A Special Report by Kellie and Benny Hell:

In 2056 a series of organ failures rapidly becomes an epidemic, leaving the world devastated. In it’s wake rises GeneCo; -a shady organ transplant company headed by Paul Sorvino as Rotti Largo (it’s president). It offers organ replacements for a price, and when that price fails to be met, GeneCo takes them back through the dark dealings of it’s ‘Repo Men,’ a group of skilled contract assassins. Surgery addiction, and widespread chemical dependence on a painkilling drug, Zydrate, plunge society into a technologically fuelled moral Dark Age in which murder is sanctioned by law, and GeneCo is at the heart of everything. In the midst of all of this, Repo: follows the story of Shilo Wallace (played by Alexa Vega), an innocent seventeen year old, sheltered by her father (a secret Repo Man, played by Anthony Head) due to a rare inherited disease. The story focuses primarily on Shilo’s search for information on her family, and her disease, which leads her into the softest spots on GeneCo’s malevolent underbelly.

Also starring Nivek Ogre (of Skinny Puppy fame), Paris Hilton (A Night in Paris), and Bill Moseley (House of 1000 Corpses) as the children of Rotti Largo, the characters of this movie show a surprising amount of typecasting. Paris, Bill, and Ogre have very short parts in the movie as its main foci are Rotti, Shilo, and her Repo Man father. Paris plays a spoiled rich kid, Ogre plays a womanizer, and Bill plays a murderous psychopath… gee, I wonder how ever they were able to get into character. Paris Hilton runs a support network for people who are addicted to Zydrate, yet she is addicted to Zydrate herself. Bill and Ogre are constantly fighting with each other over who should inherit Daddy’s company, since Rotti found out in the beginning of the film that he is going to be dead soon and no organ transplant will save him. Blind Meg was marvelously played by operatic chanteuse Sarah Brightman, whose costumes were amazing.

The Repo Man was so convincing that you’d be surprised this wasn’t a big budget multi-million dollar revenue earner after release… oh wait, there hasn’t been a real release… It has an well-known cast; a decent, if tongue-in-cheek, plot directed by Saw II, III, and IV director Darren Lynn Bousman, and written by illustrator, Terrance Zdunich (who plays “Graverobber,” a total hottie), and Darren Smith (who wrote the score and plays the band leader); and received a fair amount of sub-cultural fanfare through the Internet. With backing by Twisted Pictures (The Saw series) and Lions Gate Films, it’s a wonder why this movie hasn’t done well financially… but it hasn’t in the least. It premiered on November 7th, 2008, on eight small screens in the U.S. and in Toronto, but brought in a sad amount on it’s opening day. While the total revenue generated by this film isn’t readily available as a figure, it seems that the companies behind it, Twisted and Lions Gate respectively, failed to push this as a viable product, leading it to be submerged beneath the weight of ‘respectable’ films.

While I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, I can say that the music (everyone had amazing voices!), artistic approach, and feel of the movie are all A+ and worthy of further exploration. I walked in with the impression that this was a modern “Rocky Horror Picture Show” geared toward the Goth crowd, and walked out amazed at it’s quality, and the relative obscurity it’s been met with since it’s release.

Lions Gate seems to have decided that Repo is not worthy of promotion or a theatrical release, and have sent it straight to video. The creators of Repo spent months trying to get it into theatres by themselves, contacting independantly owned theatres accross the country and doing a tour with the film. Terrance and Darren both attended every screening across the U.S., taking questions from the fans afterwards, and doing a meet and greet with anyone who waited in line to meet them. Their dedication and drive to this movie alone was inspiring and made me want to help them promote in any way I could.

You can find more theatre showings, and more information at the Repo The Genetic Opera site.

