Reign Over Me - Excellent acting, a dramatic story, gripping and, most importantly, a plausible scenario (with few exceptions). Adam Sandler plays a very subtle character, which is a drastic change for him. The unraveling of the story (its pacing) was wonderful. It had a few characters I did not sympathize with, though I thought the movie was trying to tell me to. Their fault, not mine. Additionally, even in a dramatic role, Adam Sandler's fits of rage and anger, while he attempted to temper them well here, still came off like "angry Adam Sandler comedy acting," which really takes you out of the feel of the story.
Overall rating (out of five stars): three and a half teary-eyed stars.
Repo! The Genetic Opera - I was initially very, very interested in seeing this due to the involvement of some actors/singers I respect (Paul Sorvino, Anthony Stewart Head, and especially Sarah Brightman). The setting and plot seemed great.
But...WOW. I'm absolutely *stunned* at what a magnificently awful piece of shit it was. The plot was an absolute mess to start with, rushed with little to no development, and it is overly kind to say that the plot resolution made not the slightest
ing bit of sense whatsoever.
When the music was good, it was passable at best. Strangely, Sarah Brightman seems to be the worst casting decision, since she outshines everybody else and exposes that nobody's a very good singer but her. When the music wasn't passable, which was most of the time, it was the drizzling shits. Erratic production and style, unapologetically bad lyrics that assumed the viewer had no intelligence to grasp what was going on in the film, and just...I don't know. "Paint-by-numbers" industrial about sums it up.
Its worst offense wasn't even the film. It was the snide self-awareness of its intentions to become a "cult" film. Its approach, its marketing, its premise, and its merchandise (merchandise manufactured before a limited release? You gotta be joking) all point to a film that *intends* to try to become a cult film. The best cult films went against the grain of filmmaking at the time and did what they wanted. The Rocky Horror Picture Show was like nothing else at the time, and Richard O'Brien's subsequent failures and missteps in both music and film show that he wants to satisfy himself as an artist first before making another popular piece of art. Repo! is not unique in its film genre, as its aesthetic, gore, and overall feel have been done before (by virtually every other film released by Twisted Pictures). It postures itself as unique, and the marketing there is successful; but its execution exposes that everything about this film is plagiarized from contemporary "gore-porn" horror films, industrial music that's been done vastly better for a quarter-century longer than this film has been out, and that, as a movie, it's a "poseur." A vile and flagrant attempt to goad innocent, naive subculture-dwellers out of their hard earned (allowance
) dollars to help fund something that is not a film, but, rather, simply an intentionally-made commodity/brand name.
Calling it unique would be like treasuring your original Thomas Kinkaide painting.
Overall rating (out of five stars): Three sacks of shit.
