While we didn’t love “Brüno,” a mildly funny film with a lot of fleeting and forgettable laughs, one scene in particular we did rather like — filled with the incisive social commentary we were hoping for — was the “Straight Dave” Ultimate Fighting Championship face-off scene (detailed here at length).
As we reported earlier this month, the scene originally included Elton John’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” originally from “The Lion King,” but either Disney and seemingly John himself pulled the song from the scene perhaps fearing the sequence was too outrageous.
And it kind of is. The moment is a part in the film when Sacha Baron Cohen’s flamboyant Austrian character attempts to go straight and starts to host a homophobic show called “Dave’s MAX Out,” a “gay-loathing party to end all gay-loathing parties.” It gives us our first peek at Straight Dave; the newly invented Brüno persona that is mustachioed, hirsute and decked out in camouflage gear and an outback hat — uber straight as it were. But eventually, he gets called out as a “f—–” by his ex-assistant who is in love with him and the two duke it out in the ring.
The scene of course was remarkably soundtracked to the aforementioned “Lion King,” song and as we wrote, when we first reported that the song had been dumped, we were partially worried that the excellent scene had been ruined or tamed beyond recognition (we first saw the original version at SXSW). However, all is well that ends well. Obviously, we’ve seen “Brüno,” and we can report that they made an awesome alternate choice in Celine Dion’s uber-schmaltz theme from “Titanic,” “My Heart Will Go On.”
Suffice to say, a sweaty, half-naked Brüno making out to with his assistant in slow-motion to this cheeseball anthem, while redneckers look on in utter disgust and shock is a pretty amazing moment. Now if only the rest of the movie was this good…
