Movie Review: Repo Men

Ahhhh haaaa, watching The Big Bang Theory while I could get in on free TV has finally paid off! The start of this weeks movie, Repo Men begins with the main character Remy, no, not the rat from Pixar's Ratatouille, but a man sitting down at an old fashioned typewriter writing about a concept called Shrodinger's Cat. While he didn't mention the concept by name, I knew what it was even though he explained it slightly differently. In TBBT Leonard says to Penny, you have to open the box to determine if the cat is dead or alive. Remy (Jude Law) says that while the box is closed the cat is both dead and alive. Two sides of the same situation. But because of TBBT I completely understood it, way to go Leonard!

Poor Remy. It's the future in a city like from Blade Runner. Tall buildings, lots of advertisements. Remy and his partner Jake (Forest Whitaker) work for a company called The Union. This company provides people with mechanical body replacement parts. Livers, lungs, knees, eyes, you name it The Union can provide it. The cost? LOTS and LOTS of money. A liver costs $672 thousand dollars or something like that. But the interest rates were reasonable, 18% the first month and then 24% thereafter. OH YEAH! That would mean a liver is a little more than the average cost of a home in Hawaii. Just like when you can't make your payments on a house or car a repo man is sent out to collect, The Union would send out repo men to collect the unpaid body part.

The repo process is bloody. The customer is stunned, the repo men take out their tool kit cutting into the body, removing the part, bagging and tagging it to be returned to inventory. I'm hoping they really clean and sterilized it well before returning it to stock. Prior to taking the part they do ask the customer if they want help after the procedure. Being unconscious they don't respond with the restocking fee being the customer's death. Remy and Jake are the top repo men for The Union and long time friends. Doesn't matter the location, time or circumstances, if payment is past due, you're fair game for collection. They are ruthless and uncaring. It's just a job.

Remy's wife is pressuring him to get out of the repo business. In talking to his boss Frank (Liev Schrieber) Remy can't bring himself to ask for a sales job. Remy has seen how the sales people use used car salesmen techniques in order to get patients to sign on the dotted line. He can't bring himself to move for the sake of his wife and son but after having his hand forced he decides to make the move much to the dismay of his long time friend Jake.

Remy heads to his last repo job and in a workplace accident ends up in the hospital needing a new heart himself. Remy realizes that he's in deep kim chee when he wakes up with large tubes coming out of his chest connected to a box on a shelf. Consequences of his actions cost him his relationship with his wife and son plus he now has property of The Union pumping blood through his body. Apparently he didn't get a discount on the mechanical heart for both an employee discount AND a workman's comp claim. Come on, loyal top notch employee and injured on the job, they should have cut the guy some slack. But Nooooo.

Relegated to a desk job he realizes that he's not cut out of the cloth of a sales person. He tries going back to repo but discovers that he no longer has the heart for it, pun intended, and without creating income he falls into the same boat as those that he dealt with. He's fallen behind in payments on his artificial heart and it must now be repossessed. And who do you think has to get it back? That's right, Jake, the long time friend. The only way to try to save himself is to get the repo claim removed from the records of The Union. He joins up with other people running from the repo men to try to get out from under.

Now it's very coincidental that this movie dealing with a bankrupt nation, high medical costs and for profit medical companies comes out on this weekend. The US Congress is running up bills for the United States pushing the country further into debt. The House of Representatives is about to vote on a bill that the President considers so important that he canceled flying overseas to meet with foreign leaders and dignitaries. Now the proposed laws won't go into effect for several years so even if the bill passes the House waiting a week to ten days isn't going to have a huge influence on the health care industry. The release date of the movie has been set for months and the votes looks to be happening this weekend. What are the odds.

So back to Schrodinger's cat. Unless you look inside you don't know if Remy is dead or alive but by not looking inside he's both dead and alive at the same time. As you watch the movie you wonder the same. Big business, ethics, friendship, relationships, and luck factor in to Remy's life. Will he be able to regain the relationship with him wife and son? Will The Union get back their equipment? Will Jake, his best friend end up killing him? You won't know until you look inside and you may be surprised as to what you find.

