This week’s half full and half empty.

Folded:

• Moon (strange Sam Rockwell, watchable as ever)
• Plaid shirts (classic style anonymity. Buy a padded one to look like a window cleaner)
• When Eight Bells Toll (the youngest you’ve ever seen Anthony Hopkins. If you’re off sick this is bound to be on Film4. It’ll really pass the time too)
• Omega Seamaster watch (you can’t afford one, but no-one will know when you stare through the jewellers’ window)
• Autumn video games (Modern Warfare 2, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Uncharted 2, Alpha Protocol, etc – prepare to have your pockets lightened)

Creased:

• Brüno (when cringeworthy stops being funny)
• Swine flu inevitability (had the bug yet? It’s getting to the ‘everyone knows somebody’ stage now)
• Guys who refer to their wives or girlfriends as ‘er indoors’ (they probably say ‘aye’ a lot too)
• Crunches (the most miserable sounding exercise ever. Going on the beach? Just wear a vest or something)
• Waiting for autumn video games (you’d never know it because of the damn unpredictable weather but we’ve only just started August)

The thing about terrorists is this – sure, they’re more than happy to sit giggling in a small room with a flaming gay Austrian for hours on end, but if you put it in an international film, darn it all, they are gonna have to save face.

And when we say save face, we mean they’re gonna have to kill Sacha Baron Cohen. After all, in his Bruno movie he somehow made them all look homo friendly – and something like that could lead to a lot of teasing at the next militant Muslim extremist Christmas gala.

That Bruno movie is doing incredibly well at the box office. Why just this week alone it’s made over $100,000 – and that’s the kind of money that makes Hollywood sequel hungry. Lucky for them, then, the next Bruno film seems to be writing itself. The basic plot is that Sacha Baron Cohen gets his head gruesomely cut off on camera while masked weenies stand around in the background shouting about how Buddha is great. Or whatever. This is perfect for movie-goers that like it heavy on the drama.

Of course for a third film we’d have to either stitch together a story line from deleted scenes or hollow out Sacha’s head to use like a hand puppet. We could maybe let the Jim Henson people do it or something. Imagine if the head tried to join a convent? Classic Baron Cohen!

Now that we’ve got such a sturdy back up plan, maybe it’s not such a bad thing that according to ABC News:

“A Palestinian group that the U.S. State Department has on its terrorist list reportedly has the comedian in its sights after he featured the organization in his current film Bruno in which he plays an openly gay Austrian television host. “We reserve the right to respond in the way we find suitable against this man (Cohen),” the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades said in a statement released to WorldNetDaily.com, an independent news Web site.”

Now those terrorists just need to calm down – they could learn a lesson or two from Paula Abdul – she hasn’t threatened to kill anybody since she got taken. Cohen doesn’t seem worried about his would-be assassins though. When asked for a response, he said simply:

“Well I hope the terrorists being embarrassingly shown is such a poor light will inspire them to tame their nuclear ambitions, and to worship the Almighty in a less violent, yet still respectful manner.”

Noble. If it’s true that is Noble, Cohen.

The terrorist group – well their name is Al Aqsa, and they claim to have broken up slowly over the past two years. Exact reasons have never been given, but inner-circle mumblings seem to indicate a member or two wanting solo careers. How exactly they ended up on camera is unclear, but what’s important is they all seem to have equally good acting chops. Let’s clean them up, teach them how to read scripts and get them married off to Jennifer Aniston.

We hear repeatedly that she’s on the market.

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It’s the second-most controversial film of the year – after Paul Blart – but Bruno has aced the weekend box office.

Despite attracting waves of controversy based on its edgy subject matter, Bruno – Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up to Borat – has entered the US weekend box office at number one, where it will definitely remain next week even though Harry Potter’s coming out.

It just goes to show that Transformers isn’t the only movie that can break records this year – Bruno has officially become the highest-grossing movie ever to feature a talking urethra. Michael Bay, we await your response with baited breath.
More than any other film this year – even that one where Serge Gainsbourg’s daughter snips her fanny off with some scissors – weekend box office number one Bruno has inflamed the passions of the broadsheet press. Some say that Bruno is homophobic. Some say that Bruno is the opposite of homophobic. Some say that Bruno is smug. Some say that if only Ali G Indahouse hadn’t been rushed into production then Sacha Baron Cohen wouldn’t have run out of characters to make films with already. Actually, nobody has said that yet. But, you know.

