Repo raked over the coals

By -

Wow, not everyone likes Repo: the Genetic Opera. I would normally just post an update as an addendum to a previous post, but these are so scathing I thought they deserved their own space - not everyone hated it.

MTV:
Thirty years after "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," there's nothing shocking about the third-hand decadence on display here. What really startles are some of the unexpected performers lunging around in the murk. What could Sorvino have been thinking as he blustered through the din, trailed by a long gray ponytail, belting out lyrics like "Maggots, vermin — you want the world for nothing!" And how did actual singer Sarah Brightman — Andrew Lloyd Webber's onetime wife and muse — feel about being tricked out as some sort of pop-eyed Elvira puppet? The songs aren't uniformly dreadful — one of them, "Seventeen," is a lively arena-punk anthem that Vega delivers with near Avril Lavigne-level energy — but the tunes are largely formless, and many of the lyrics have the flat quality of words that should have been simply spoken, not sung. ("Didn't I tell you not to go out?" Wallace bellows at his sheltered daughter, in response to which she warbles, "You did! You did!") The picture runs just 98 minutes, but it already feels too long three-quarters of the way in. It feels unnecessary from the beginning.
LA Times: Mark Olsen

The film is bad -- not good-bad, tacky-bad or fun-bad, just plain awful and nearly unwatchable. "Repo" has feet of lead, with none of the frenetic grace or swooping lyricism that make a musical film, well, musical.

The score is mostly a tuneless, fake-industrial throb, without a catchy hum-ability. At times it seems as if "Repo" is some sort of parody of old-world Italian filmmaking, with all the singing post-recorded (and often drenched in reverb), so mouths and the sounds emitting from them are disconcertingly dislocated.

NY Times: Nathan Lee
But when you live by the song, you die by the song. A few catchy melodies, some clever lyrics or even a sense that the score wasn’t just one long, unmodulated track might have energized this singularly inert tale of a young girl (Alexa Vega) seeking answers to the nature of her peculiar genetic disease.
USAToday: Claudia Puig

...viewers must slog through a sappy conclusion, accosted by some of the most banal songs imaginable. Repo! might have been an SNL or MADtv skit, but as a movie, it should be repossessed by its financiers.

Reuters: Frank Scheck
The sung-through musical score somehow manages to contain not a single memorable song, though the performers give it their undeniable all.
IfMagazine: Abbie Bernstein
The songs are musically somewhere between garage metal and PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE pop, and lyrically on the Tim Rice expository side. Plot points are sung in language that often is more on-the-nose than poetic. However, the vocal prowess of most of the cast is such that the score incorporates honest-to-goodness operatic flourishes, particularly in Brightman’s numbers.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Role of Music in Opera

By -
There are numerous books on the topic, and every composer, librettist, director, singer and audience member has their opinion as to what role the music should play in an opera. In a play without music, the words ought to support the meaning behind a character's actions. However, in the case of action movies, often times the action is what tells the story and there aren't words, just images to forward the plot. We might hear music to accompany action, build tension, but the action tells the story. Musicals tend to speak until the emotion of the moment just "has" to break out in song - unless it's something like "Mama Mia" where the dialog is the rails we travel on between songs; the songs themselves, written before the concept of the musical, are the focus of the production, while the story is secondary. Operas are a different beast. The music provides emotion to the words spoken, but it also plays the role of ambience when there is only action. In ...
Read more

Episode 210b: Joyeuse le départ

By -
Image
Podcast:  Play in new window  |  Download Subscribe:  Apple Podcasts  |  Android  |  Google Play  |  Stitcher  |  TuneIn  |  RSS Provost Cunningham has Transmigrated, but to where! What is Dr Sage going to do with his body? And how can she bring home her friends, Abigail and Erasmus, without also bring home Cunningham? What are they going to say when they find the “skeleton” she’s hiding in her closet? Cast: Eddie Louise Clark  as Dr Sage Chip Clark  as Professor Savant Justin Bremer  as the Narrator Emily Riley Piatt  as Abigail Entwhistle, Calypso & Dean Stewart Written by  Eddie Louise Theme music by  Unwoman Sound Design by  Chip Michael
Read more

Teaching Composition – What are we trying to achieve

By -
In the process of learning composition I have spent time with a number of instructors who have encouraged me to write twelve-tone, pitch-class, electro-acoustic and other forms of experimental techniques. No matter how much I might understand and appreciate the work of other composers in the genres, these are not forms of music I resonate with. They are simply not forms of music I listen to and I struggle with the idea of writing them. However, in a Master Class by Libby Larsen she made the comment, “Learn them all, because all forms of music have something to offer.” This I very much agree. There are elements of each of the above mentioned forms (and others) that I do resonate with. Berg’s Violin Concerto is a beautiful twelve-tone work, although it is possible to look at numerous sections of the music with a “tonal” analysis. Another composer friend, Gary Bachlund commented that using these techniques can narrow the choices for how to compose a piece of work. If you look at ...
Read more