A plethora of issues need to be addressed about Repo Men before actually discussing Repo Men. Well, really just three issues, so maybe it’s not a “plethora,” but it’s still much more than normal, let us not anger El Guapo with improper word use. First, all issues with Repo! The Genetic Opera are completely covered here and here by Repo!’s co-writer/creator Terrance Zdunich from his point of view. Second, Repo Men has absolutely no connection or affiliation with the 1984 Emilio Estevez classic Repo Man. Third, (SMALL SPOILER) the filmmakers behind Repo Men are fully aware of the similarities to the Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life “liver donor” segment, going so far as to include a shot of the sketch itself in the film. Good. Everything out of the way? Let’s not speak of these things any further. Well, except…
Not to anger genius/legend John Cleese, but Meaning Of Life is unquestionably my favorite Python film. Blasphemy you say? Sure, and it’s an opinion that often must be defended in everyday life, an argument that usually ends with “It’s not like I don’t love all the other Python flicks as well, leave me alone.” When I saw the first trailer for Repo Men the very first thought in my mind was the possible occurrence of a John Cleese or Terry Gilliam cameo. Little did I know that Repo Men would owe more to Meaning Of Life in tone than in concept. If you haven’t seen it, the “liver donor” segment involves John Cleese and Graham Chapman as liver-collectors, who go from home to home, and nonchalantly collect livers from people that signed up for a liver donor card. So the skit is basically Chapman violently ripping out the liver of Terry Gilliam’s Rastafarian-Jewish character, blood spurting and screaming in pain, whilst Cleese casually hits on his wife, Terry Jones, who isn’t at all affected by the gruesome murder of her husband happening before her, instead complaining about it as if her husband made one of his normal idiotic day to day decisions. Comedy genius. Simple and direct.
The relationship that Repo Men, the film, wants the audience to have with its two main characters is very much like that Python sketch. It’s very befuddling at first, and as much as I hate to say it, very “refreshing” in such a big studio action/sci-fi flick as this. The tone of the film is almost that of a 1980’s buddy-cop comedy, Jude Law and Forest Whitaker, black and white partners and life long friends that battle the struggle of their jobs together, and relax with cold beer and some laughs after a hard days work. The catch is that they are brutally murdering people, poor people, day to day, by repossessing bio-mechanical organs in which the client has lapsed on their payment. These are the bad guys, and for a healthy chunk of the film, Jude Law’s character is a remorseless killing machine. It’s a risk as well as an art to be able to have characters such as these and yet still handle the tone in such a way that the audience can “laugh” with them. Repo Men pulls it off very effortlessly. One minute you have Law and Whitaker killing innocents, the next you are chuckling at their chum-like banter. It’s like American Pyscho, we laugh with Patrick Bateman in the face of his obvious insanity and bloodlust, however in Repo Men it’s very interesting and welcome to see that in such a huge, mainstream film. Mixing comedy with murderers that you don’t exactly hate is, oddly, a lot of fun. This, of course, brings the Monty Python “liver donor” comparison full circle when there is a short moment where these two Repo Men are sitting in their living room, watching Meaning Of Life, and chuckling to themselves.
On the surface and via the marketing the movie seems like a very straightforward Blade Runner meets a-thousand-other-genres type of flick, which, in a lot of ways, it very much is, but it survives by its sense of humor, and its craftsmanship. It has a muted Minority Report/Blade Runner type of evil-future-corporate landscape setting, one that is only really referenced in the visuals aside from the one corporation we deal with in the movie. Its most obvious element is that of the “what happens if the corrupt system you uphold turns on you” genre, very Logan’s Run, which we’ve seen a gazillion times, but luckily the movie has a bit more happening underneath and even if it is derivative, its still very well made and fun. The system turns on Jude Law’s Remy when an accident in the line of duty causes him to need a heart replacement. He then becomes part of the system, and sympathetic toward others with a similar problem to him, thus making him unable to kill, thus making him poor, thus making him lapse on his artificial-heart payments, thus making the plot.
Aside from one or two over-edited fight scenes, the movie is very appropriately shot and stitched together…drab textures and solid geography and pacing. From what I can tell, this is Miguel Sapochnik’s first major studio directorial effort and a very welcome one at that. Having not read the book, The Repossession Mambo, I don’t know what the tone of the source material is, but the film, while not a comedy, has no qualms about irony or making a joke via freeze frames, or voice over.
