Hard-core Potter fans are sad, pathetic losers apparently upset that the film's ending is different from the resolution of the book (Half-Blood Prince the film ends with Harry getting naked and fucking a horse, which was not a plot point in the book until the final volume, Harry Potter Gets Naked And Fucks A Horse), and are expressing their displeasure on the popular microblogging platform. Notes the Hollywood Reporter: "As sexyfhqwhgads puts it, 'Harry Potter 6 ending inaccurate. Otherwise good.'" And we all know that even a middling review from sexyfhqwhgads is box office poison. We'll just have to see how it the whole thing plays out.

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Apart from the issues of (what they called in the early 90s) "representation"-issues which I am going to continue to prefer to believe don't really exist in this modern age (and I think even Rabbi Simcha Weinstein agrees), when we all represent ourselves on the Facebooks-there is the issue of representing actual things accurately, which falls apart in Bruno. Even the "terrorist" interviewed by Bruno is now angry, since the terrorist interviewed in the movie is actually on the board of the Holy Land Trust.

More importantly, Anthony Lane is very much on to something today, when he wrote, "I realized, watching 'Borat' again, that what it exposed was not a vacuity in American manners but, more often than not, a tolerance unimaginable elsewhere." Similarly, I realized, watching Bruno again, that what doesn't happen in interactions with people in the film is what is important. People in odd job interviews are agreeable and sycophantic; people are happy when a baby is taken away from an obviously bad parent; people are upset and disturbed when confronted with an obviously crazy person. Yet, overall, people exhibit an extremely profound cultural training that forces them to treat people with at least some basic respect, when it isn't completely, earth-shatteringly obvious that they are dealing with a crazy; Bruno shows the extent of this social code, and how it borders on extreme, myopic denial.

People believe that other people are essentially the same on the inside. People do not always stop and take time, during an interaction, to add up all the factors that would indicate that the person they are dealing with is crazy, or dangerous, or a fraud. And the reason many people think that Bruno is mean-spirited is that the essential prank at the movie's heart is trade upon those values. We are watching a person with bad intentions flail on other people's social inhibitions. Those inhibitions are strong-like, Anne Frank "people are basically good at heart" strong, the worst expression of the denial of bad intentions ever. This cultural training is why bad people run riot on society, and take what they want. The rest of us just can't believe that anyone would do that. In any event, none of the gays present last night walked out on Bruno, and neither did they particularly talk like him either.

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1.

I do not care if Bruno is good for the gays. You know what is good for the gays? A nice dinner at a very expensive restaurant with exceptional service and a dessert on the house, followed by, most likely at a different location, some good old-fashioned ass-fucking. Also maybe a week-long trip to a tiny island on the eastern side of the Peloponnesus.

I think that now it is impossible for a film or television experience to be "good" or "bad" for any group of people. There is no overwhelming media; there is no visual industry that can sway a society, maybe not even incrementally. You know what is good for the gays? Facebook. Also getting it on in rooms with lots of mirrors.

2.

There are a couple few very true things, in my vast experience, about gay men, besides that they like a great vacation. One is that in at least one point in absolutely any interaction with another man, except in times of life-threatening emergency or other extreme distraction, a gay man has thought, of the other man, "What would it be like to fuck him?"

Gay men are predatory animals, with sex often foremost on their minds, when they are not practicing ikebana or shopping.

Although. All men, to be sure, are constantly thinking about putting body parts inside other body parts. Men think about sex a lot!

Hmm! Hold the phone. So this is really a way in which mammals of both genders are alike, don't you think? One day at an office where I worked, I sat around with the women and we had a long, strongly-opinionated conversation about which male co-worker was the most well-hung. (We all pretty much came to the same conclusion.)

Then the women probably went down to Anthropologie to look at the new clothes. Women!

Why does the idea that all gay men are predatory linger? When you compare the numbers, 15% of men who lived with other men in couples reported sexual assaults or stalkings, but a whopping 25% of women college students reported sexual assaults or attempted sexual assaults, bout 3/4s of those by men known to them. So men are actually predatory, as they are burdened with chemicals and penises; gay men slightly less so, because they are burdened with socialization.

3.

Recently, while scheduling an interview for "mainstream media outlet" with a mid-level celebrity personage, I was sent a release form. "Attached is a nondisclosure agreement," wrote the publicist handling. Lots of other people were going to be interviewing this personage, and "practically everyone has signed an NDA," emailed the publicist, after she received my flabbergasted email (written mostly in all-caps). She meant journalists! The NDA said that some information I might learn in the course of reporting might be what they called Confidential Information:

I shall not myself... prepare or assist in the preparation of any audio visual or written work or any other work, material or project whatsoever that depicts, concerns or relates in any way to the Program or my presence or participation in the production of the Program or to any Confidential Information hereto.... I agree to pay Producer, and its successors, licensees and assigns, at least the sum of One Million Dollars ($1,000,000.00) per breach plus disgorgement of any income that I may receive now or in the future, as liquidated damages in the event I breach this Agreement at any time... I will return all documents, notes, copies, or other materials provided by Producer or created by me which contain Confidential Information to Producer...."