Here’s the weekend box office top five…

1 - Bruno (So there’s been an Ali G film, a Borat film and now a Bruno film. What’s next for Sacha Baron Cohen? Let’s hope it’s a film based around this embarrassingly earnest youthy Windsor-based local television presenter. Talk about humiliating) $30,426,000

2 – Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs (Not having seen Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs, we’re a little confused. Didn’t dinosaurs happen before the ice age? Is time going backwards here? Let’s hope so, because we’d love for Ice Age 4 to be about single cell prokaryotes. Single cell prokaryotes chasing an acorn around and being HILARIOUS!!!) $28,500,000

3 - Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen (Yesterday we heard about a competition where one of the prizes was a walk-on part in Transformers 3. We’re assuming that that’s the second prize, though, because that way the first prize would have to be something better. Like, you know, a jab in the eye with a shitty stick or whatever) $24,200,000

4 - Public Enemies (A film about a criminal starring that bloke who screams at his underlings and the woman with a sideline in uncomfortably barmy 9/11 conspiracy theories. No, we can’t understand why it didn’t do better either) $14,111,000

5 - The Proposal (Doing better than the just-released I Love You Beth Cooper, proving that Hayden Panettiere’s naked body isn’t quite as popular as Hayden Panettiere seems to think it is. Still, at least she’s got that sparkling personality of hers to fall back on, hasn’t she? Oh.) $10,507,000

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Yes, the latter has once again happened, with Cohen’s Bruno being sued for allegedly hurting a woman in a bingo hall quite badly.

Normally this would bring cries of derision from hecklerspray, but this time it looks a bit different…

Where normally Sacha Baron Cohen is sued for having a sense of humour, mocking idiots and preying on those with deep-seated resentment of “the blacks” “the jews” or “the foreigns” (or is simply punched in the face), this time – if early indications are anything to go by – there may be legs on the case.

During filming for the upcoming Bruno movie Cohen visited a bingo hall in Palmdale, California, back in 2007. While he had been billed as a celebrity guest, his presence probably didn’t go down too well – if it did, it would be a bit of a shit film, let’s be honest.

No, what allegedly happened was that Sacha/Bruno was involved in an altercation with the bingo caller – one Richelle Olson – which (allegedly) left her so dazed that she ended up collapsing and hitting her head on a concrete slab. Allegedly, this has (allegedly) left her disabled, has made her lose a great deal of weight and has generally made her life a lot worse, pushing her to sue for unspecified damages.

Allegedly.

What isn’t alleged is what Olson herself said of the allegedly fateful day, which was as follows, according to (*shudder*) The Daily Express:

She accuses the star of using “vulgar and offensive language” when he took the stage to call the numbers during the bingo game, and when she tried to snatch the microphone from him she alleges a “physical struggle ensued.”

The legal papers allege Cohen “offensively touched, pushed and battered” Olson, causing her to fall to the ground.

She goes on to accuse several camera operators, who were filming the event, of rushing onto the stage where “defendants attacked (her) for a period of one to five minutes to intentionally create a dramatic emotional response… while (they) recorded her humiliation and embarrassment.”

It all sounds pretty horrible, to be fair, but at the same time it’s hard to take any of these cases seriously when the vast majority of them are nothing but embarrassed morons feeling bad that they’ve been shown up. Time will tell if this is one of those cases or if it carries on and leads Sacha Baron Cohen to rethink how far he goes with his film stunts.

It probably won’t, let’s be honest here. Lawsuits will have been expected from day one, especially after the three billion other ones (eight was an overstatement) that came along in the wake of Borat. And lest we forget, this is a man who is willing to bleach all of his body hair for a laugh.

Nevertheless, the tween ceremony which has produced an average of one genuine laugh per every three years – not a bad statistic – has a new notch on the bedpost where they can proudly boast ‘we made a website that doesn’t like Robert Pattison laugh. A bit’.

