18 years later, still my favorite movie
Repo Man is completely unclassifiable. Funny, dark, biting, thrilling, confusing, action, adventure, it's all there. Emilio Estevez plays Otto, a "white suburban punk" living in LA's sprawl, with a nowhere job that he loses in the film's second scene. When his hippie parents admit they sent his college fund to a TV preacher (We're sending Bibles to El Salvador!), Otto meets Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), a cocaine-driven Repo Man who needs an extra driver. Otto joins the firm and soon learns the Repo Code; Bud's version (You see, a Repo Man gets himself INTO tense situations), and the other regulars at Helping Hand Auto share their philosophies too. Light finds Bud's view tedious but is willing to handle shoot-outs when he's not reading parodies of Scientology (Diuretix), Miller seems completely neuron-fried (The more you drive, the less intelligent you are), and Oly is along to make a four-pack. (Did you notice the four experienced Repo Men are named after beers?) Let's go get a...
A Proud One Among Many
Every decade, there seems to be a movie that defines the angst of the culture and the subculture, the collective feeling that something is wrong with the establishment. To call this zeitgeist is misleading; these films don't reflect the spirit of the times as much as they somehow tap into the opposite - they manage to create an all-around sense of unease about the state of the world. In the 1960s, it was The Graduate and the bombshell look at the end. For the 1990s, Fight Club identified many things wrong both with pop culture and those acting in rebellion against it. For the Reagan-saturated 1980s, the distinction falls squarely on Alex Cox's debut film Repo Man. In one of his first roles, Emilio Estevez plays Otto, a street punk who loses his job and college savings in the same day due to misunderstandings and television preachers. At the end of his rope financially and mentally, he agrees to make a quick 20 bucks by helping experienced repo man Bud (Harry Dean Stanton). Realizing...
"I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either."
Alex Cox sends up the Reagan era in a black comedy about car reposession. With a stellar soundtrack and lots of quotables, Cox is the precursor to the Coens and Tarantino. Cox sends up everything but the kitchen sink-suburban life, televangelism, nuclear fear, UFO conspiracies, commercialism, self help cults, and more I'm sure I missed here. Straight up lo-budget classic if you have a taste for irony and absurdity.
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