In the past I have argued that all action-heroes are actors, but not all actors are action heroes. Here we have two of the best working “actors” in Hollywood throwing the punches, their acting ability is not under scrutiny; however their “punches” might be. Forest Whitaker, while certainly more than an “action” star, has done this type of film before, so no concern there, especially considering how enthusiastically joyful he plays his part. I’ll admit, that even for us Jude Law fans, there is a slight concern that he couldn’t carry an action film. When I think of Law, no offense to him, but I see a tiny guy, a great actor, and someone best suited to drama, comedy, and perhaps some Eddie Izzard-coined films where British people named Sebastian walk into rooms where other British people are arranging matches. It’s a pleasure to report that he not only carries the film, he knocks it out of the park. I thought the site of Gigolo Joe beating people up and slicing out their organs would feel wrong, but instead, I found myself more than entertained while he was brutally slicing and shooting his way through plenty of “bay guys,” looking great (sexy?) while doing so. I mean, Law is no Statham, Stallone, Willis, or Ah-nuld, but he held his own. The great Liev Schreiber rounds out the leading men as the head of the Repo Men’s corporate office, silly New York accent (played for laughs,) asshole-ish demeanor, and all. Seriously though, has Schreiber ever not been class-A great? He’s another case of “why isn’t this guy more famous?”
**************MAJOR SPOILERS START HERE**************
While reviewing Shutter Island most of my time was spent harping on the fact that cinematic twists, MOST of the time, are the lamest possible device a movie can use…especially one involving a dream during sleep, cryogenic stasis, or brain illness or injury. Well Repo Men has a twist, not a huge all encompassing “M. Night is crazy” twist, but a twist none the less. I am going to try my best to defend this twist, while sticking to my guns on my Shutter Island review. Skip over the next paragraph if you don’t need your memory refreshed.
About three quarters of the way through the film Jude Law and Alice Braga’s characters are on the run from the corporation. Law has an artificial heart; Braga’s Beth has almost half of her body comprised of fake organs. There is a rather minor showdown between Whitaker’s Jake and Law’s Remy. Jake, of course, is trying to repossess Remy’s heart, in the face of his life long friendship. During the fight sequence, Jake hits Remy in the head with a huge steel hook, right before getting tasered unconscious by Remy. Remy is then awaken by Beth, and the too of them decide to storm the corporate building, kill anyone in their way, and destroy all the credit files to free everyone on the books. Well, including a truly, truly bad ass Jude Law knife fight, they succeed. They make it to the cliché inner sanctum of organ re-acquisition, the sub-basement of evil, the all-white-décor file storage department. They then realize that the only way to get themselves out of the system is to scan the body parts inside them, which brings about an extremely gory and oddly sexual scene where the two of them slice each other open and stick the scanner module (very similar to one you’d find at a supermarket) inside the each others body. They succeed again, they survive, and then Whitaker and Schreiber enter the room, Whitaker has a change of heart on a dime, kills Schreiber and the three of them blow up what’s left of the evil basement.
Cut to: They are sitting on a beach, Jake, Beth, and Remy, enjoying tropical cocktails and laughing it up like all is well. At this point, some overly anxious people in my theater, assuming the film was over, walked out fully satisfied with the most obvious, cliché ending in history. The screen then glitches with static, you hear voices talking, cut back to that small encounter earlier, Remy is lying on his back in a coma, that huge steel hook actually busted his skull wide open. Paramedic’s from the corporation had him on an artificial neural-net, in which he was dreaming beautiful dreams. He’s been in a coma for the entire end climax of the film, a computer creating his ideal scenario. Movie Ends. Bad guys win.