Why? Well: Sacha Baron Cohen’s gay Austrian fashion journalist creation, Bruno, landed half-naked in the lap of Marshall Mathers‘ gay-disliking American irritant/rapper, Eminem.

That’s a lot of bold.

While Americans are still to get really used to the fact that Cohen isn’t actually any of the men he claims to be, hard as it is to believe, the British have had his antics for a decade now and really aren’t too shocked any more with anything he does.

Which also means there isn’t any shock that events like this are staged. Because it’s an MTV event. They are actually an evil corporation and they want to stay on the good side of artists (using the term in a fashion so loose it simply doesn’t hold itself up without a belt).

What this means is that no, they probably didn’t spring this on Eminem. All the speculation that came after the event, which saw everyone’s favourite rappist teabagged by a genuinely funny man, was unnecessary.

The ‘revelation’ by Perez Hilton that he hears it was set up? Unnecessary.

The speculation on countless blogs and traditional news sites the world over as to the ballsack-to-face and how genuine it was? Unnecessary.

The posting of a story decrying all these people as fools on a reasonably popular, award-winning celebrity news blog? Unne… oh no, wait – necessary.

Hopefully our cutting wit and cynical take on the situation will force Baron Cohen to take things to the a new level for his next stunt – he can be a new David Blaine. Except with discernible talent, a personality and the ultimate saving grace of not being a massive prick.

But what could the new street magician of comedy do? Yes, as we’re so smart (and have run out of things to say), here’s a list:

1. Stage a coup at the next ‘youth’ award ceremony he is invited to, taking over from the main hosts and declaring the show as his own. This could possibly involve murder, cutlasses and Mark Thatcher, depending on how far Cohen wants to take it.

2. Take the humiliation of a popular celebrity angle up a notch by kidnapping one – say, Robert Pattison – keeping him locked in a cellar and frequently abusing and humiliating him over a period of months or years. He could even record it, if he’s feeling particularly fruity.

3. Destroy MTV, thus bringing about the end of the disgusting corporation and finally bringing about the fall of their dominion over the music you people listen to. This would thusly pave the way for a better society where people actually listen to good music. And not the fucking Jonas Brothers. In 3D.

This will probably be taken down by the time you see this, but still try and do a watch of Eminem getting teabagged by Bruno here.

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When Hecklerspray gets called into various places to accept awards and whatnot, we routinely do four things.

The first is we always have a sword pointed at the innards of whoever hands us our trophy. That’s just to ensure an enthusiastic and positive over-the-top speech, which works well over half the time. If you Youtube ‘Hecklerspray, Billy Crystal, Kidney Sack Spill’ ‘you’ll see exactly what we’re talking about there.

Other major celebrities have a similar routine of only attending certain award ceremonies. Paula Abdul, for instance, only attends them when the presenter is Sacha Baron Cohen with cameras rolling.

Usually when Paula Abdul takes an award it’s off of a mantle place during a famous friend’s Christmas party. That doesn’t matter though – because she still takes it graciously and offers a slurred speech about how she couldn’t have done it without MC Skat Cat and/or the restless ghosts of all her dead fans.

You can imagine then how eager she was to accept an award that actually had her name plate screwed onto the base. Allegedly it was for being ‘Artist of the Year’ in Germany. Nominees she’d probably beaten out were David Hasselhoff, Michael Knight, and the grandson of the guy who used to trim Heinrich Himmler’s moustache.

To accept the award Abdul was told she had to show up at some vacant house in Hollywood. We’re told Paula Interviewed well. She maintained good poise, she used sentences fused together with a good noun to adverb ratio, and perhaps most importantly her butt didn’t fart on the backs of the Mexicans she was literally sitting on. She describes the whole set up like this:

“It is the most interesting, wacked-out situation that happened to me. I was scarred for my life for a year. I walk into the home, and I’m greeted by this futuristic Captain Nemo-looking dude with a Mohawk — and he’s flaming. And I’m going, ‘Oh, this is going to be one of those fun Japanese game shows.’ I’m like, ‘OK, this is weird.’ [Bruno] says, ‘Sorry, there’s no furniture.’ And he snaps his fingers and says, ‘Gardeners!’ And these two Mexican guys come in, and they drop down to all fours, and he says [to me], ‘Sit down.’ And I said, ‘I’m not doing that.’ “

“It was getting so uncomfortable, and I’m throwing daggers with my eyes at my publicist. I said, ‘No, I won’t be doing that. I have to go to work. … And by the way, where’s my award?’ And I’m trying to hold a smile on my face. It was hysterical, but it was so disturbing.’”

