Category: Arts

Aliens have been on Earth for 28 years. Not invaders, not even supplicants, they simply appeared here, stranded, and became terrestrial refugees. Mysteriously lacking leadership like isolated drone workers in an ant colony, they submitted to containment in a ghetto outside Johannesburg, South Africa, in the shadow of the mothership which has floated in lifeless silence for nearly three decades.

“I've been thinking,” says Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) near the beginning of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, to which his friend and comrade-in-arms Duke (Channing Tatum) replies, “I warned you about that.” Clearly director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, its sequels, Van Helsing) took this to heart: in the first five minutes, a squad of sinister but anonymous super-soldiers led by a literal supermodel (Sienna Miller as “the Baroness,” formerly Duke’s fiancée, Anna) seize a top-secret weapon from a U.S. military convoy “with extreme prejudice,” as they say in these sorts of movies, setting the tone for everything that follows.

Even with two films still to come – for anyone outside the loop, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is getting the bifurcated Kill Bill treatment – the sixth installment of Harry Potter sees the stakes rising, the danger increasing, and nothing much left to be taken for granted by our wizard hero except for his two best friends.

Those familiar with the character Bruno know him as one of a triptych of alter egos on display in Sacha Baron Cohen’s Da Ali G Show (alongside Borat and the titular Ali G), a lisping and effeminate Austrian TV host whose apparent ignorance, and superficiality – not to mention his confrontationally flamboyant homosexuality – elicits laughable, often bigoted or contradictory, remarks from his interview subjects.