Reviews

If there's one thing I absolutely can't stand, it's a film that tries to be something it's not, and fails every step of the way. Repo! The Genetic Opera thinks it is many things: horror, a musical, a rock opera, a cult film, artsy, and interesting. It is none of the above.

Before anyone accuses me of not "getting it," let it be understood that I am madly in love with the horror genre. I enjoy art films and blood-and-guts films, even bad ones. Repo! left me reeling, not because I was bothered by the gratuitous gore, but because everything about it was full of pain.

Somewhere in this mess was supposedly a plot. An evil, corrupt, futuristic company called GeneCo rules the world (oh, gee, how original) by providing people with dirt-cheap fashionable organ transplants. However, there's a catch - if you can't pay on time, a guy in a mask called the Repo Man will rip your guts out. I'm not kidding.

So, we have Shilo Wallace (Alexa Vega), a pale, sickly, pampered teenager who looks like she stepped out of a Hot Topic poster. She has a hereditary blood disease, and her devoted dad (Anthony S. Head) is the Repo Man. We find out this second plot twist roughly 15 minutes into the movie, eliminating any possibility that there will be real conflict or mystery. There's also something about her dad killing her mom, but not really; it was actually the evil GeneCo guy (Paul Sorvino), who now wants to turn Shilo against her dad and toward him so that he'll have a competent heir for his conglomerate, as opposed to his three disastrous offspring, one of whom is Paris Hilton. Yes, I am confused too.

About 85% of the dialogue is sung; this is a very bad thing. Not because rock operas are inherently bad (I loved JCS), but because writers Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich (who also plays the Grave Robber, a narrator figure with no actual purpose) were too busy creating "art" to write lyrics that scan, we are treated to such accidental comic masterpieces such as "Ashes, ashes/dust, dust/my children were a bust!" If I ruled the universe, I would make it divine law that you cannot get into heaven if you have ever deliberately rhymed the words "passing" and "guessing." Also, with the exception of Sorvino and Sarah Brightman (if you absolutely must see it, see it for her), none of the cast can sing. Head is erratic, Bill Moseley and Nivek Ogre are ridiculous, and Vega and Paris Hilton are just plain annoying.

This is not the Rocky Horror of my generation. Rocky Horror was fun, memorable, and featured extremely talented performers. Repo! was agonizing, excruciatingly pretentious, and memorable only in its badness. Two days after seeing this film, I cannot remember a single "song" from it (for the record, the background music sounds like the Nails-On-A-Blackboard Choir). Repo! will be forgotten by all but the bad-movie aficionados in a few years. "Art" it is not, unless you count unintentional comic gold.

I'll admit upfront that I am a world-class bawl-baby and it's not hard for a movie to make me cry. I cry when I watch a movie that's depressing, uplifting, frightening, adorable, funny, or - more than anything - clearly shot from the heart and at the heart. Therefore, it should surprise no one that Fighting Tommy Riley, which was all of the above, made me sob.

The back-cover story is not what one would call original - in fact, it sounds like a rip-off of the wonderful Million Dollar Baby. Old, washed-up second-class has-been meets young, wide-eyed, unstoppable ready-to-take-on-the-world talent and together they make the perfect team, which eventually carries them both to some kind of championship. It even has all the usual heart-of-gold character twists that we know from movies like M$B - young talent is pursued by steel-hearted bigwigs but displays unwavering loyalty to trainer, trainer becomes the parent young talent never had, and eventually, unspeakable tragedy strikes. But this old, washed-up plot has found its way to a young, unstoppable talent - writer and star J.P. Davis - and he has done some beautiful things with it.

The performances of Davis and co-star Eddie Jones are electrifying. Jones's monologue (delivered by his character, Marty Goldberg, to the frank, temperamental Tommy) about why it's wrong to judge is a gem on the level of Ellen Burstyn's monologue from Requiem for a Dream. The cabin-in-the-woods scene (those who have seen the film know exactly what I'm talking about, and those who haven't are in for a cinematic treat) is also a thing of beauty, put together in just the right way to wrench at the viewer's heart. Yet the movie manages not to preach, and this in itself is a thing of wonder - when something is told from the heart, it's hard not to get on the soapbox.

This should be the point where I say that this disturbing and, at times, extremely adult movie is not for everyone, and I agree that it will probably be lost on young children. It is for everyone else. You will fall in love with these characters, and when it turns out that they aren't (are? I actually figured out what was going on early in the movie) exactly what they seem, you, like Tommy Riley, will find it very hard to abandon them.

The gentle, up-close-and-personal style of cinematography was well-deserving of this award it's already won, and Eddie O'Flaherty's direction is the work of a man who knows what he wants and how to get it. The ending is a little hokey, but not so much that it ruins what has already come.