Now take that scene and throw it together with the one where Bruno paid the cage fighters to start making out in front of a bunch of low-brow red necks and you’ve got yourself a fairly decent movie.

Not as good as anything Lucas would make, mind you, but decent.

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Ich vas wrong when I thought that Sacha Baron Cohen’s camp crusader, Bruno, would be a slice of cringe-worthy crap.

The Cambridge educated comedian is back on form after Borat and causes a storm of trouble as a gay Austrian fashionista. Censors in the US are not amused and consider his homosexual humour to be ‘over the line’.

So far they’ve rated Bruno NC-17, which means the film may not see a commercial release but is guaranteed to be good.

Watch Cohen defend himself from dildos, adopt an African child (he names him OJ) and turn a fashion show into a spectacle as he dons a velcro jumpsuit. He manipulates a pack of gun-toting, gay-hating rednecks, causes outrage in a room full of fat black women and turns up to army training clad in Dolce & Gabbana. Shock, outrage and public anal sex comes to silver screen along with another stupid accent that will last for years.

As expected, the Ali G actor never misses a chance to poke fun at his own religion and gets a pack of orthodox Jews to chase him down the street. Sacha Baron Cohen is an international pariah once again, Don’t miss him.

[story by Alex de Moller]

She’d charge $12 a pop to watch, and when enough people were gathered around she’d let the beasts out of their cages. Those pandas are savage animals too – we saw them skin a guy once. It was a half-dead senior citizen, but a guy nonetheless.

But all that was when the pandas were younger. With the passing of time came panda-related geriatric problems. Also with the passing of time came a strange gay-panda love affair. It was actually horrific – not that anything’s wrong with that.

That experience is why we feel we can relate so well to a whole bunch of people in Arkansas. They showed up for a vicious cage fight, and what they got instead was two grown mean undressing each other in a flurry of lust and passion.

And you know who people are blaming? Borat. We mean Bruno. People are blaming Bruno.

Picture it – you spent all day polishing your finest brass knuckles until they gleam just so in the sunlight. You practice knee kicks on your wooden karate thingy for over an hour and you inject several numbing agents into both your face and groin.

When it’s time for the bout, you step into the ring full of confidence. Your opponent winds up, you brace for the impact, but instead of hitting you he licks your neck a whole bunch and tells you there are flowers from him back in your locker. You casually thank him, and notice for the first time that his eyes are the perfect shade of blue.

That was all from page three of our brother’s autobiography – word for word. The following four chapters are more of the same – it’s pretty redundant, actually. He calls it science fiction, and he’s still looking for a publisher.

Sacha Baron Cohen may have read some of it. We’re far from sure about that, but CNN explains our suspicions:

“Crowds in Arkansas came for the lure of cage fighting and $1 beer, but police say what they got instead was men ripping each others’ clothes off and kissing — a stunt suspected of being orchestrated by Sacha Baron Cohen of “Borat” fame. We had a contract for cage fighting. We were deceived,” said Dwight Duncan, president and CEO of Four States Fair Grounds in Texarkana, where the first of two Arkansas fights raised suspicions last month.”

Outside of Soho, San Francisco, and the lavender apartment our third step-dad eventually moved into, the cage-match crowd isn’t generally the sort that would take kindly to passionate displays of homosexuality where their stomach-jabs and face-punches are supposed to be.

That’s why immediately following the match, every male that looked effeminate within a five mile radius was rounded up, taken to a local park and tickled for no less than 20 minutes – which is ironic, as we’ve heard that’s kind of ‘a thing’ in those circles.

It’s just what we heard.