Beforehand my wife told her friend that I would laugh harder than anyone in the theater all thru "Bruno" then when we got out I'd say, "That wasn't so good." She was right, as usual.
Two good things were: 1, the normalization of gay activities. I thought this was cool, to see gay stuff put firmly in the spectrum of human strangeness. (Michel Foucault said that there is no such thing as normal (Norm Finkelstein quoted that to me in Gaza when a health professional was talking about normality)).
2, A few months back Leila Abu-Saba wrote this great piece about Ain al Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon. In one of the inspired, feeble comic turns of the flick, suddenly Sacha Baron Cohen was there, meeting a leader of the al Aksa brigades in an effort to get kidnaped. We saw the crowded dusty streets of the camp, the ghetto life of it, and the cramped apartment of the resistance figure. In stark contrast to the open clean spaces of all the Israeli scenes in the film. I thought of how those people got crammed into that space, how the Israelis gave themselves elbow room, and pitied the Palestinians.