I walked out of the theater completely baffled as to why I liked the flick so much, especially with a twist. I think I figured out why. Unlike M. Night’s twists, this twist didn’t change the entire film, just about the last 20 or so minutes, it also didn’t change the world they were living in. This wasn’t a twist where they find out that all the organs are actually made by aliens or that they aren’t actually on earth and the whole city is a government experiment on the moon or some crap like that. The world that the movie sets up is true, and the twist doesn’t change that. Secondly, if they edited out the twist, the movie itself would still be a completely formed, albeit clichéd, narrative that makes absolute and total sense. There would be no Vanilla Sky/Shutter Island “why are things all weird for no discernible reason” type of confusion. Remy’s delusion is perfectly comprehensible and finishes out the story (If anyone knows how the book ends, leave a comment about it below.)
Also, the twist take’s a turn, at least in my opinion, towards reality instead of the more fantastic and “Hollywood.” The reality of how things end in real life would be that a human head getting smashed in by a giant piece of metal gets busted open and the hero’s journey ends. This makes the twist almost more welcomed, in that the “fake” Remy-created ending wraps everything up in such a nice little package, especially the sudden and unearned change-of-heart that Whitaker’s character takes. Jake, in the span of literal seconds, after an entire film of being unquestionably devoted to the system of organ repossession, decides he’s on the wrong side and stabs his boss in the neck. It’s awkward to watch him laughing it up on the beach with Law. Remember, the both of these men are effectively mass murderers, Law’s character has somewhat fought for redemption, while Whitaker just did an Anakin Skywalker and said “Ok, I’ll be on your side now.”
So it is nice that the corny, saccharin nature of Jake’s turn from the dark side actually never happened. And sue me, but I love it when the bad guys win, when drab, cold reality wins out over triumphant fantastical Hollywood hegemony. Hollywood endings have their place, but it does get tiring seeing the good guy win, giving the audience what it wants. You got to love a twist like this, ESPECIALLY opposed to Shutter Island since the viewer thinks that their emotional journey is over, relaxing on a tropical beach somewhere, just to strip it away and remind them that life sucks, and not every movie exists to help them escape the reality of their banality filled job at the horse manure processing plant (I’m not sure if those exist.) Some movies want you to know that horse manure processing might be as good as it gets. Those movies aren’t for everyone.
While cliché and derivative, Repo Men is worth a look. Jude can kick some serious gluteus-maximus too, good for him.
Thanks for reading, I’m Bob Rose and you probably (PROBABLY) are not.
There’s a moment in WE LIVE IN PUBLIC (Now out on DVD) in which Josh Harris, an Internet wunderkind who saw the convergence of our online and everyday lives meshing long before any of us delighted in the joy of broadband service, makes an underground lair. Now, as founder of Pseudo.com, one of the very first sites to ever make video on the Internet available in the late 90’s, he wanted to push the sociological and psychological boundaries of what we would consider voyeuristic. He built a bunker, for lack of a better word, underground in New York where dozens upon dozens of people, artists mostly, had to submit not only applications for the chance to have their lives taped 24/7 but were put through rigorous examinations to determine their willingness to be completely exposed to those around them in ways we hadn’t yet been exposed to. One of the things you learn quickly about the cultural mores of artists, I think, is that through this selection process you notice that these people are open to the idea of things, the idea of a good artistic endeavor, in a way that I don’t think Ma and Pa Kettle would, as the general looseness of those who agreed to be filmed bathing, fornicating, and doing whatever they wanted while the cameras rolled is apparent in their giddiness to take part in this experiment.
I’ll admit it: I’m dumb.
As Maurice Sendak tells it, life growing up was sweet with his older brother and older sister.
The Academy Awards is either just around the corner or has been announced depending on when or if this gets posted. It’s been awhile since I’ve delivered my input on what’s out there. Thinking back I do not have a good enough reason not to have delivered Mr. Stipp a review or two a month. I could use the excuse that I have been traversing through a labyrinth of pain while in and out of a drug haze that impedes my writing, but I just don’t think that is acceptable. I will not continue on with my condition in fear of falling into maudlin territory and depressing you, the reader, and myself. So, in my humble opinion it’s unfortunate that the Academy has reduced itself to a cheap marketing ploy rather than get more creative to capture a television audience with the announcement of 10 “best picture nominees” rather than the streamline 5. Pardon me; did I use the word “creative” conjunctively with the Academy?
You have to look at a performance by Christoph Waltz in Inglorious Basterds in order to fully comprehend why Jakob Cedergren, who plays town cop Robert Hansen in Terribly Happy, deserves his own spot on the world stage.
