much a road trip movie, with the main couple going to various places and meeting various friends/relatives/acquaintances, trying to find a place to live. Nothing new, but it was handled well, and the two main characters are eminently likable.

Which brings me to this point: Not to be an egotist or anything, but it looked a lot like they modeled John Krasinski’s character in this after me, personally. Or his looks, anyway. Seriously, when I have a beard, I look and dress just like that guy did. I mean, the way he acted was much smoother than my M.O., but damn if he wasn’t my spitting image.

You’re going to leave me for him, aren’t you?

MARLENE: Well, no. But he was smoother…

I’ll just say that the two main characters were kind of modeled after us. If we were 30+ and expecting a child, which is Oh My God Not So!

Besides the movie not being quirky over the top, it had a solid cast (love Catherine O’Hara, Jeff Daniels and Maggie Gyllenhaal) and a good way of fooling the audience into not expecting the obvious. Although it had a few line cues that didn’t seem to matter or go anywhere, there were some great laugh lines (or LOL lines, to all of you texting fools out there) from John Krasinski’s character, Burt. Rudolph’s character, Verona, of course played the stick in the mud girlfriend sometimes, she had some one liners that were pretty funny.

I’m not a stick in the mud, right? I do have good one liners.

MATT: We’re both sticks in the mud, and we’re both fun, one-liner spewing craaazies. It depends on the circumstances which of us is which (or if we’re both one or the other). Only in Hollywood is one person in a relationship consistently the serious adult (usually the woman), while the other is the fun-loving but immature one (generally a guy, who is generally fat).

But back to the movie.

I agree that the movie avoids the obvious ending — something that anybody who had only seen a trailer would pretty much definitely expect to happen doesn’t — and that was satisfying, especially since the ending seems to wrap up the leads’ story pretty well. Though, I gotta say, some of the other characters that pop up, well, they don’t get much resolution. Not that I necessarily feel like I needed them to. That’s how life is, after all. But I still feel pretty bad for those folks.

MARLENE’S RATING:

MATT’S RATING:

Michael Jackson (1958-2009)

MATT: This isn’t really what we wanted to talk about in our first post on the exciting new entertainment blog Matt and Marlene Devour the Culture, but hey, you gotta take what comes, I guess.

And so it is with great sadness that we have to write about the life and death of Michael Jackson tonight, who died yesterday of cardiac arrest at age 50. (Like that’s news to you.)

And yeah, he was accused of, and likely did, some terrible shit in the last decade or so of his life. Hell, the South Park episode where he moves in to town and wears a fake mustache may well be the funniest episode that show ever made.

But we’re not here to talk about that tonight, no. We’re here to acknowledge that, no matter how much troubling stuff Michael Jackson might have done, he made Off the Wall, and that made him awesome.

(Note: This low-quality Korean version was all that was available, due to YouTube’s draconian embedding policies.)

Marlene and I had some disagreement about MJ’s iconic status — I say he was a little before our time. I was born in ’83, she in ’86, and I would contend that his heyday predates us. I mean, yeah, I definitely remember Dangerous and Moonwalker and all that jazz. I will forever think that he was asking Annie if she was wal-king in “Smooth Criminal,” though.

But whether he was an icon of our generation or not, Michael Jackson was most certainly an icon. Frankly, I don’t think there’ll ever be anybody who was just as famous as that guy was in the early and mid 1980s. I mean, hell, he was basically able to single-handedly (and inadvertently) launch the career of a song parodist into the stratosphere. And a pretty great rapper made a pretty amazing mixtape in honor of him. That’s powerful.

MARLENE: I really don’t like the whole remembrance thing, especially on the first post of this blog, but we have to talk about the long lasting legacy of King of the Pop.

Micheal Jackson, who I certainly thought was a girl upon viewing the Black or White video when I was 5 or 6 years old, but later realized was not (I’m not trying to make a sad joke. I really thought he was a lady), has left a large dent in the pop world. I’m fairly certain that the majority of teeny-bob pop stars in the music industry today would not be there if it weren’t for MJ.

Now, I know you’re thinking, “What a pleasant world it would be without an idiot like Britney Spears hogging the headlines,” but remember that MJ and Quincy Jones alone made two of the greatest pop records in the last few decades. “Off the Wall” an “Thriller,” I’m sure, has made most wanna-be pop stars attempt to aspire to even one tenth of their greatness. Even The Jackson 5 made some of the most toe tapping songs…ever!

Right, he did some pretty indecent stuff to kids that is inexcusable, but you know something? People go to football games and jam out to that Gary Glitter crap all of the time. And that dude was a convicted child porn freak!

I think for this generation, there was never a pop star at the level of Jackson. Sure there was Elvis. Sure there were The Beatles (um, now who gets the rights to those Lennon and McCartney compositions?) and it was horrible the way Lennon left the world. And it sucks Elvis died on the toilet. But for our generation, I mean anyone who was even born in the ’80′s, I don’t think another pop star will hit young people quite like MJ has.

All I’m saying is basically what Matt has already stated, he made some of the greatest pop/dance records, and that made him the undeniable King of Pop.

Even if he was kind of a dick to Paul McCartney.