Martin Schneider writes:

Sacha Baron Cohen’s new movie Bruno (or Brüno), featuring his “flamboyantly gay” Austrian fashion scenester character, is due out this summer. The recently released trailer starts with a barrage of pullquotes, one of the first of which is “Lavatorial!” and is credited to “Anthony Lane, The New Yorker” (it’s perfectly accurate).

Like any good fashionista, the trailer jokes that Borat is “so 2006.” But sadism-tinged guerrilla culture-war humor (no matter how brilliant) really does seem incredibly 2006, no? It’ll be interesting to see if squirming squares will play as well in the age of Obama, now that those squares are worried about their jobs, mortgages, retirement plans. Is it homophobia or parody of same? Ah, who can tell. If you missed it the first time around, George Saunders’s take on Borat was one of the sharpest.

I’m writing this from Austria, Bruno’s supposed homeland, where Joseph Fritzl pleaded guilty a couple of weeks ago. Bruno’s definitely a step up, PR-wise.