$9.99 – DVD REVIEW
DEAD SNOW – DVD REVIEW
BRAVE NEW FILMS 5TH ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION – REVIEW
I did not have the chance to see this film while it was playing in the theaters but it made a decent amount of coin at the box office and I now have a few copies to give away for a few people who would like a chance to win one.
I deeply regret having to drag Robert Altman into this.
There’s no denying that this movie has had its setbacks. From delays to reshoots to the replacement of the editor, and original director, this film ought to have been a multi-million dollar, direct-to-DVD dud. Instead, what we have been given by director Joe Johnson is a movie that is paced quickly, has more than a few quality kills, has a story that isn’t completely insulting to the viewer, and is pure fun.
Roger Ebert recently 
You’ve just got to put yourself back into the frame of mind in order for this to work.
I am a man of simple pleasures.
What made a movie like this so unique when compared to seeing Ti West’s House of the Devil in the same week is that here are two movies that get it right. While one is a distillation of everything that made old school horror such a hoot Pontypool proves that you can fast forward your time machine, Doc Brown, and enjoy the stylings of an artist that knows how to make 21st century horror cool again.
The long-awaited release of Universal Studios’ 2010 version of The Wolfman conjures the history of the men who made the original horror films at the studio in the 1920s through the 1940s. Not only was the original 1941 film The Wolf Man key among them, but the rich history of the other films is directly tied into both why and how that film was created.
For the Waggner Wolf Man film, slated as a B-picture by the Universal brass, Pierce and Fulton knew that they had an opportunity to create a unique project that would harken back to the old Laemmle years at the studio. In Chaney, they had the hulking physical actor who could be used to realize their ideas. With The Wolf Man, Kent, along with major contributions by studio mainstays Pierce and Fulton, created the film’s showpiece “transformation” sequences which became standard fare in the many spin-offs that followed. Witness the lap dissolves that Kent and Fulton implemented for transformations from man to wolf, and especially, in the film’s tragic climax, from wolf back to man. Kent also cleverly orchestrated the noted end of the film where Claude Rains unknowingly beats his own son with a silver-tipped cane, later realizing that it was his own flesh that he killed. In their tussle, an especially marked cut to a close shot of Chaney, Jr. as the Wolf Man struggling with Rains makes for one of the film’s most fascinating moments.
James Cameron wanted me to let you know that, in addition to being “the king of the world”, he is now also the king of Pandora. That, of course, is the name given to the moon associated with the planet Polyphemus in Mr. King of the Galaxy’s new movie, Avatar. An Avatar is, as I’m sure you know, the binary and digital equivalent of an “AKA”, which itself is just an acronymic way of saying “I can’t stand on my own two feet, so I’ll adopt a more exciting alter-ego”.
Richard Kelly does not make “normal” movies, that is, films in the style or manner of the day, and especially not the cookie cutter style of storytelling found in most studio pictures or CBS police procedurals. The better art films, on the other hand, follow either the style of, say, Terence Mallick’s Badlands, which is also the new “international” style, somewhat distanced from the action and often visually beautiful and about “real” people, or they follow the juiced up musical Scorsese style of Mean Streets. 
The Oscar and Emmy winning screenwriter of the film, Diablo Cody, is the new Tarantino, a screenwriter poised to take over the town and inspire a clutch of fanatic followers. She has a column in Entertainment Weekly and a Showtime TV show and also helped produced Jennifer’s Body. But though she has the image of a tattooed hard drinking rebel there is a conservative steak to her work. The EW column thus far has been a self-glorifying journey through the nostalgia of her childhood interests, and the career making Juno was at heart a conservative vision of maternity. On the other hand, no major motion picture or TV series these days can endorse abortion. The dominant culture somehow demands that decry abortion, probably for fear of a backlash. As Nabokov said in an afterword to Lolita, no American work of fiction will ever concern itself with happy incest, an atheist who dies contented in his sleep, or a fruitful interracial marriage. He could have added to the list a tale about a successful, problem-clearing, and life-saving abortion (though Third Watch tried at the start of its second season).
