The little random bag that could

The Sociology of 4chan series WILL continue. I shall not be silenced. Rules 1 and 2 are mere guidelines!

But at the moment I've got two random things I want to discuss.

1. I was directed by my brother to the website for Games Paradise in Sydney. A decent shop that's got some less common roleplaying and gaming things (at least in Sydney). Out of idle curiosity I looked at the cost of a Games Workshop Warhammer 40,000 squad box. About $35, expensive, as all Games Workshop stuff is. Out of further idle curiosity I checked out the cost of the same box on the Games Workshop site. $40.

For those of you not mathematically or business-ally inclined, let's work this out. Games Workshop stores in Australia import these things and then deliver them to both stores run by others and their own stores.

In their own stores, the price is marked up from the production costs (in order to make a profit) to $40.

Presumably when the wholesale sell the products to other stores they mark the price up enough to make a profit there, and presumably the store they sell it too marks the price up enough for them to make a reasonable profit as well. Yet this double-mark-up price comes out to be LESS then the official Games Workshop site. Goddammit, GW. Goddammit.



2. Repo: The Genetic Opera. It's a cult movie that has some of signs that it'll be a cult classic, to me. I first took notice when I saw it was a musical about a dystopic future where there are corporate sponsored assassins as a fact of life.

Long story short, the idea is that R:TGO is based in a future where organ failure is a fact of life. To counter this a company grew genetically cloned organs and sold them. Most people could not afford this, but the company (GeneCo) offered a payment plan. The real catch? As long as you meet the (apparently expensive) payments, you're safe. If you miss one? They repossess the organ. Yeah, they cut you open while you're alive and take it out. These are the Repo men. Plus because of the commonplace nature of surgery now, it's become incredibly common and fashionable to have recreational surgery.

Dark, dystopic, musical? Sounds fun so far. So what went wrong?

Well parts of it I genuinely enjoyed. Blind Mag was an interesting character with an incredible singing voice, definately worth a listen to her scenes. The father character (played by Anthony Stewart Head, Giles from Buffy) was quite deep, showing the psychological breakdown of someone who knows they're doing is evil, and originally had good intentions. I ended up rooting for him, even in the scenes when he seemed to break down, becoming a gleeful sadistic maniac, reveling in his duties as a GeneCo Repo-man (SPOILERS), and he has a pretty impressive singing voice.

Other parts of it were just a let-down. The three children of the big-bad-evil-guy had no characters, just gimmicks, and considering how much attention they get I was sitting there waiting for them to bring on INTERESTING characters. An angry-angry business man, a slutty-slutty surgery addicted Paris Hilton, and a face-stealing effeminate party-boy. There, I just saved you a bunch of time.

The main character (Shylow, the daughter of the Repo Man mentioned above) is... a waste of screen time. I understand she's meant to appeal to the emo crowd, she's a sky humble girl oppressed by her horrible situation in life, hence why she's so unassuming and hesitant in most of her singing. That doesn't excuse the fact that I had NO desire to see her come out in front of the movie. She could have been hit by a car twenty minutes before the climax of the film and it genuinely would not have bothered me. Her weak singing genuinely detracted from alot of the songs, and the "I'm a rebellious 17 year old who hates being told what to do by 'the man'!" is just... well it's fucking irritating. Yeah, I get that we're supposed to feel sorry for her since she's ill and can't go out because of her illness. The whole 'princess locked in the tower' thing (not subtle, filmmakers, not subtle), I get that. It doesn't stop me disliking every scene the character's in.

Another part that annoyed me was the character of the Graverobber. In this future world there's an incredibly powerful painkiller/stimulant that allows people to undertake all this surgery. The drawback? It's incredibly addictive. An illegal varient of it can be harvested from dead bodies, so that's the introduction to the Graverobber character. He breaks into graveyards and harvests this drug, then sells it. He functions as the narrator a couple of times, and is described by the wiki-page as "Darkly Charismatic", with an obvious anti-authoritarian streak. He's not.

He comes off as pointless and a deus-ex machina at least once. The vast majority of his songs were weak and sounded like boring narration that was being sung, rather then an actual attempt at lyrics. It took me a while to work out precisely what it was about the character that bugged me, before I put my finger on it. He was a pointless 'Author favourite'. He's played by one of the creators, indicating that writer loved the character, and just happens to show up all over the place, get away with everything he's doing, and be supposedly charismatic. I'm sorry, but even speaking as a person not adverse to recreational drug use, I find it hard to enjoy the presence of someone who makes a living selling HIGHLY addictive (described as such in the movie) chemicals to prostitutes.

Possibly the worst part of the movie? There are a whole bunch of moments that I hope against hope were done in a parodying sense, I really really hope they were meant to be a parody. But when I watch it I just get the sense it was being done because the film makers genuinely thought it was a good idea. Combining rock and opera sounds great, but when you have half naked women cavorting on stage while a conductor sings loudly about getting people to testify at how awesome GeneCo is, I just get the feeling the film-makers were going for a 'modern rocky horror show' feel, rather then attempting to parody attempts to modernise old-school culture and deify economic processes. The latter would be far more effective then the former.

Long story short: If you have the chance to see Repo for free and you've got a boring night in planned, take it up. Don't pay for it until you've seen it at least once to work out if you like it.