And yet: apparently "practically everyone" signed this. So we know that people will sign a release form the second anyone hands one to them, even when it runs counter to their best interests.

And that is just like how everyone ended up in Bruno. "Oh, we are making a documentary about an Austrian television star; sign this, please." That particular release surely says, if anyone has ever actually read it, that the company doing the shooting may utilize all recordings made of the release-signer and exploit them in any and all media, including "selling" those recordings to a related company, one that is producing a different film.

It's even easier if you're staging an event. "Signed the waver, left the phones and everything in the truck, checked our ID's at least twice," wrote an attendee of a staged Bruno event in Arkansas, before he was, you know, surprised by what he described as a "fag makeout session" and what I describe as "just another Saturday night."

When did we become a people so willing, in some cases so desperate, to be filmed, that we sign away limitless and unintelligible rights at the drop of a hat?

4.

How come everyone is so flipped out about what Tony Scott referred to as "a specially modified exercise machine" in the Times today (answer: IT IS MODIFIED TO HAVE A DILDO ON IT!) but no one ever mentioned an essentially-similar product put to use in the Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading? Does it just look better next to George Clooney? A perusal of the Internet will demonstrate, in any event, that these sorts of things seem to find generally, though not totally, heterosexual use, in any event. Also they are mostly funny-gross. Bruno parodies gay sex quite outrageously. But at the end of the movie, all I could really think was that sex is always really gross, whether you are dressing up for it or not. Consider the blow job! Consider it again! You're going to put the weird wrinkling peeing thing in your WHERE? Because WHY, AGAIN?

5.

Outside the Bruno screening, I did see:

A. One woman in her early 30s in a totally adorable outfit who had laughed at the movie but had felt very conflicted about it and also felt quite a bit as if she'd been punched.

B. One devastatingly good-looking gay man, born 1964, who was violently and not at all wrongly upset.

C. One cheery gay man, in his 60s, who thought it was the funniest thing he'd ever seen and was absolutely all smiles.

D. A group of oddly good-looking people in their 20s, who all quite enjoyed the movie, but all sheepish about saying so and felt guilty because their gay friend had just left and was totally miffed by the movie.

E. And me, who is going to delay a hasty judgment just this once, until after he sees it again with his boyfriend. I might hate it! I might think it's funny and stupid! I'm still impressed by anything that riles people up so strongly. Though of course, as Bruno would point out, Hitler riled people up too, didn't he.

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• "Sacha Baron Cohen and his wicked comic cohorts have produced a film that is funnier, more offensive, and more outrageous than Borat and the collected output of Ali G put together."
• "Sometimes you question whether he has finally crossed the line into offensive bad taste – and, latterly, whether you were right to laugh at it – but the audience all seemed to guffaw and groan in the right places. They even gasped in horror when they were supposed to."
• "And here lies a warning – the pygmy sex scene is one of the most horrific incidents ever committed to celluloid. I'm talking fire extinguishers, champagne bottles and mechanically adapted fitness equipment. Teenage boys should under no circumstances watch this with their parents."
• "Brüno is funniest, though, when it's at its most politically incorrect, especially when it comes to homosexuality. There's an eye-popping montage of extreme gay sex practices (imaginary, one hopes), a surfeit of waving penises, dildos, fetish gear, anal bleaching, and an excruciating mime in which Brüno fellates the ghost of a deceased member of Milli Vanilli in front of a psychic."

Oh, I am so totally there.

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"It makes you sickened by gay sex, even if you are someone who participates in it" says ANOTHER GAY INSIDER, somehow, who is dumb. And has never seen a John Waters movie.

Gay complainers are setting back gay intelligence by at least two decades!

"They are going to be laughing at one character and he does not represent the mainstream of the gay community," Marc Shaiman, a composer who BRAVELY allowed his name to be used, "but millions of people can get the impression he does-and that can be dangerous." Right. Just like pictures of Americans torturing people gets people killed. Oh wait, it doesn't!

I hereby sentence all gays to a year of a film studies class in the early 90s.

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The verdict on last night's "excitement" at the MTV Movie awards: Eh. "Was it staged? Most likely. Eminem is a master pitchmen, and he's used his homophobic tag to move records before (see the Grammys' 2001 performance with Elton John). But if it was planned, Emimen should have stuck around and had more fun with the moment. After all, storming out was the obvious move, and what we'd expect from Em (as is much of 'Relapse')."

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