The following podcast contains explicit language.

The Culture Gab Fest is sponsored by Audible, offering more than 50,000 downloadable

audiobooks.

CultureFest listeners can download a free audiobook by signing up for an Audible membership

at Audiblepodcast.com slash culture

fest.

I'm Stephen Metcath, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest in Bruno Veritas edition.

This is also the daily podcast from slate.com for Wednesday, July 15th, 2009.

On today's program, we're going to talk about the new movie Bruno, incisive satire or crude exploitation, Goldman Sachs, Capitalism's Glory or Capitalism's Scourge, and OroVard to All That, Food, Wine, and the End of France, with Slate's wine columnist, our special guest, I should say, Slate's wine columnist Mike Steinberger.

Joining me today are Slate's deputy editor, Julia Turner.

Julia, hello.

Hi, Steve. It's nice to have you back. Very nice to be back. Great to see you. And our film critic, Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana. Hey, Stephen. Dana, where to even begin with the movie, Bruno? know. It's the second movie from Sasha Baron Cohen, who made a big splash with the Ali G show on

HBO a few years ago, made a King's Ransom with Borat, which was a huge hit. And now he

returns with Bruno, set it up a little bit, just describe what the movie is about and what the

experience of watching this movie is like. And then let's get into some of its quite obvious controversies. Okay, yeah, I'm very, very curious to hear what you both thought of it, because I'm realizing now that Bruno is this minefield to talk about, and I'm kind of hoping we disagree on it somewhat, but, okay, so Bruno, how to describe it? It's a hoax comedy, a prank done entirely in the character of this sort of uber swishy Austrian fashion journalist named Bruno. Do we have a last name for Bruno? I don't think we do, right? I think he's just Bruno. He's just Bruno and Borat is just Borat. And yeah, essentially it's almost identical in structure to Borat. He crosses the U.S. and the globe to some extent, sort of

with these different skits in which he provokes sort of real life unsuspecting marks and also

some scripted scenes, which is a big question when you watch these movies, how many people

know they're being set up and, you know, how many scenes are scripted. But yeah, it's just a big

comedy provocation. I think probably most of our listeners have at least heard some graphic stories from it, if not seen it already.

Isn't part of the problem here that Borat was sweet and somewhat credulous in a way and that your sympathies could flow fairly easily to him for all his strangeness, whereas Bruno can be regarded

as something of a total human failure in a way. I mean, he admires Hitler because Hitler was famous,

and his sort of guiding ambition in life is to be famous as well. And that's a kind of good

...