(Click image at the end of the article to view video)

Funny or Die is the first site in a network which hopes to leverage the celebrity of people famous in old media into celebrity in new media. Your hosts at Funny or Die are apparently Will Ferrell, Judd Apatow, Adam McKay, and Chris Henchy. I came across the site today because I heard that Paris Hilton had made a campaign ad about John McCain because John McCain had made a campaign ad about her and Barack Obama. Searching on YouTube, I mostly only found about a lot of new pages promising something to do with Paris Hilton and porn. I never searched for Paris Hilton before, so maybe there are a couple hundred new pornographic entries about her on YouTube every day. It wasn’t very helpful anyway, so I went over to Live.com search and found what I was looking for on on the Funny or Die site.

I don’t live in America, so I don’t have an opinion on the upcoming election, but I still think this video is funny. I guess the John McCain campaign made an ad where they said Barack Obama is a celebrity, like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, but does that mean he is ready to lead. Paris Hilton is one of the many heirs to the Hilton hotels fortune and a number of her family members donated to the McCain campaign. So her whole family was angry about her being in the ad and she made a response video for the Funny or Die web site.

The moral of the story is that one should always try to avoid insulting good-looking bitchy club kids with trust funds. The least of them will make it their mission in life to get retribution for imagined slights. For an actual slight, the most successful of them will make a comedy video for a celebrity-driven web site and more than four million people will see their video dis.

I live in Los Angeles, so it is probably no surprise that a lot of people I know are making resolutions to either become stars or achieve bigger stardom.

It doesn’t seem like it is much fun to be famous in 2008 though. Entertainment Weekly’s entire year in review issue was all about how much it sucks to have the eyes of the world on you. When I recently went to my OB/GYN, I was reading either Esquire or GQ in his waiting room and there was an interview with Michael J. Fox. The interviewer asked him what his thoughts were on like Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears or Paris Hilton or maybe all three. Michael J. Fox was a young Hollywood star in the 80’s, but he still has a pretty squeaky clean rep. Perhaps because he played a wholesome character on TV for a while. At any rate, his response was that he was soooooooooooooo glad the whole tabloid and paparazzi thing did not exist when he was young because it was his opinion that he did a lot of the same dumb things and they just were not recorded for posterity.

When I was a teenager, I lived overseas, mostly in countries where (a) it was legal for me to drink and (b) I had diplomatic immunity so what was legal was not that much of a factor. I am pretty certain that I would cringe at photos and video taken in many of the situations I got myself into. But there aren’t any. Actually, I wish there were more photos of me growing up. But the point is that I could be young and experimental and even a little wild, without it going down on my permanent record.

It feels weird to type, but I suppose I used to be at least a local celebrity within certain geographies and certain scenes. My personality was generally turned up to eleven. I thought shirt was spelled L-I-N-G-E-R-I-E. My writing was getting published all over. And no one had ever seen anything quite like Blue Blood Magazine at the time. I signed a lot of autographs in the 90’s. Maybe I still am some variety of celeb, but I hope not. I want a private life. I want to get to occasionally say something stupid without being haunted by it forever and ever. I want the freedom to be imperfect and the ability to be personal one-on-one. I will never tell a friend to read my LiveJournal or most recent press release or magazine interview to find out what I’ve been up to.

I know I have the juice to make other people pretty famous is certain circles, but it doesn’t really seem like something I want to do as often as I once did. Most people think they crave the attention, but they can’t handle it at all. They simultaneously get addicted to being on magazine covers and completely melt down that they can no long just move to the next town and be totally invisible. And then, of course, they illogically lash out at everyone around them.

Situation gets rough
Then I start to panic
It’s not enough
It’s just a habit
Hey kid you’re sick
Darling this is it
You can all just kiss off into the air
Behind my back I can see them stare
They’ll hurt me bad but I won’t mind
They’ll hurt me bad they do it all the time
Yeah yeah, they do it all the time
I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record

2007 was officially the last year anyone should have even halfway contemplated wanting to be famous for the sake of being famous. I predict that reality TV will grow in 2008, not just because of the WGA strike or economics, but because most people can only handle any modicum of fame for so long. I think a thirteen week reality show is about the right length of time to be in the public eye before snapping, driving your car into someone who could help you, shaving your head (or letting your hair grow in, depending), or passing out on a Hollywood sidewalk.

