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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (July 17, 2009)
WWW JU STOUT COM Bruno and other Boys' Shorts New Film and DVD Releases Get Serious - and Seriously Funny By GARY MORRIS Early in Bruno, there’s a scene where the titular star describes his tiny Asian boyfriend, who Bruno thinks “may be a midget.” W hat follows is a montage of the two going at it using a traveling dildo machine, a champagne bottle exploding out of the boyfriend’s ass, an alarming pinwheel effect, and other sexual activities that would shock a swinger. This sequence sets the tone for w hat’s to come in •Sacha Baron Cohen’s jaw-dropping follow up to Borat. Bruno's marketing campaign invokes the earlier film in a sardonic tagline - “Borat was so 2006.” And if anything, Bruno (Universal) goes even further in skewering star culture, the fashion world, homophobia, and racism - though some viewers may be too busy flinching and covering their eyes to notice. The film is not for the faint of heart. Directed by Larry Charles {Borat, T V ’s Curb Your Enthusiasm), Bruno is a series of vignettes loosely based on Cohen’s latest character, a ridiculously narcissistic Austrian queen in butt-hugging Alpine shorts, and his endless attempts to become an international superstar. This of course involves fashion, one of Bruno’s obsessions. In a typical sequence, he crashes a prominent (real) fashion design er’s show dressed in a total Velcro outfit. Staggering and stumbling down the runway - his outfit sticking to him and ev erything else - he more or less dismantles the set. Cohen ratchets up the attack on the absurdity o f haute couture with a scene of Bruno interviewing an airhead model and shots o f real models wearing preposterous, clown-like dresses on the runway. It’s uphill, downhill or perhaps sideways from there. Cohen/Bruno’s victims pile up fast: a group of Deliverance-style hillbilly hunters that he tries to seduce; a bunch o f swingers; a queeny ex-gay minister (who he says has “blow job lips”); and in a sequence that will surely FROM BOYS B R IE F S 5 In the B razilian "You. Me 5 Him " Danilo and Marcos becom e surrogate parents to Marcos 10-year-old brother when their parents a re killed The film B ru n o is m any things, but it is not remotely hom ophobic, as some h ave ch a rg e d Bruno's seem ingly sen seless pursuit of fam e exposes sm all-m inded attitudes, including hom ophobia, in just about every scen e send some viewers stampeding to the exit, an elaborate episode in which “single parent” Bruno trades an iPod for a black African baby, who’s then taken away from him by a child welfare officer on a trash talk TV show. The latter instance is a brutal satire o f the celebrity adoptions of third-world children for, the film implies, photo ops and conscience salving. O ther encounters find our hero, who calls almost everybody “girlfriend,” wagging his ass at Ron Paul and turning basic training into an exercise in style. Normally, describing such scenes would constitute a spoiler, but doing so with Bruno doesn’t remotely capture their effect. Bruno may not be as ragingly successful as Borat, which took in $260 million. The origi nal ending, involving what was reported as a “cruel joke” on LaToya Jackson, was cut after FROM BO YS B R IE F S 5: “Kali M a.“ which won aw ard s on the festival circuit, tells the story of a g a y boy's fierce mother turning the tab les by attackin g his bully the death o f her famous brother. And Cohen’s shtick is so intense - the scenes sometimes so unsettling as he puts himself in one threaten ing situation after another - that it’s hard not to feel ? bit bludgeoned by the conclusion. One thing should be clarified: the film is not remotely homophobic, as some have charged. Bruno’s seemingly senseless pursuit of fame brilliantly, if uncomfortably, exposes small- minded attitudes, including homophobia, in just about every scene. * * * O n a quieter note, one of the happy by products o f the queer film festival circuit has been the thematic gay, lesbian, bi and trans shorts collections on DVD, assembled by companies like Wolfe Video and Picture This Video. These collections, while often all over the map in terms o f quality, at least give us a chance to revisit the worthy ones. Two recent discs devoted to gay male themes have enough gold among the dross to make them worth considering for rental or purchase. A perennial favorite in this group are the Boys Briefs and Boys Shorts (Wolfe) collections (get it?). The former series is up to number 5, and showcases several international entries vaguely on the subtitle’s theme, “Schoolboys.” The “boys” here range from pre-teens navi gating an innocent crush in “Benny’s Gym” to decidedly post-”boy” exercises such as “Flatmates,” in which two twentysomethings - one gay, one straight - indulge in some ho moerotic horseplay to mask deeper emotions. W hile some o f the shorts tackle classic issues o f coming out and fitting in, others ad dress more timely concerns. In “You, Me, & H im ,” Danilo and Marcos become surrogate parents to Marcos’ 10-year-old brother when their parents are killed. The film doesn’t sugar- coat the problems of a sometimes disruptive child unexpectedly entering a couple’s life. “Kali M a” won awards on the festival circuit, and it’s easy to see why: who doesn’t love the idea o f a gay boy’s fierce mother turning the tables by attacking his bully? Speaking o f accolades, more than half of the seven shorts in the S Is fo r Sexy (Picture This) collection are award winners. “Signage” offers a sensitive take on the common theme of the pleasures and pitfalls o f picking up, but the context is fresh: the main characters are either deaf or understand sign language. “Mr. Right22” is a witty look at the terrors o f Internet hookups. By far the most ambitious o f these shorts is “Shahram and Abbas,” a veritable extrava ganza in the genre at 35 minutes. The title characters are both straight Iranians, both ap plying for refugee status in the Netherlands by pretending to be gay. Is it a sign of our com munity coming-of-age that an only marginally gay film like this can make it into a gay shorts collection by simply being well-written, well- acted, and compelling? Let’s hope so. 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