Repo! The Genetic Opera

What do you get when Saw and Willy Wonka have a child, meanwhile Moulin Rouge and The Island have a kid, and somehow those two kids get together and have a baby? You get Repo! The Genetic Opera.

For those who don't know it, it's set in the not-too-distant future during an epidemic of organ failures. GeneCo, headed by Rotti Largo, offers payment plans to those who can't afford transplants. But if you get behind on your payments, Rotti sends his Repo Man after you to "reposess" your transplanted organs.

The story focuses on the life of Shilo Wallace (Alexa Vega), victim of an unspecified blood disease and kept sheltered in her room by her father Nathan (Anthony Head), who has a dangerous secret life. She sneaks out at night to get a glimpse of life, and gets caught up with a Graverobber (Terrence Zdunich) who collects a surgical painkiller called Zydrate from petrified corpses and sells it on the black market. Shilo finds out that Rotti holds a cure for her condition. After being sucked into the haunting world of GeneCo, she is unable to turn back, as all of her questions will be answered at the wildly anticipated spectacular event: The Genetic Opera.

This movie first offers something that we rarely see at the movies anymore: originality. This type of movie doesn't have to make sense in the same way that a traditional film does. It simply has to take you somewhere you have never been, and hopefully throw your mind through a few loops along the way.

There is so much whimsy in this film that it almost becomes an absurdist fairytale. It skips and jumps from one homage to the next, cribbing notes from Rocky Horror in one scene before moving on to Rigoletto in the next. Genres and archetypes are thrown up against one another and mashed together with reckless abandon mixing Grand Guignol with Sondheim and Disney with Faces of Death. It cuts together the pieces of our collective pop culture consciousness the same way that the antagonists cut together new forms for their bodies.

And it's wickedly funny too.

Picking up where the ultimate consumers of Romero's shopping malls left off, Repo! makes for a brutal satire of consumer culture where human flesh is a commodity bought and sold with government approval. People have designer spines and get upgrades on their bodies when they go in for maintenance on their artificial organs. Starlets don't forget to wear panties, they forget to sew on their new faces.

Darren Lynn Bousman has made a name for himself as a go-to guy for over the top, operatic gore and he doesn't shy away from it here. Repo! is often tremendously bloody with sanguine spilling left and right, often directly on top of naked flesh. He takes what he learned making Saw II--IV and pushes in into overdrive as he uses it to skewer one satirical target after the next.

Normally I am one to shy away from sexualized violence. I find it repulsive and saddening, but here, Bousman has found that perfect mix between sexy and grotesque. Though the bloodletting is vicious, it never spills over into elaborate rape fantasy. It is a shame that he is no longer attached to the Hellraiser relaunch.

The cast, made up of a bizarre collection of geek favorites, musicians and world famous opera singers is almost weirder than the movie's central conceit. Paul Sorvino is brilliant fun as the patriarch who controls the world but finds himself unable to defeat cancer. Sorvino is fascinating to watch when he is let loose and he has a singing voice to rival any star of stage. Sarah Brightman is also quite good in a small roll that is entirely divorced from her signature turn in Phantom of the Opera. The rest of the cast is a bit of a mixed bag. Alexa Vega is strong as the cloistered daughter of the eponymous organ ripper and Anthony Stewart Head outdoes his Buffy singing, even as his role is too close to that of Giles, but he's still very good. Meanwhile Bill Mosely is obnoxious and all over the place, playing his seventh version of Chop-top while Paris Hilton is actually shockingly watchable as Amber Sweet, really just a hightened-reality version of herself. But the real standout is Nivek Ogre of Skinny Puppy. The man steals the show as a deformed lothario who has a nasty habit of killing his lovers.

But I really can't do justice explaining it here. You have to see it for yourself.

I give this a WIN for being complerely engaging and original...an instant cult classic.

Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

So much scientific FAIL in this movie, but I still loved it nonetheless...

I was expecting this to be a big disasterous FAIL when I heard about it. Dinosaurs AFTER Ice Age? WTF?