Before They Were Stars – Commercials courtesy of Metacafe

My mother’s generation had a saying about how you could go anywhere so long as you had a little black dress. I’ve been working on putting this to the test this September. Every year, I tend to feel kinda gothic during the summer and I perk up as soon as it is Fall. I don’t know if this is some sort of Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder (Disorder is such a judgmental word.) or if I just really like school to be in session, whether or not I am attending it. My birthday is also in August and I tend to use my birthday and New Year’s as times to make adjustments designed to perfect my existence. This Fall, I’ve made a commitment to get out and enjoy what Los Angeles has to offer. So I bought a lot of little black dresses and have been trying new things and enjoying it a lot as it happens. The only weird thing about doing so much which is brand new is that it creates a bit of social anxiety.

The feminist blog/site Say Object referred to me saying,

“One of our favorite feminist thinkers, Amelia G of BlueBlood.net, recently weighed in on the “Captivity” billboard controversy, and some of what she says suprised us (plus, Girl clearly did her research).”

Writer/editor/cupcake fetishist Rachel Kramer Bussel and I were chatting about the Say Object mention and she told me they were having a party.

So Tuesday night, although I knew I was eventually headed to the West Side to help Blue Blood hottie Superna celebrate her birthday, I started all the way on the East Side at The Echoplex in Echo Park. The first event on deck was the The Conversation which was the opening act for Yo Majesty at Lady Party 911. Apparently comedians Jessi Klein and Jessica Chaffin do a weekly show called (I think) The Pages where they intellectualize tabloid fodder in a humorous fashion. The duo moderated The Conversation for this event where the topic was Punishing the Princesses. Basically the idea was to do a feminist deconstruction of why, as a society, we put people like Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsey Lohan on a pedestal and then knock them off it. The panelists were Tracy McMillan who I kind of think maybe writes for television, but I’m not sure. Then there was Jen Sincero who was apparently booked because she wrote The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping With Chicks, although Don’t Sleep With Your Drummer is the books of hers I’m familiar with. It would be most accurate I guess to say I’m partly familiar with it, as I was enjoying reading it but was in the middle of it when Blue Blood exhibited at Erotica LA and a couple of members of Jen Sincero’s entourage stopped by my booth and acted so weird that I never got back to reading it. Rounding out the panel was Nina Hartley who, at least for me, I thought needed no introduction. For the event she was billed as Porn Queen Nina Hartley.

Jessi Klein and Jessica Chaffin were good moderators and kept The Conversation flowing. They have a sort of intelligent sex-obsessed vibe that strikes me as sort of Sex and the City, despite the fact that the closest I’ve come to seeing that show is watching a spoof of it on Saturday Night Live. Tracy McMillan says that she thinks masculine energy is all about going out into the world in a hunting sort of way and that feminine energy is about being receptive and gathering things in a powerful way. She says that she thinks Madonna has evolved from seeking masculine power and energy to seeking the feminine side. I think that I am secretly a man. Jen Sincero explained that she wrote her The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping With Chicks because she found herself thirty-five-years-old and in a relationship with a woman for the first time. She said that she interviewed a lot of people for the book and that the people her own age she interviewed were very caught up with issues of sexual identity, but the younger people had more of the attitude of why wouldn’t you just sleep with whoever you feel like. Nina Hartley surprised me by being really awfully cool. I sort of thought I knew who she was in a general way, but she had really interesting insights. She is definitely not just another pornstar with an unconventional relationship and a publicist who claims she is smart. She is very well-spoken and was able to make interesting counterpoints all evening to an audience which was not necessarily porn-familiar or even porn-friendly. At one point, the panelists were talking about some reality show chick who had nude photos of herself posted to the internet and, while deconstructing whether the photos were more simply nude than prurient, someone mentioned that the girl was seventeen. Nina Hartley expressed horror and the other people on stage were like seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, what’s the difference? From a professional performer’s perspective the issue has to do with what is legal and I thought she handled that and other issues really well. The most interesting point she made was when they got to the topic of blowjobs. Apparently, some teen perv researchers recently did some sort of study (yeah, sure, a “study”) of how girls as young as twelve are just handing out the blowjobs these days and boys are not reciprocating. Nina Hartley said that, when she was fifteen, the notion of boys not reciprocating would have been totally uncool, but that she was interested in penises and would have been interested in giving blowjobs. However, she did not know that she could be alone with a boy and have limits on what she would do and she did not feel ready for intercourse.

