Ty's weekend movie picks for Friday, July 10

(from "Dillinger is Dead," at the Brattle. No, it doesn't star Johnny Depp.)

Wesley weighs in on "Bruno" with disappointment this morning, and I have to say he and I saw the same movie: the caustic high-wire comedic thrills of "Borat" are gone, replaced by the smugness that comes from shooting big fish in a tiny barrel.

The problem is obvious. As played by star Sacha Baron Cohen, the character of Borat was odd but not so odd that unsuspecting camera subjects wouldn't treat him with polite deference, consequently agreeing with and amplifying his increasingly outrageous statements until they snapped out of the encounter, usually with splenetic rage. The comedy came from both the sustained tension -- when would Borat finally go too far for these people? -- and Cohen's knack for going farther than most humans consider possible or even healthy. The satire came from how far people would go right along with him.

The flamboyantly, cartoonishly gay character of Bruno, on the other hand, goes too far right away, usually in the initial encounter, so there's no tension -- none, zippo, zilch. Instead, the gag comes from mashing the subject's homophobic flight-response button so hard that he (and it's almost always a he) immediately responds with shock and dismay. Take (spoiler alert) the already notorious focus group scene, in which Bruno shows a roomful of average Amurricans a chat-show pilot that includes a gyrating talking penis. Shock comedy? Sure. Satire that lasts more than 30 seconds? Nope, because the viewers react with instant and predictable disgust and we've learned nothing. Bruno doesn't give people the comfort zone Borat did, so there's no reason for them to engage with the character and then reveal themselves and their opinions. He's a stun-gun rather than a rib-tickler, and watching him go after, say, Ron Paul in a hotel room or a hunting party of good old boys reveals only that the average uptight straight guy over the age of 30 doesn't like being assaulted by an effeminate Austrian cartoon character. Rather than being illuminated, I came out of "Bruno" feeling sorry for a lot of these people, and I really don't think that was the intended effect.

Anyway, so patently outre is Bruno from the git that you start wondering how many of the encounters have been staged, or stage-managed, or massaged in the editing room. Adding to the suspicion is that Bruno, unlike the ostensibly Kazakh reporter Borat, doesn't necessarily need to have a camera with him at all times, so what are these people actually thinking? The only sequence that genuinely works as both comedy and jaw-dropping revelation about human nature is when Bruno interviews Hollywood stage-parents about casting their babies in a music video, gradually increasing the requirements to the levels of torture ("Vould you mind if ve put your child on a crucifix?") and marveling as the moms and dads nod away in agreement. That scene says something about human greed; most of the others say simply that people don't like their comfort zones invaded by aggressively weird strangers, which isn't exactly news you can use. "Bruno" is made of stretch fabric, and it gets stretched until the seams pop.

In other theaters, "The Hurt Locker" marks the return of the great, ornery action-drama filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, who's getting a lot of deserved ink about herself on this one. The movie, which I haven't yet seen (sorry, been away on vacation), concerns a bomb squad in Iraq and arrives on a wave of ecstatic reviews praising it as the first great mainstream drama to come from the conflict (as opposed to documentaries, of which there are many fine examples). Anyway, well worth a look-see, and if you crave more Bigelow, know that her earlier films are getting aired out at the Harvard Film Archive and that tonight you can see her hellacious 1984 redneck vampire movie "Near Dark" To quote Bill Paxton: "Ah hates it when they ain't shaved."

The Boston French Film Festival at the Museum of Fine Arts kicked off last night, bringing in the usual mixed but necessary bag of Gallic cinema to Boston. Given the parlous state of foreign-film distribution in this country, this will be your only chance to see most if not all of these movies, so Wesley and a host of others at the Globe weighed in earlier this week with a Baedeker to what's worth seeing.

Director Rod Webber is a local filmmaker and self-styled pariah who has been getting in entertainment reporters' faces lately, as a good self-promoting indie dude should, about his new movie "A Man Among Giants." It's a scrappy documentary that follows a possibly mentally unbalanced Republican ex-pro wrestling dwarf named Doug "Tiny" Tunstall as he runs for mayor of Pawtucket, RI. The movie is entertaining and sad, and it runs roughshod over how much the camera is exploiting or even feeding into its subject's delusions. In a weird way, Tiny's a real-life Borat, prodding those he meets to respond to his outrageous statements and near-total unsuitability for public office; Webber's attitude toward him is fond, indulgent, horrified, and ultimately not clear enough. But the director's one to watch; the film's at the Somerville for a week.

Unreconstructed art-hounds and those who wish Jean-Luc Godard had made more movies during his 1960s peak should toddle off to the Brattle to see Marco Ferreri's 1969 "Dillinger is Dead," a rather brilliantly aggravating movie that has very little to do with John Dillinger but does give Michel Piccoli a chance to plumb the depths of bourgie alienation while wasting (in more ways than one) the insolently enchanting rock footnote Anita Pallenberg. The latter is also onscreen these days in her older incarnation in "Cheri"; age may have withered her but custom has not staled her infinite decadence.

"I Love You, Beth Cooper" is the teen-comedy of the week, based on a novel my 14-year-old daughter liked a lot, in part because it repurposes '80s John Hughes movie cliches with so much wit. The movie, not so much. There are a number of other new films opening in the area today, but I'm still slightly out of the loop. Anyway, it's supposed to be sunny all weekend -- get outside, you little yard-apes!