First, a word on how Zombieland isn’t Shaun of the Dead 2: Jay of the Dead (where did I get Jay? It rhymes with DAY… never mind.) All the atrocious grammar, inept spelling, and questionable motives of “talk backers” on the net would make one think that the issue of plagiarism would be no big deal. How wrong one can be. In the dim, darkened world of the internet-age all movies that are sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, sequel-remakes, remake-reboots, and rebooted-sequel-half-prequels are given a pass on their content. Generation “TROLL” screams out to Hollywood’s ears “Give me content I’ve already seen, only NEWER and with more CGI!” Yet, when a film tries to exist only on the merits of a script alone, that is when the content is harshly criticized. Apparently you can’t have two separate movies about the same subject anymore, not without bucket loads of hate spewed forth. These complaints seem to have mutated in the 90’s and snowballed into a mammoth sphere of ignorance.
Director Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland might be the first time fast-moving-non-zombies have actually been properly utilized. The nitpicking loser inside me wants to complain, but the forgiving, Left-4-Dead addicted, softy inside me has to admit something. At no point was I bothered by the fact that the “zombies” where still-living-infected-humans, in a film called ZOMBIEland. This is because of how much of the film’s comedy is derived from the speed at which these zombies move. Right at the start of the flick we are told that due to speed, “the fatties die first.” As a fatty myself, I have to admit that this hilarious (and sadly true) assertion alone is enough to forgive all further use of non-Romero-certified-undead-slow-motion-zombies. Plus the name Zombieland is coined by Jesse Eisenberg’s character… making it the character’s mistake instead of the script’s. Also, it is time all of us who actually care about the Fast vs. Slow zombie debate admit that if fast-still-living zombies became a reality, we would call them “zombies” without hesitation. That doesn’t mean we love George Romero any less.
A hilarious slow-motion credit sequence is all we are treated to as for the initial onslaught of the infected uprising. Zombieland drops us into the already post-apocalyptic world of desolation. Narrated by Jesse Eisenberg, we are introduced to this world through his “rules” for survival, which makes a great running gag throughout the entire film. The movie doesn’t try to be a satirical horror flick bogged down in the meaning of life with heavy syrup. There is no sub-textual message about how “we are them, and they are us.” Zombieland is a simple action-comedy, but great in its simplicity and it stays true to what it is.
Opening credits and flashbacks aside, there are only five non-zombified humans seen throughout the movie, all of them with the simple goal of finding something that reminds them of a pre-zombie life. The girls, Wichita and Little Rock, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, are looking to visit an amusement park one last time. Woody Harrelson’s zombie-hunter, Tallahassee, simply wants to eat a Twinkie, and Jesse Eisenberg’s Columbus wants to find his “family.” Even the characters in the movie try to avoid sentimentality by calling each other by the names of the places they are from. This is not to say that there aren’t serious moments in the flick, but no more then your average action movie circa 1985. When dealing with death and survival you have to add in some semblance of emotion, here those moments are welcomed, short, sweet, and do give depth to these four survivors. At no point does the film feel cold or devoid of relatable themes, which serves the comedy, and separates it from empty action fare like Transformers 2 (I know, I know, let it go already… )
Woody Harrelson gives one of his best comedic performances since Kingpin. He is a classical machismo “badass” but he never stops giving us that sense that he’s basically just being Woody Harrelson, himself, which is arguably even funnier. He of course becomes the big-brother figure of Jesse Eisenberg, who is nothing more then a weak, scared, little wussy. Tallahassee is older, cooler, a hero archetype and externalizes all of his anger, so basically they are the Odd Couple in a zombie flick. In fact this might be the biggest flaw of the whole film, its mediocre character premise. We’ve seen these characters before and it’s pretty obvious where everyone is going and why. Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese’s script side steps most chances to make the movie’s themes and characters unique, not to mention all the technical aspects of the zombies them selves. However, all the sidestepping leaves more room for the comedy and the action, which in the end sells the movie as a cohesive entertaining whole. The characters have depth, we’ve just seen these depths so many times before, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The run time even felt short. It’s a movie review cliché but the flick doesn’t “overstay its welcome” one bit. If I’m going down the road of review clichés then I might as well mention that the flick is “just plain fun,” nothing messy. There is passion behind the need to provide light, hilarious, balls-out action-horror entertainment, you got to love that. It’s a rarity in theaters these days. Add to that a pretty good soundtrack (Metallica, Mozart, Van Halen, and Willie Nelson) and a rather cool teaser poster (the one without photoshopped actors.)