Now you would think that, having had the site responsible for the event call me a favorite feminist thinker, I would not be experiencing any social anxiety, but that would be inaccurate. I figured I would be just kinda incognito and get to see other people talk. Only my good friend Lange kept hitting me on my cell during the talk because he had gotten to the club for the Superna birthday party an hour early. My cell phone is set so it is really loud when being turned off. It sings an entire song before powering down. I generally only think of how annoying this is at times when it would be even more annoying to play with the cell phone settings. So I just kept hitting mute and texted him where I was. I think the ringing makes the people sitting near me glance over at me and it turns out that one of them is Julia Rubiner with a super different haircut from the last time I saw her at a party at her house. Julia was kind enough to help write some Blue Blood About Us stuff when I was totally hyperventilating and blocked on writing it. I actually would have worked with her a bunch more, only all of her publicist pals were apparently part of the same pact to put a media blackout on Blue Blood projects. Whatever. It was nice to run into her.

Once The Conversation was complete, I got back in my car and drove like a bat out of hell, just long enough to get kind of turned around and lost in Echo Park. Fortunately, my cell phone features the primitive form of GPS where you call your friends and make them MapQuest where the fuck you are. I have nice friends.

I make it over to The Viper Room and meet up with the rest of the Blue Blood posse. The entire downstairs lounge is set for a Superna takeover and she is getting ready to play an all acoustic set with a new drummer. Uber-scenester Casper, of Coyote Shivers band fame, makes me and Forrest Black feel very welcome and we appreciate it. Last time I bought Superna shots, she vomited blood, so I don’t get her any birthday shots, but everyone else does. After her performance, she and Scar spend most of the rest of the night making out.

We hear that Fred Durst is filming a reality show in the upstairs of the club shortly. That seems like the perfect surreal end to the evening, so we all trundle upstairs. Fred Durst is gracious and nice, although I get the sense that, like me, part of him is really into being where he is and part of him is just crawling out of his skin with so many people around, looking and maybe judging. The band on stage for the reality show has a kind of an 80’s hard rock Pat Benetar sort of thing going and I like them, although security requests that I not shoot while they are on stage and I comply because I am considerate like that. When folks are nice to me anyway.

The thing people who are not extremely shy sometimes don’t get about me is that, it is already kind of painful to leave my house. Once I’ve exited the building, it is no more uncomfortable for me to talk to a rockstar than it is to chat with someone I vaguely know. It is all over the agony threshhold in a way and it is all interesting and stimulating in a way, so it is sort of all the same to me. I’m actually most comfortable with total strangers and with people I know very well. People I sort of know make me the most uneasy.

In closing her set, Superna mentions from the stage that people who want to see her naked ass (which must be everyone!) should go to BlueBlood.com. When I go into the bathroom, someone has put a Blue Blood sticker up in one of the stalls. I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to be able to maintain my anxiety level, if the universe is going to be so sweet to me. I hope my art doesn’t suffer.

I realize that Glaxo doesn’t want to be associated with a person like Paris Hilton, but she’s being cheated out of a great opportunity to use her popularity for good, and to rehab her image a bit.

Yes, I think PH should become a celeb spokesperson for Valtrex, and should do public outreach on behalf of genital herpes sufferers.

(Seriously, it’s not like she has any sense of personal shame, and the jail thing doesn’t work for anyone. The last guy who came out of jail with his image improved was Mandela, and he went in a hero.)

I’m envisioning a very lo-tek trashy glam viral-style campaign, if you will, with street teams pasting up mysterious flyers that ask, “Is Paris Burning?”