Playlist: Commando, The Sopranos, Bruno

Pretty much ran the gauntlet of emotion and questioning my sexuality last night with these three titles.

1. Commando Director's Commentary and Directors Cut: Mark Lester is a no name director that made this, Firestarter and Armed and Dangerous with Eugene Levy. He does a great commentary and goes into how he used Leni Riefenstahl and the Nazi Propaganda film Triumph of the Will as inspiration for Commando. It's a fun commentary and he is really proud of the film which makes it even funnier...the director's cut offers more dismemberment by John Matrix...the film's gore is very minimal by today's standards and except for the cursing would have got a PG-13 for the director's added gore. I loved this film as a kid and it's still fun...I love when director's feel the need to make excuses for the lack of CGI in the 1980s...they always do in commentaries for some reason.

2. The Sopranos Season 1 Episode 11 "Nobody Knows Anything": I am rewatching these from the beginning on HBO on Demand...I missed a bunch of episodes originally in 1999 when this show came out because I did not have HBO 11 years ago. Its a little ridiculous looking back, some of the episodes have great moments, some are ridiculous like the Master G rap episode, which was episode 10, Christopher does make a great Uncle Ben's Converted Rice Joke in a Harlem chicken takeout place though.

3. Bruno: I felt like I had to take a shower after this...It's not just Gay, or super gay, they might at well as had full on fisting and bestiality, etc...what is our world cumming to?...the highlights were the Ron Paul Interview..and Straight Dave's Ultimate Fighting...I laughed my ass off, and had my ass covered the whole time in case Bruno was behind me with a dildo.

What a crazy night...if I learned anything tonight, it was sometimes you have to "let off some steam"

Playlist: Paper Heart & Bruno

I'm not sure what to make of Paper Heart? It's a movie about the making of a documentary that doesn't really try very hard on either account. Charlyne Yi is a--what? comedian? performance artist? I still have no idea--woman who goes around interviewing people, including a lot of Hollywood hipster friends, about the subject of love. Unfortunately, she's not a good interviewer and doesn't seem to fully understand what she's even hoping to accomplish (not about finding the answer, that's the point, I get it, but about how to go about finding the answer--she has no POV, which is fancy talk for "personality). And that's just it: the fate of this film rests entirely on the audience finding Yi a loveably charming goofball. That she's whiney and dull does not make that a winning bet. At some point she falls for actor Michael Cera and they fall in love...or not, I honestly don't know. But I do know they dated for a few years in real life, which just further takes the point of this thing and drops it off a cliff. As for the filmmakers' bloated claim that they created a "hybrid documentary," I won't tell anyone that only means they couldn't write a whole script. Sssh...

Then we have Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen's straight (so to speak) fake documentary about the quest for fame of a--politely phrased by Wikipedia--"flamboyant gay Austrian fashion journalist". I had reservations going in because 1. the Bruno segments were always the weakest parts of Cohen's "Da Ali G Show", and 2. it just looked like a gay Borat. Which it was, but who cares because it was funny. Cohen is an immensly talented performer who understands the most important rule of comedy: committment. If you're going in, go all in. Comedy is about the uncomfortableness of the truth and you can't be honest if you're scared. And even if some of the more over-the-top moments knock hard on the documentary wall, you accept that it's still a film about Bruno. Not Cohen. You're invested in the character, like him or hate him. So, it's not a fake documentary at all. It's a real documentary about a fake character. And there is a difference.

Quick endnote: Cohen's 2002 film about his signature creation, Ali G Indahouse, is an unfortunately underappreciated comedic showcase. If Borat and Bruno are raging caricatures, than Ali G is maybe the most ridiculous character ever brought to screen. There's nothing about him that connects to real life, but everything about him is real. That's mad skillz, yo. Booyakasha.