The movie is rated R due to the some sexuality/nudity, grizzly images, bloody violence and language. You'll get all of this in the running time of 111 minutes. If you hang to the end, the very end of the movie there is a little Easter egg. While cool, if you don't stay it won't be a huge loss.

Movie Review: Our Family Wedding

This weeks rom-com is Our Family Wedding starring America Ferrera and Lance Gross from Ugly Betty and House of Payne. After finishing the movie I went up to the refreshment counter to get a refill of my large soda before heading out to the bus stop. I was asked by the person behind the counter what movie I saw and what I thought of it. Speaking to the concession person I told her it was good, not worth the price of a full ticket but maybe a matinee price. While sitting on the bus and taking the ride from the Dole Cannery where I usually see my movies to Downtown Honolulu I had a chance to reflect on what I had seen.

Then I got distracted. As the bus was passing by I'olani Palace and the Kamehameha the Great statue there were all sorts of vehicles parked along Mililani Street and around Ali'i 0 Hale indicating that some sort of filming was going on. I got off at the stop and poked for a moment. Turns out the remake of Hawaii Five-O was there doing filming. I took a picture of some trailers and posted up to my Twitter, Flickr and Facebook accounts.

The trailers were for "Danny Williams", "Chin Ho Kelly", "Steve McGarrett" and "Mary McGarrett". I then got back on the bus to complete the ride home. In case you're wondering, if you have one of the new state quarters, the Hawaii quarter has the statue on the back of the quarter and Iolani Palace is the location used for the Five-O office in the original series. On the bus I pulled myself back into thought and as I reviewed the movie in my mind realized this movie was neither romantic or a comedy, it's really a tragedy.

Ferrera plays Lucia who is in love with Marcus (Gross) but neither has told their parents the game plan to get married. The two families get together for dinner where Lucia's Mexican family gets to meet Marcus's African-American father. The two dads, Lucia's dad Miguel (Carlos Mencia) and Marcus' dad Brad (Forest Whitaker) immediately start to clash for various reasons. Even in a posh restaurant the two dads start throwing around stereotypes raising voices and embarrassing everyone. Have we seen this before? Yes we have. Take part of Guess Who and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, try to fix them into the formulaic rom-com but don't develop character depth or put in comedy and go light on the romance and you end up with this flick.

I really like Ferrera and hopefully once Ugly Betty ends, she'll have more time to pick roles better than what the role of Lucia offered her. The character didn't get enough development for us to care about her decision and why she thought standing by Marcus was a good decision.

As I watched Gross, I really didn't see much apart from what he's done as Calvin Payne. He had a lot of help around him. Taye Diggs makes a cameo. Charlie Murphy in his role talks about being a whipped husband. Warren Sapp has a moment of screen time. Ultimately, it was Calvin Payne on the screen and not a fully formed Marcus.

Mencia was not inspired at all. Every time he was on the screen I was hoping he'd soon get off the screen. Enough said about him.

Whitaker's character didn't seem realistic. As a DJ, would he really make that kind of money to support the life style that was shown. Highly doubtful.

The set up and premises were not in any way believable. From the police department to the modern bathroom to how to combine traditions the plot didn't flow. But like most romance stories, Act One thru Three: boy finds girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl were followed.

One scene that I found difficult to take in was during the boy loses girl act. In my head, I have a heard time wrapping my brain around a dad trying to sooth his own problems with alcohol and when the son shows up with his problems the dad offers the son alcohol so they both could try to wash away their troubles with 100 proof on the rocks. Just because their personal lives are on the rocks doesn't mean you should use the same metaphor while drinking.

Was it 100% bad. No, but there was way more bad than good. The ending of the movie showing the blending of the traditions between the two cultures seemed forced. The one scene that I thought was really good was in the planning of who sits where at the reception. They had a peg board of sorts that represented the layout of tables. Using pegs to represent people and the "What if?" scenarios did get some of the biggest laughs from me and other people in the theater.

The movie ran 90 minutes and rated PG-13 for some language and some sexual content. From what I understand, Red Box on the mainland rents for a dollar a movie. That price seems about right for this instead of the price of a matinee.