If it must be done, I’ll do it. Is Zombieland as good as or anything like, Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead? No. Not really. Zombies and comedy is where it ends. Perhaps one could say that Shaun makes fun of the slow-moving-Romero-approved zombies in much the same way as Zombieland does the fast-movers. However, Shaun is a romantic comedy with zombies (a Rom-Com-Zom), with a much tighter, better script and a smaller scope. Shaun even has a “we are them, and they are us” message, plus a dump truck full of homage weaved throughout, with fantastic editing and direction to boot. Zombieland is a straight up action comedy, a great one, but that’s about it… unless there is something I’m not seeing. So there Mr. Internet, I hope that satiates your craving to compare mildly similar films. Thanks for reading.
Antichrist will remind horror buffs right off the bat of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Both begin with the death of a child due to the inattention of parents, significantly in the case of Antichrist after the child witnesses uncomprehendingly the Primal Scene, though as the wife says later, “Freud is dead.” In von Trier’s thick imagery, death and orgasm are united. The rest of the movie profiles how that death haunts the surviving parents, with both supernatural and psychological elements. 
At first He seems like the epitome of the compassionate husband, a rational man seeking to cure his wife and save their marriage. His approach to therapy, though, could be viewed as reductive as the Bay Watch Philosophy, which dictates that in every episode, someone with a phobia is encouraged to “face their fear.” The Bay Watch School of Therapy erases phobias through confrontation; von Trier’s existential humanism is less serene. 
Her contempt comes to the foreground in the forrest when she begins to speak frankly to him about his various foibles, such as his distance from She and Nick “last summer.” But he learns strange things about her, too. For one thing, she was hobbling her son with the wrong shoes, a fact that shows up in an autopsy report he at first refuses to look at. Her weird mistreatment of her son anticipates her Misery style ball and chaining of He. She also keeps something called a Gynocide scrapbook. Also, the book she was writing becomes increasing erratic in its handwriting (one of two or three subtle allusions to the films of Stanley Kubrick). She also begins to say “crazy” things, though there is the possibility of a terrible truth to them. She asserts that “human nature is evil,” that “women do not control their own bodies, nature does,” that a “crying woman is a scheming woman,” that “nature is satan’s church.” She also speaks the enigmatic “when the Three Beggars arrive someone must die,” which may refer to the three small statues that Nick knocks down on his way to the window, or to the three animal visitations that He sees. In response, He says that she has betrayed her own thesis that she has been working on for so long, and he also tells her somewhat less convincingly that “good and evil have nothing to do with therapy.”
Once again we’ve got passes to see a sneak preview of a film that’s about to drop soon. This time it’s for the new Ang Lee film, TAKING WOODSTOCK.
I remember my first time learning what satire was in college.
This movie deserves a place.
So, wi-fi sucks and so does every hotspot that wants a 10 spot to log on to their already crappy service. Before heading out for my Friday activities (1:1s with a mess off great people and panels that I hope are worth waiting for) I wanted to let you know that you can follow my stream of consciousness through my Twitter strteam: STIPP. Some of the highlights from yesterday include:
Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn’t.
So, who’s going next week? I know many of you are planning to descend on the land that is known for its temperate climate and willingness to let hoards of geeks and nerds pick apart San Diego in a frenzy that only would have heightened my sense of geekery had I started attending when I was 13.
Many of you in Phoenix and beyond who have been hitting me up for screening passes have been just great in showing up and enjoying these films. Since the response has been so good on my end in getting these tickets out to those who love a good free film I once again have passes to see a sneak preview.
When I last reported on this site, I happen to mention I would finish up my take on a few other gems from the Phoenix Film Festival. I find it sad that so many turds have made their way to the screen with marketing budgets that nearly rival the film itself while smaller and vastly more entertaining fare has been virtually ignored. I guess it’s the way of the business ““ a fine female body draped over a motorcycle and nondescript machinery plowing into one another over a down-to-earth story that could actually makes us feel human again.