Oh Otto, You Came And You Gave Without Taking

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I wasn't entirely optimistic going into Bruce La Bruce's latest flick, Otto; or Up With Dead People... word was mixed and I've seen enough of Bruce's previous output to know what I was getting into. Amateurish acting and mediocre camera-work, the occasional outburst of graphic smut, all in the service of some usually- ends- up-being overly pretentious intellectual obviousness. His films exist to push buttons really, to meld sex together with your college thesis. And there's plenty of that in Otto, the "gay" "zombie" "movie" and yes all of those words should probably stay in quotation marks... it's just that kind of film. The kind that sort of disassembles itself merrily as it trundles along sloppily...

It's a mixed bag, this Otto, with remainders of the usual strikes against it that I just lobbed at Bruce's previous work... only not quite as distracting as before. There are some rough patches to the acting, but there are also some treasures. Going in I knew enough about the film beforehand to have worried that the figure of the avant-garde lesbian filmmaker named Medea might come off as obvious and annoying, but she turns out to be terrifically funny, and there is one wonderfully written scene between her and Otto in a garbage dump that is the film's highlight - a funny and surprisingly touching ode to the world we are leaving behind for the future generations.

That was what I found so surprising about my reaction to the film - that it actually, on a couple of occasions, managed to move me. I expected plenty of silliness with blood and guts and fucking - and lordy there is plenty of that too (wound fucker!) - but I didn't expect Bruce's thoughts, which often have felt like nothing more than a punk's middle-finger-laced tantrum, to cohere into something sorta genuine. Otto is a tragic figure... until he isn't because the "film" is really a film within a film... within a film? Contrary to how I might normally feel about this much narrative rug-pulling though - unless the writer's name is Charlie Kaufman, natch - I found the uneasiness with what level of reality we were in at any given moment with the movie to be cleverly engaging... it didn't annoy me. I thought it set up the third act suprisingly well, and kept me curious where Bruce was going with all of this.

(Psst - where he was going, of course, was an orgy.)

Otto himself though, cuts quite an almost immediately iconic figure though, no? The goth-emo wet dream of a queer Tim Burton. And while the film sometimes lapses into Bruce's cheap-looking slap-dash mise-en-scène, there's more striking visuals here then I expected, and most of them are due to Otto's striking presence. Slap him down in the middle of a field of yellow flowers and you've got a great shot, ya know? Throw some blood over him and the contrast with his blue-white contact lenses off his gray/black ensemble... it's a rich tapestry.

So while I've often admired the basic fact that there was a Bruce La Bruce out there making movies and filling the role of the punk-porn aesthetician - A) that really ought to be a word if it isn't, and B) La Bruce's schtick has always been so much more palatable to me than somebody like David Decoteau whose soft-core possessed-straight- boys-in-underpants flicks are unwatchable and offensively closeted - this was the first time that I've more than merely admired the existence of one of his films, but actually genuinely liked and enjoyed it. Yay that.
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