Why "Repo Man" is good for you
08 03 12 - 18:40
I imagine most people reading this will have their own equivalent - the film that first rocked their world, blew their tiny minds, introduced them to the all-consuming marvel of cinema. But Repo Man was mine. Squinting through a veil of cigarette smoke, all but pinned back in my seat as Iggy Pop's theme tune blasted tinnily from the Electric's speakers, I watched agape as the frantic title sequence of a radiation-green road map of the route from Los Alamos to California gave way to the opening scene of Frank J Parnell's stuttering drive across the desert: the first sardonic note of the film's account of a stolen Chevy Malibu with a secret in its trunk and, in its way, pretty much everything else besides. And something deeply significant clicked into place for me.
Given my age at the time, the strange thing is, having watched it semi-regularly over the last two decades, I still think the film's a stone classic. Still as fuck-you funny now as then; still as prescient in its fixation with conspiracies and coincidence; still as potent in portraying an LA (and by extension a world) at once feral and beigely-corporatised. Now, as an adult, I'm still glad it was the one that got to me first. And that in itself is no minor stroke of luck. After all, at 12, most of us are nothing if not insanely pliable, our formative influences ingested haphazardly, stumbled on by chance - and as I think of it now, a vast streak of my own tastes can still be traced back to that glacial night at the Electric. - "How Repo Man got my cultural motor running," by Danny Leigh, The Guardian
Worth noting. A true classic, alongside Apocalypse Now and Dr. Strangelove.
A new one you might add: Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy.
nineteen comments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqlLn0Jj8CQ Jim Necroslaughter - 08-03-’12 20:54
Do your labs consist of honing burger-flipping techniques, and do you get evaluated on how well you can say the phrase "Would you like fries with that"? Biostats, bitch - 10-03-’12 05:08
And the rest of the movies mentioned so far, e.g. Dr. Strangelove, aren't? you're clueless, you get an F - 10-03-’12 05:09
For a more interesting take on that, you'd have to read "Brave New World," and not the odious spoon-fed simplisticism of "1984."
"Dr. Strangelove" however is the one movie that made a truly terrible fear into a tunnel of laughter. I used to use this to test potential girlfriend material. If she didn't get it... she didn't get a call back. nihilist (URL) - 11-03-’12 11:07
both versions are superb..
2nd will be the cube... Benny - 11-03-’12 18:39
@nihilist: yes, that's perfect, Catcher in the Rye is the perfect analogue to Taxi Driver. They're what I like to call first ballots in the Facebook Favorites Hall of Fame. Film Major - 12-03-’12 14:49