Aren't You Getting So Freaked Out About Brüno?
You ought to be! Sacha Baron Cohen's outrageous new comedy Bruno has dipped its balls on Great Britain, and early reviews are trickling in. The across-the-pond verdict? It's just a crazy good time. Emphasis, you know, on crazy.
Our strange, formless doppleganger The Awl has a Briton review roundup so we won't belabor the point and post our own snippets of the same notices. Though, this quote from The Guardian should be noted early and often:
There's an eye-popping montage of extreme gay sex practices (imaginary, one hopes), a surfeit of waving penises, dildos, fetish gear, anal bleaching, and an excruciating mime in which Brüno fellates the ghost of a deceased member of Milli Vanilli in front of a psychic.
Oh dear God, yes you did read that right. Terrific.
So if those cheeky (and, yes it's true, more sexually liberated) Brits responded well to the film, how will big dumb fat loud fried fuckwit America receive it? Well, we'll tell you this and it won't surprise you: Gay folks are awfully worried. Actors and comedians and social gays (like departing MTV exec Brian Graden) are pretty much freaked out that the film, while funny and crazy and manic and strange and intellectually rebellious as it may be, is going to ring in the wrong way with those who'd go to see it to stock up on anti-gay ammunition. If you have to explain that a joke is a goddamned joke, then it just might not be funny, as David Letterman so artfully put it this week after he tried to rape Bambi's dead mom. So if we're laughing, well good for Us for actually enjoying something we paid $12 for. But if They are laughing too, and in The Wrong Way, then we've cause for concern.
There's also the argument to be made that, hey everyone who's gay in America, let's man up and accept something that, while it might be a bit nasty, has a grain of truth to it. Is there a highly sexualized cultural subset of Gay Men? Abso-fucking-lutely. One could say that hey, Bruno is just the gay Stiffler, though that would assume a level playing field that has never existed and probably won't for years and years until we're consumed by the warm rising oceans. But still there is a bit of general good in that thought-adventure: Will the moderate lefties who like gays in an abstract sense recoil in horror when confronted in the face by gross things—like dildos and hotpants and, we're guessing, lube—that actually do exist in the gay world? Who the hell knows! And isn't that sort of the point: To find out.
The nervous Hollywood pro-Gay lobby has already turned its full attention away from maliciously trying to destroy the sacred bonds of the Johnson family of 12 Farmhouse Drive in Lenexa, Kansas and successfully pressured Universal into doing a recut of the film's ending, which now features a "Hey, it was all just a dream! A silly homophobe-skewing dream!" bit with none other than Elton John. But was it enough? Will it be enough? Will anything be enough? These are questions we're left to ponder as the film makes its horrid gay pink sparkly way across the Atlantic.
Now we're just waiting to find out if we'll embrace it like Sir Elton, or toss it away in disgust, like poor Robbie Williams.