Kelly Wand"Bruno" review
July 30th 2009 00:19
Being gay is neat.
Bruno is a curiously disjointed but thoughtful documentary about a gay male Austrian fashion diva named Bruno I think I’ve seen on TV before but with different hair. The “u” in his name has an umlaut over it, although oddly it’s still pronounced “Bruno”. (I don’t know how to make umlauts with a PC keyboard yet, only thèsè.) Though Bruno is gay and Austrian, he also enjoys being a buffoon in public and desperately wants to be famous, so he comes to America where he’ll fit in, or at least be 2 for 4. He also comes because he’s driven out of Austria for wearing a Velcro suit like the one David Letterman wore to a fashion show, where he sticks to curtains and knocks things over and gets booed by rich types who actually consider fashion shows serious entertainment.
Without a single contact or discernible human emotion, Bruno instantly snags a Hollywood agent and gets a chance to shoot a network pilot about Harrison Ford telling him to fuck off, with lots of filler involving his singing penis. I think it’s called “Bruno.” He shows it to a focus group and a TV executive, along with his agent, who oddly appears never to have seen it before. The focus group doesn’t like the show, apparently because they dislike Harrison Ford and/or because Bruno’s Austrian and they’re racists. I was in a focus group once, for a TV sitcom pilot starring Al Molinaro of “Happy Days” called “The Ugily Family”, in which he played a long-suffering patriarch with an unfortunate last name. They also showed us a commercial for spaghetti sauce. Then they asked us 2 or 3 questions about the show and 101 questions about spaghetti sauce. Television pwnz.
After the witless suits fail to greenlight his kick-ass Harrison Ford series, Bruno tries to enlist Paula Abdul’s help by having her over to his new house, but she gets offended at the sight of a near-naked Mexican and flees. Apparently Paula Abdul’s racist too. I’d still do her. Since Bruno doesn’t swing that way, though, he tries to seduce Ron Paul in a hotel room instead, but barely makes it to first base. Somehow Bruno managed to find the one Republican senator who’s not into the sausage.
Since Bruno’s the only non-racist, he adopts a small African child and names him O.J. This upsets some black people in a live studio audience for some talk show, which is surprising since as I recall black people like O.J., or at least enough to let him off the hook for murder and because he’s awesome in Capricorn One and The Naked Gun. Isn’t naming a child after him a compliment to their hero? Some people from social services show up to take O.J. away from Bruno to await a much more idyllic fate in the American welfare system.
Logically, Bruno decides to continue his quest for fame in the Middle East by holding a peace summit between famous Israeli Yossi Alpher and some Palestinian guy. He gets them to agree that hummus is nutritious and to endure his touch. He suggests to a “terrorist leader” named Ayman Abu Aita that Osama bin Laden resembles a “dirty wizard.” Though this too is clearly a compliment, since the dirty wizard from Lord of the Rings was everyone’s favorite character, Aita, who resembles a mustached Nazgul, takes typically terrorist umbrage. Why don’t my nation’s actual mainstream anchors interview these people?
Returning to America in perplexity and defeat, Bruno wisely realizes that the only bulletproof route to fame in an industry ruled by gay men is by feigning straightness. For a crash course in liking girls, he heads to the Deep South, where heterosexuality rules, especially if it’s with a relative. Sadly, the swingers at the swingers’ party he crashes refuse to open up to him, except for a nice blond lady. He then joins the Army, where for his recent success in hurting the feelings of terrorists you think he’d be hailed as a hero. Sadly, they only promote him to colonel. Bruno also tries to go hunting with some toothless Deliverance-y rednecks à la Cabin Boy. Sadly, everyone survives.
With only one orthodox path to fame remaining, Bruno enters a cage match in a Thunderdome-esque arena somewhere (hopefully) in the south. One of the audience members is wearing a shirt that says, “Assholes are just for shitting.” Apparently the international symbol for heterosexuality has been upgraded from light-socket to poo. He gets into a brawl with his estranged gay assistant Lutz, but in the course of comically bludgeoning each other they both realize how gay wrestling matches are in general and start making out. The audience members don’t like seeing sex when they paid to see violence so they throw metal chairs into the ring to try and kill them. This makes Bruno famous worldwide.
Or so I assume, since a movie was made about his attempts to have a movie made about his attempts to have. I liked it. It’s admittedly a bit disconcerting how much the story arc so closely resembles that of the 2006 documentary Borat, but it’s good to know that Bono, Slash, and Elton John were all in the same recording booth, if not at the same time. I wouldn’t mind seeing a documentary about the PR guys who managed to secure all these celebs and terrorists and get them to sit with Bruno just long enough to get them to leave in a huff*.
*Apparently there was a sweet bit with LaToya Jackson that was expensively cut at the last minute from studio workprints because her pedophiliac brother had just died and the last thing on the filmmakers’ minds was offending anyone, especially black people and pedophilia enthusiasts. That Bruno needs to grow some stones.
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