I once heard someone say that all boxing movies are great. Excluding all of the ridiculous Rocky sequels, I have to agree with him, though I'm not sure this is so much a boxing movie as a movie about men - REAL men, not great epic-hero conquerers. As a result, you will connect with Tommy and Marty in a way you never connected with William Wallace, Maximus, and Alexander, and you won't be forgetting it soon.

Grade: A-.

In the corner of the cozy living room, a seventeen-year-old boy buries his face in his jacket rather than look at the screen. "Oh my God," a sixteen-year-old girl whimpers. Another stares at the screen, paralyzed, unable even to blink. And a fifteen-year-old girl weeps openly, but only some of it is the horror she feels right now. She's just had an epiphany. "I want to be a filmmaker," she thinks.

This is what happened when a group of friends and I watched Darren Aronofsky's film "Requiem for a Dream" - fifteen minutes after the film had ended.

I've seen a lot of movies, ranging from incredible to despicable. I've laughed, I've cried, and I've raised my eyebrows. I've come very close to tossing my cookies, mostly at blood-and-guts fests like "The Passion of the Christ." This was the first time I ever came out of a movie just wishing I was dead, and, at the same time, thanking my lucky stars that I was alive. There has never been and I don't think there ever will be a movie as shocking, terrifying, and inspiring as this one.

Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn) is a lonely old widow who desperately wants and needs something or someone to care about. Her son, Harry (Jared Leto) is a lost, confused kid - a bit of a sleazebag, but he seems to have a good heart. His girlfriend, Marion (Jennifer Connolly) is a bright, ambitious young woman who is experiencing real love for the first time. And their best friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans - speaking of shocks) is a street-wise tough guy who misses his mother and wants to be loved. In spite of this, they are all happy - or rather, they think they are. Sara's just gotten a call informing her that she's going to be on television, and in a desperate effort to lose weight for the event she begins taking powerful prescription pills. And she's not lying to you - this is the best she has felt in years. Harry, Marion, and Tyrone are running a successful heroin-and-cocaine traffic, and in between all of the sex, shoots, and buying Harry's mom a new TV set, life is pretty darn good. You and I could live happily in a world like that if we were made to.

Except that, of course, it can't stay like that. The chills begin to travel with greater and greater frequency down the spine as the lives of each of these four individuals are shattered. Each of them is reduced to a mindless void of addiction. That's what this film is about - addiction. Addiction does terrible, terrible things to good people, and Darren Aronofsky and Hubert Selby Jr. know it.

The film is a must-see for any actor. The performances of Leto, Connolly, and (in a pleasant surprise) Wayans dovetail perfectly with each other, and viewers will be drawn to the humanity and honesty that each of them throws into their character. But - it's already been sung, and it can't be said enough - Ellen Burstyn stole the show and has no plans to return it any time soon. The sight of Sara running wildly down the street, emaciated and babbling, will tear your heart from her chest. Combine that with her wrenching depictions of what it is like to be old and alone, and the dream sequences in which she is a lovable aging beauty queen, and you will be building your Ellen Burstyn shrine tomorrow.

One fellow whose performance is not given nearly the mention it deserves is Christopher McDonald, who plays Tappy Tibbons, America's favorite television personality. We've all seen Tappy. We can all name dozens of different Tappys. And McDonald's perfect mix of dazzling smiles, charisma, and an undercurrent of evil ("Juice by Tappy! Juice by Tappy!") is more haunting than any supernatural thriller.

Darren Aronofsky is a brilliant director. There aren't words to describe the way this film was put together. He dealt with a low budget and over 2,000 cuts, and a brilliant novel/script by Hubert Selby Jr. to produce a truly original piece of film-making. Where was the Academy when this film came out? Possibly the most heartbreaking thing about the plot of this movie is that it's not quite as bleak as we feel like it should be. Yes, you heard me right. We expect that every character will be reduced to a lame creature devoid of hope and dreams. It might even be a comfort to us if they were. And yet, in the final sequence, we see a glimpse of what is left of Sara Goldfarb's dream. "Requiem" has its title for a reason - she knows that her dream of being on television with her beautiful little boy for the whole world to see is dead, and that's why tears leak from her eyes in the final sequence. They don't damage her glorious smile, but they leave a lasting impression on our hearts. After seeing this disturbing, intense, depressing, horrifying film, we want to ease our own pain, by telling her and the world that it's no good. But we can't bring ourselves to do it.

And of course, we have nothing to say.

