.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

How much would you pay for a laugh? When it comes to movies, I have a formula. I would pay $1.00 for a laugh. Hell, I pay over a buck for a chocolate bar, a pack or gum or a soda pop. So, a dollar for a laugh - to me - is well worth the expense.

I use this formula when I got to the movies. If I am paying $10 to see a comedy, then it better give me a minimum of $10 good laughs for me to think of it as a success in terms of wallet to belly roll ratio.

Airplane and Blazing Saddles are the gold standard, but there have been plenty of comedies in the past few years that have provided me with chuck(le) for the buck. Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Role Models and I Love You Man are good examples of me leaving a theatre feeling happier than when I bought my ticket.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan was another good example. The movie starring Sasha Baron Cohen as a Kazakhstanian visiting America was funny, rude and crude. Audiences must have agreed as Borat went on to make the studio millions of dollars.

So, where to from here? Well, Cohen brings us Brüno, an Austrian fashion disaster that comes to America to become famous. Like Borat, Brüno pits himself in real life situations with real people for the purposes of bring a documentary style film to the paying audience. But unlike Borat, Brüno didn't make me laugh.

There are plenty of amusing moments in Brüno. A lot of them have to do with his own body parts, but as I got close to the hour mark of a movie that is less than 90 minutes in length, I noticed that I hadn't laughed once. In fact, I don't think I even had a crack of a smile that might have lead to a laugh.

Brüno's biggest faux pas is that where Borat was funny in that he was in situations where ordinary people embarrassed themselves thus making us laugh, Brüno simply puts himself in embarrassing situations with ordinary people in hopes that we would find it equally amusing.

The results are less than funny and the crude and raunchy humor just made me want to get up and leave the theatre - which is something I only experience about once every two or three years.

The half descent bits included Brüno at a swingers party, Brüno out with some rednecks hunting and Brüno confronting celebrities such as Paula Abdul and Harrison Ford (his encounter with LaToya Jackson was edited from the film due to Michael Jackson's sudden death last week).

But each of these encounters were just good enough to be part of a sketch on Saturday Night Live and not something that can be crammed into an entire full length movie.

All other scenes including a focus group that watches Brüno's penis for what seems an eternity, a running gag about the black child he traded an iPod for, and a redneck ultimate fighting cage which is transformed into a homosexual romping ground for Brüno and his assistant are just unbearable to watch - and worse - unfunny.

The whole film was pretty much unfunny. It gets a single half star simply for the scene to where Brüno interviews parents who want their children to become stars and will do anything (and I do mean, ANYTHING) to get their sons and daughters in front of the camera.

Borat was funny. Brüno was brutal.