At the Opera Tonight...

[jetpack_monkey]

Repo! was tonight. Tons of people there (show was oversold). Met up with friends both new and old, which was nice.

As for the film itself, I thought it wasn't great. There were parts that seemed to break out (Anthony Stewart Head and, shockingly, Paris Hilton were quite good), others that were embarrassingly bad (particularly, and I hate to say this because I love the actor, Bill Moseley). There were choices made that shouldn't have worked but totally did (the little cartoon "sproing" noise when ASH pops into frame at one point) and others that shouldn't have and fulfilled that promise (the whole thing, with exception of flashbacks, is presented in a weird, posterized blur and hyper-saturated, like a 93-minute LJ icon). Alexa Vega's either not a great singer or her sound engineer should be fired, but any time she and ASH are singing together, it's a thing of awesome. One of the songs seemed to draw from Ace of Base as its primary inspiration. A whole subplot about Zydrate (a drug made from the dead) is introduced and then discarded.

I enjoyed it in parts and in others I waited for it to become enjoyable again. That's about the best summation I have. Definitely not a film for everybody, and you can count me in the crowd missing out.

Full review coming soon to Classic-Horror, likely.

Comments

[qkellie.livejournal.com]

like a 93-minute LJ icon

That sounds either very distracting or kind of awesome. Either way, it's the kind of thing that will look really dated really quickly, which I sort of love in cult movies.

[jetpack-monkey.livejournal.com]

I usually do, too, but I prefer it when it's low-key. Like, all the hair is weird or the shoulder pads are too thick. People use extremely archaic slang. When it's the visual style of the whole damn movie... I mean, you get used to it after a while, but it's jarring when they switch styles for flashbacks (to some sort of "film scratch" look you can find in Adobe AfterEffects) and then come back. You have to readjust all over again.

Also, the whole thing was cut like a whole bunch of bad 90s music videos strung together. Quick cuts to slightly different angles of Anthony Stewart Head singing, followed by the long shot from down the hallway, stuff like that.

(I keep finding more things to not like about it as I think... I hate when that happens, because I do lose the key element that there were some parts that were absolutely brilliant. Although, come to think of it, this actually hurts the film, because there's a sense of wasted potential)

(also, FYI, Joan Jett cameo)

[qkellie.livejournal.com]

Eh, yeah, it sounds like somebody got a copy of Premiere for their birthday and decided to make a movie. ;)

Joan Jett and ASH are awesome, and I'm amused if Paris Hilton was actually decent in something, but I do not think these things would negate my annoyance with it overall.