Most films, even the most worthless ones, have something about them which is meritorious. O Brother, Where Art Thou? had a decent soundtrack. Walking Tall had a good moral. Elf had some cute moments. No viewer should see any of these movies immediately before or after eating. Dodgeball, however, is one of those thankful rarities which should not be seen if the viewer is ever planning to eat again.

The plot deals with an apathetic local fitness center owner (Vince Vaughn) who is trying to save his cute little neighborhood gym from a major corporate takeover masterminded by an evil fitness guru (Ben Stiller) with an inflated ego and some other inflated things as well, if you get my drift. In order to raise the money he needs to pay off his debts and save his gym, Vaughn's character Peter LaFleur puts together a ragtag dodgeball team and enters it in a Las Vegas competition. Only problem is, Stiller & Co. have also entered a team. The Average Joe team includes a group of characters that I believe I was supposed to like: a sweet-faced lawyer who turns out to be an Amazon (Christine Taylor), a disillusioned male cheerleader (Justin Long), a man who thinks he is a pirate (Alan Tudyk), a pansy with bottled-up anger (Stephen Root), the Napoleon Dynamite style team manager (Joel David Moore), and another guy (Chris Williams) whom I don't remember anything about, even though I just saw the movie.

Of course, no movie is devoid of the occasional shining moment. Rip Torn's former-dodgeball-champion-turned-coach was a likable fellow. I smiled a few times, and even had one or two weak chuckles. The presence of Lance Armstrong and Chuck Norris made me raise my eyebrows, but I had no issue with it. Any of this, however, was canceled out by the horror that was in store in the last ten minutes of the movie.

A good ending can save an otherwise mediocre movie (a la Unbreakable or Queen of the Damned). A bad ending sticks in the viewer's memory like a butcher knife. ***SPOILER ALERT*** This was a bad ending. It began when Christine Taylor's character is revealed, for no reason whatsoever, to be a bisexual. It ended with our ten-second view of Ben Stiller's now-washed-up White Goodman, who now weighs about 925 pounds and has lost everything. I nearly threw up everything I had eaten that day when this image came on the screen. It reeked of pure antihumor - it was something one has to see to believe, and I hope for your sake that you never see it.

In past movies I have been very impressed with performances by Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughan - they are talented actors. I suppose there was only so much they could do with this miserable screenplay, and frankly I'm shocked they accepted the roles. As for Armstrong and Norris, I usually expect better from them. I can only wonder what they saw in it that possessed them to agree to appear in this disgusting excuse for entertainment. Grade: F.

Every critic whose reviews I had read hated this movie. The reviews all seemed to say the same things. Flutey leading man. Vacuous leading lady. Sluggish pace and lazy directing. After seeing the movie for myself, the only reason I can guess for all of the negative reviews is that most of the film critics are looking at it purely as a movie, as opposed to a movie-musical, when the two are not separable.

(spoilers below) The plot has become common knowledge by now. In the dark cellars of the Paris Opera House lives a man (Gerard Butler) with a disfigured face and far too many names (The Phantom, the Opera Ghost, the Angel of Music, and in the book, Erik) whose only love and passion is music. Then along comes an obscure, orphaned chorus girl named Christine Daae (Emmy Rossum) with a voice to warm even in the Phantom's icy heart. He trains her, manipulates the rest of the opera for her benefit, and eventually falls madly in love with her. Problem is, she has a thing for another man, a much better-looking childhood friend named Raoul (Patrick Wilson). Enraged at what he sees as this rejection and betrayal, the Phantom slowly unravels to the point of madness, creating an atmosphere of terror for the entire opera.

Rossum gives a stellar performance - her supernatural vocal skills (pronounced the most in "Think of Me," "All I Ask of You" and the title song) combined with the childlike innocence of her characters combine to make one of the most charismatic female leads I've ever seen in a musical. Wilson's Raoul, while not quite as compelling, is strong and solid and does a nice job on most of his songs. Minnie Driver is a delightfully hideous Carlotta (the narcissistic prima donna) and Jennifer Ellison, Miranda Richardson, Simon Callow, and Victor McGuire provide excellent supporting acting and voices.

The complaint I hear most often about this movie is that Gerard Butler, our leading man, doesn't have a voice which does the Phantom justice. I beg to differ. Butler's singing voice, while not technically fantastic, is shockingly human and will chill the spine of any viewer who has ever known the feeling of being an outcast ("This face which earned a mother's fear and loathing..."). Fifteen minutes after leaving the theater, I was still shaking. Butler and Rossum had superb chemistry, as demonstrated in the title song and in "Point of No Return." If you have a short attention span, don't like classical music, have perfect pitch, or are looking for an excellent technical movie - don't see this film. Otherwise, I would recommend it to anyone. Grade: A.