Imagine yourself hanging out in a faintly smelly blue-collar saloon in Austin, Texas (i.e., in a less enlightened section of town), and one of the guys at the bar asks what you thought of Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Bruno, or rather the preview footage you’ve just seen at a South by Southwest event. And you say to him without skipping a beat that it’s “wildly, paralytically funny and brilliantly transgressive.”
The beer boys wouldn’t like that, trust me. If I was a chunky Austin guy who drove a forklift at a soft-drink company and some smartypants in horn-rim glasses said that a movie was “brilliantly transgressive,” right away I would be thinking about hitting him.
The above six-word description came from MSN Movies and AMCtv.com‘s James Rocchi, as passed along by Indiewire‘s Eugene Hernandez. I think all film critics have to keep the shitkicker readers in mind when they write. I’m not saying you can’t write what you want to write or be who you really are, but every so often you have to tone down the NYU Masters in Film Appreciation jargon.
The 7-11 way to say it is that Bruno “pushes the comedy limits in a really clever and wild-ass way. You know, like Borat only more gay this time.”