the premiere of Bruno in Sydney tonight was chaos. You would think he was a real person-hundreds of screaming cheering fans.

The film is hillarious. Only Sacha Baron Cohen could get away with sending up a gay German designer and not offend gays.

Bruno arrived as a gladiator with a white horse-his speech was funny. He descends in to Nazi rants.

Even the coppers trying to control the traffic were laughing:laugh:

Wonder what his next character will be ?

Whos to say that gays aren't offended, have you spoken to them all?. If I was gay I would feel ridiculed by this character. The character of Borat was deeply racist and patronising towards eastern Europeans and highly sexist (Using the umbrella excuse of irony to get away with it).

no-I haven't spoken to all gays and don't think I ever could (perish the thought).

OK so it's my view he is inoffensive but then I know a hundred gays just like Bruno. Just not as funny. He's also sends up Germans-and my German pal tonight thought he was funny .

Plenty of gay people turned up for the film-he was interviewed by a well known dyke radio host and I counted at least 10 draq queens.

I take your point but I've found there is no real meeting point here .I once worked on a gay magazine for a year and had real problems with other staff.

I wanted to run the really outrageous pics from gay parties-they wanted to run the politically correct ones as they reckoned the political message had to always be sent out.

What it boiled down to was taste-they wanted macho bear types..I wanted 'pretty' people and drag queens. They literally tried to make 'taste' political. They argued that featuring' effeminate' types was stereotyping gays.

I argued that effeminate gays were a real breed, I love effeminate people and to call them 'stereotypes'was more of an insult than anything.

Sure Borat was offensive but hardly 'deeply' offensive. There are people just like Borat and those in the film and I've met them

There are 'ocker' Barry McKenzie type Aussies and there are any number of English cariciatures in films who exist in real life..and Irish and so on.

Frankly-I reckon comedy should be offensive but I hope I haven't offended you.

And when they flung that closet door open a lot of fucking boring queens came out as well.

But from a glance-the majority of what seemed to be thousands of fans looked pretty straight to me. Guys & girlfriend , mothers and kids and they seemed to really like Bruno as a real person. So he's doing something right. And I've witnessed this at the few Sydney Gay Mardi Gras I've seen..literally half a million straight people adoring the mincing queens covered in sequins.

Kind of agree with you here, robbie.

as a gay man I shall be giving the film a wide berth.

I'm actually really looking forward to seeing it.

Although it's really impossible to tell others whether they should like or dislike like a film , Bruno is very similar to Borat and Ali G.

I think Baron Cohen is pretty good at using his characters to show up other people's prejudices and have fun at the same time.

I resisted seeing Borat until it was on DVD and then loved it :it's the USA he is having a go at.

Bruno does likewise-but he has a much wider circle of people to pick from- gays, straights, fashion , pop stars, celebrity and so on.

He's similar to Ricky Gervais.