On July 21, The Nation’s Richard Kim sat down with Marty Moss-Coane on WHYY’s “Radio Times” to discuss the radically flawed premise of Sacha Baron Cohen’s new movie “Brüno.” Dissecting the film’s excruciating, anxiety-provoking moments, Kim emphasized several points he laid out in his recent article “Et Tu, Brüno?”. Explaining that Baron Cohen created a “novel cinematic experience” and reached a “discomfort factor” that was often hilarious, Kim argues that the Brüno project neither confronted nor elicited the nation’s latent homophobia. Rather, Kim reasons, the film failed to provoke the kind of homophobic reactions from his (largely polite) “punked” subjects in the way that 2006’s “Borat” was able to casually expose extreme sexism, racism and antisemitism wherever he went.

You can listen to the conversation here:
Richard Kim Discusses Why “Brüno” is Problematic.