Repo! The Genetic Opera (SPOILERS)

Who’s seen the movie? I got to go a couple of days ago to a little independent theater in Mobile. I’d been obsessed with the soundtrack ever since some of my online friends started telling me about it. The movie turned out to be fantastic, a true gem, and with the online buzz it’s been getting it seems likely to become the Rocky Horror cult film of the 21st century. In fact, I’ve heard it described as Rocky Horror-meets-Sweeney Todd, which is accurate, but I’d throw in a little touch of Blade Runner, too.

The plot really fast: in the future, an epidemic of organ failures has crippled the globe, and many of the survivors are addicted to painkillers, plastic surgery, or both. GeneCo, led by the despotic Rott Largo (Paul Sorvino) rents organs to those who need them, but there’s a catch – if you miss a payment, he sends the Repo Man (Anthony Stewart Head) after you, and then your time is up. A young girl, Shilo (Alexa Vega), who is suffering from a rare blood disease, yearns to join the outside world but she’s kept in seclusion by her loving but overprotective father (Anthony Stewart Head).

Let’s get this out of the way: Repo! is an opera. The entire movie is told through song; there’s about four lines of spoken dialogue. You can’t seperate Repo! from it’s music, and if you don’t like musicals or don’t like the songs, the movie probably won’t work for you. The standout songs are the industrial “Zydrate Anatomy”, a charming little ditty teaching kids how to use drugs with a bass line that could blow your eardrums out; “Chase the Morning”, a more operatic number featuring Sarah Brightman and Alexa Vega; “Legal Assassin”, a solo number by Anthony Stewart Head, who desperately deserves recognition for more than just playing Giles; and “Didn’t Know I’d Love You So Much”, a delicately beautiful father/daughter love song between Head and Vega’s characters; and “At the Opera Tonight”, an ensemble piece featuring the entire main cast that has a glorious rock-opera feel. This isn’t a old school musical, though – the characters sing, but don’t usually dance, they go about their (frequently unsettling) business. There’s a hilarious moment during the jazz-tinged “Thankless Job” where Nathan (Head) is disembowling a man and reaching into his guts to wiggle a tendon to make the corpse sing along with him. Well, hilarious if you’re ME.

Furthermore, this movie has possibly the single strangest cast ever assembled. Anthony Stewart Head, Broadway star Sarah Brightman, Alexa Vega from Spy Kids, Paul Sorvino, Ogre from Skinny Puppy, Bill Moseley from Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Paris Hilton (yes, Paris Hilton), and Terrance Zdunich, who’s most notable work before this film was as a storyboard artist for Into the Wild. Zdunich is the real discovery here – he plays the lovable rogue Graverobber, a drug dealer who robs graves (does what it says on the tin) and he also co-created the film and stage play it was based on, and co-wrote the songs. He puts his baritone to good use here – as one of my friends puts it, “it’s like he’s fucking you with his voice”. His duet with Vega, “Needle Through a Bug” that plays over the end credits, is possibly the sexiest song ever recorded that is not specifically about sex.

Anthony Stewart Head, as I mentioned before, is so good that it’s criminal that there’s not more roles for handsome middle-aged men in rock operas. He and Brightman are simply the two most talented singers in the cast (and Brightman is GORGEOUS. I hope I look that good when I’m 40-something). The entire movie would fall apart without him, and that’s not hyperbole. Everyone is really good in their roles, but I want to point out the three most controversial names – Moseley, Ogre, and Hilton, who play the three spoiled and degenerate Largo children. Moseley and Ogre play the walking personifications of Rage and Vanity, respectively, and they’re also the comic relief (Repo! being Repo! the comic relief is supplied by a murderer and a rapist). They are indeed very funny, especially Moseley, and their duet together, “Mark It Up”, is hilarious but sadly too profane to post any lyrics here. Hilton is where a lot of people write this movie off. Before you turn tail, let me say that she’s playing a junkie whore who’s addicted to plastic surgery, and when you have a role like that, you don’t go to Helen Mirren – you go to Paris Hilton. She’s great, she really is. She doesn’t sing much, so if you’re terrified you’re going to be trapped in a theater for an hour and a half listening to her warbling, calm down. She only has one brief solo – “Blame Not My Cheeks” – and bit parts in a few other songs.

The movie was made on a shoestring budget – the director, Darren Lynn Bousman, practically had to beg Lionsgate to let him make it, and most of the props are stolen from the Saw sets – but it doesn’t look cheap at all. It’s stylized, but the special effects are all well-done, and the movie looks beautiful. There’s also a lot less gore than I thought there’d be, especially considering Bousman directing a couple of the Saw movies – there’s like three scenes of people being gutted, one woman stabbing out her eyes, and a man being shot, and that’s it. There are some brief scenes of scalpels and plastic surgery, so if that makes you queasy, be warned.

If you love rock operas, cybergoth culture, or biting satires of the modern obsessions with money and beauty, then Repo! might be for you.