I haven't had so many laff-out-loud moments in a movie for a long time. There's about an even mix of verbal and visual gags in this 3rd installment of the Ice Age family saga, they're all fresh, and they all work. You wouldn't think a film set in the age of mammoths would be able to run a parody of the old "red wire vs. blue wire" time-bomb scenario, but they find an ingenious way to do it.

Now those among you who haven't fallen prey to creationism are well aware that mammoths are very large mammals (and hence quite recent in geological time), while the last of the dinosaurs went extinct 65,000,000 years ago. So how does the plot explain their coexistence? Well, it seems that there's this entire hidden tropical world underneath the eponymous ice, and our heroes literally fall into it. (Don't overthink it.)

Suddenly Manny the mammoth and his pregnant mate Ellie discover that they're not only not the largest creatures on Earth, as they'd thot, but actually pretty petite compared to the Mama T. Rex, who in turn has to look up to Dad. It's a classic tale of nature red in tooth and claw, except for nobody actually getting eaten. (Well, several critters are swallowed whole but subsequently disgorged, slimy with saliva but basically unhurt; family film, y'know.)

The animation is terrific. Judging from the end credits, apparently the Astor beaver trade, long thot to be extinct, has experienced a renaissance in the animated-fur factories of California. Dino babies and mammal kids are ridiculously endearing. The 3-D is likewise terrific, well used where appropriate (especially in conveying a sense of scale for the underworld) but not overdone. The one carp I have is that 3-D simply does not lend itself to dissolves between scenes; I'm guessing the filmmakers figured this out themselves, as most of the time they used cuts.

The characters, familiar now from the 2 previous films, are well acted with distinctive personalities, and the comic-relief possums have an expanded role. New to the cast is Scratte, a long-lashed female squirrel who, in a running subplot (including mini-cartoons to both start and end the flik), vies with the iconic acorn for the undying devotion of Scrat. As a devotee of the tango, I particularly appreciated their version of it. Also new is Buck, a bold, intrepid, 1-eyed buccaneer of a weasel, voiced by Simon Pegg with British accent in full flower.

Really, it's amazing to realize how much stuff they managed to cram into barely an hour and a half. Never a dull moment, never a missed step. Why, then, does it not get my top rating? Not at all because, as a comedy, it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. After all, Dogma was a comedy, and it maxed out on my rating scale. But Ice Age 3 wasn't quite an entire story, more a collection of loosely related parts. Every one of those parts was well done, tho; indeed, I'd gladly take any of them over the entire 2.5 hours of the noxious Transformers; sadly, this much better film probably won't do nearly as well at the box office. Too bad.

I give this a WIN, because of the surprise I had when I saw it...totally worth seeing again.

Year One

From the same guy that directed such comedy classics Caddyshack(1980), National Lampoons Vacation(1983), and Groundhog Day(1993). Not to mention he co starred and co wrote the two Ghostbusters(1984-1989). Hard to believe that Harold Ramis would resort to the level of unfunny. He used to know what funny is. Has he forgotten, I think not. Year One for Harold Ramis is just an unfortunate misfire.

I saw this with a friend of mine, and about half an hour into it, I turned to her and said "This was a big mistake."...and she agreed.

This movie was going from bad to worse to the point where I just left before it ended. I really wanted to like this movie, but nothing was jumping off the screen, I heard very little laughs in the theater, none of the characters where the least bit interesting. Jack Black and Michael Cera are alright, but both of them can't seem to grab much appeal to make this movie entertaining. Michael Cera is always an entertaining presence, but after seeing this film, I doubt his career will go very far as it's gonna go. Same goes on the boat for Jack Black. David Cross(Mr. Show) is so amazingly unfunny in his co starring role. So was Christopher Mintz-Plasse in his role, I think after this film he should be called Mc-Douchebag.

If you're looking for a better and funnier film, then go see The Hangover instead.

All in all, I give this film a FAIL...didn't like it at all.