I saw this a couple weeks ago and am still trying to decide if I liked it or not. It was certainly well done in all the ways you mention (and I’ll admit, the cast list I saw was what made me see it…I was expecting it to be hilariously awful). Whether I actually liked it or not, it certainly made an impression, and at least that’s something in a movie these days. I have to add a disclaimer that I normally HATE muscials. Nothing detracts from a movie faster for me than a well coreographed song and dance number breaking up the plot. But in this case, it was truly weird enough that it worked for me. I would certainly second the recommendation to see it if you get a chance.

I thought it was horrible. I love musicals, love opera, love goth culture, love Anthony Stewart Head, love Sarah Brightman, love “high concept” movies, and I thought this was excrement. Total shite.

I thought, after Terrance Zdunich (GraveRobber, who also co-wrote it), who I quite liked, Paris Hilton was the best thing in this movie. Seriously, she was very very good, in her singing and acting both.

Other than that, the script was in serious need of an editor, there was no reason (thematically or dramatically) for the two brothers to be in it at all, and the ambiguity of Nathan’s “Let The Monster Rise” was completely lacking two acts earlier in “Legal Assassin”, giving me an entire movie of a sadistic asshole of a father, not a tortured man or a Jekyl/Hyde dichotomy, either of which would have been more interesting.

Every actor played every scene on 11, which meant there was no development, no emotional arc, no where to go. The fact that normally good actors (Head especially, who’s capable of wonderful nuance) did this tells me it was a directorial decision, and it was a terrible one.

There was way, way too much “tell me” and not enough show me - too many expository bits or characters singing to me about how they felt, instead of conveying it to me through their acting and singing.

I watched this as part of the “tour” the director did recently. After the movie, he spent a couple of hours whining at the audience about how shabbily he’d been treated by The Studio and how they all said there was no audience for this thing, but LOOK! Here’s the audience! And the crowd went wild, of course. The nichey gothy emo crowd who filled less than half the very small theater (The Music Box, natch) by the end of the movie. Then he launched into some tales about how all the popular kids at school hated him and made fun of him for his purple hair and how it was the goth people who accepted him for who he is (to more rousing cheers, of course) and I really, really wanted to get up and say, “Dude, tone down the persecution complex: they didn’t like your movie 'cause it sucks ass, not 'cause you’re a goth!” But, being a coward, I didn’t.

But he did ask us all to write about our experience on the internet, positive or negative, so…there you go.

Repo! is definitely polarizing. It’s been compared to Rocky Horror a lot, and that’s one thing they have in common – people either love it or hate it. It is over-the-top, but it’s supposed to be – it’s opera. They express their feelings in song because it’s opera. If Anthony Head’s performance didn’t express the Jekyll/Hyde dichotomy to you, then there’s nothing I could say that could get it across. Nathan’s a very complex character and Head is note-for-note perfect in my opinion.

If Pavi and Luigi weren’t there, then a lot of Rotti’s motives wouldn’t make sense – he’s utterly disappointed in his children, which is why he sets on Shilo as a worthy heir. They also help highlight how decadent and empty this brave new world is – that Luigi can stab people with abandon and Pavi can attach women’s faces to himself with surgical staples, and everyone’s okay with it, because they’re Largos and their dad is one of the most powerful men in the world.

Wasn’t Paris Hilton in this also? They showed a clip of it one night when she was on the Letterman show and it actually looked really funny.

Didn’t know Alexa Vega was in it. She was one of the few young actresses of the past decade who (along with Amanda Bynes) I wanted to see succeed in show biz.

I understood that they were going for Jekyll and Hyde, but only intellectually. Emotionally, it felt like he was playing two different characters, not one character with two sides OR it made it felt like he was all evil and sadistic and that’s why he made Shilo stay inside all the time, not 'cause he honestly cared for her.

All of which could have been established with just Amber. We didn’t need three of them, it made things more convoluted without making them more interesting.

Nathan explains his motives for keeping Shilo locked up in “Legal Assassin” – she’s his everything, she keeps him sane, keeps him from becoming Repo Man all the time. He loves her, but it’s not an entirely healthy love. Nathan depends on her to maintain what’s left of his sanity, and he seems determined to keep Shilo

imprisoned and near-fatally ill

for the rest of her life. He’s a complicated character; he’s the overprotective, loving father, and the villain, monster, and murderer of the film, as he himself admits.

Amber isn’t a comedic character the way Pavi and Luigi are. She’s supposed to be there slinking around in the background while her brothers snap and snarl at each other, so we (the audience) will be shocked when

she assumes command of GeneCo

Pavi and Luigi are the children Rotti despises, while Amber he simply ignores or underestimates. They fulfil different roles in the narrative than she does. As I said, Amber does her bit, and her brothers do theirs. It’s Luigi and Pavi who embody the thoughtlessly violent, soulless, degenerate world they inhabit. If they were any other way, Rotti wouldn’t be so disgusted with them, so he would’ve had no reason to set his sights on Shilo, and the entire plot is derailed.

Um, yes, she plays Amber, as I mentioned in the OP. This may be the only redeeming aspect of Paris Hilton’s entire career.