Yes, yes, we get the Hilton hate; she's rich, she's superficial, she looked particularly scary in night vision. But we can't shake the feeling that there's something more to everyone's most favorite hated socialite than we give her credit for. This is, after all, the woman who starred as a surgery-addict in Repo The Genetic Opera - not the most obvious, or glamorous, role you'd imagine for her - as well as agreeing to star in a self-depreciating-but-hilarious McCain-baiting Funny or Die video during last year's election madness. Her Supernatural guest spot continues the trend, according to showrunner Eric Kripke:

If anyone ever wanted to see a bloodthirsty Paris attack and kill somebody, this is your chance[. I'm] quite frankly shocked that Paris agreed to do it. We wrote the role just for her... We're very excited that she said yes. She plays the role of a demonic creature that takes the form of... Paris Hilton. If you know our style, you know we go pretty funny and irreverent with this stuff, so—expect that. The fact that she wanted to do the episode speaks volumes about her sense of humor. She's flat-out awesome for playing along. You'll see.

Is there a hidden, self-aware side to Hilton that allows her to play with her own public identity like this, or is she just so desperate for the spotlight that she'll go along with anything as long as it gets her name out there? We're leaning towards the former, but we'll admit it: we're biased towards anyone who did a cameo on Veronica Mars.

'Supernatural' snags Paris Hilton to play 'demonic creature' [Chicago Tribune]

What first attracted me to the film was Anthony Stewart Head, also known as too-sexy-for-his-age Watcher/librarian Giles of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Head lent spectacular and commanding vocals to that series' status-quo-busting musical episode, and he's quite fit to be the lead tenor here as the eponymous Repo Man who steals organs from the poor to give to the rich.

He's also the loving yet unsettling father to sweet, sick Shilo Wallace (Alexa Vega). The drama between father and daughter is at the heart of the show, set against the backdrop of a frightening future where health care is so dire that massive conglomerate GeneCo is out to rip the bloody viscera from the chests of anyone who can't front their bills. Among the many screaming denizens of this dystopia, Vega and Head are the talented, charismatic duo that hold this bewildering movie opera together.

Repo! grew out of a ten-minute stage show in 1999, and it's picked up lots of plot along the way: Each character comes with oodles of sizzling backstory and a few racy graphic novel panels that serve as explanation. There's a lot to keep track of here, meaning that devoted fans will have excess material by the boatload to pore over when all is said and done. Appearances by Sarah Brightman and Paul Sorvino lend significant vocal cred to the ensemble, and Terrance Zdunich's creepy Graverobber is the perfect de facto narrator. These five (Vega, Head, Brightman, Sorvino, and Zdunich) are probably the only sympathetic characters here – the only ones to whom the film has time enough to lend a bit of complexity. As for Paris Hilton, if you close your eyes and think of England, she goes away soon enough.

The look of the film is pretty much what you'd expect. The cinematography is heavy with highlights and shadows – Repo!'s landscape uses light only to emphasize the dark, and its indulgent sweeps of a grimy, holographic future city will be a delight to anyone who thrilled at Blade Runner. Of course Victorian goth suffuses every costume. It's no surprise that people were ready with Repo! outfits this Halloween, before the movie even came out. Plus, it features a cool new futuristic drug – the painkilling Zydrate, which can be extracted easily from fresh corpses.

There are simplistic though mildly insightful one-liners – "Why is genetics such a bitch?" croons Vega as Shilo, the girl with the seemingly incurable blood disease. Though it might not achieve the same critical acclaim, it has the Rocky Horror geek perv vibe: Repo is an overwhelmingly odd, shockingly sexual, rocked-out celebration of all that is gory and scary and alive.

So if you've already been keeping an eye on the publicity and feeling a tingle in your throat, trust me, Repo! delivers. It may not be polished or genius, but it's fun – and Hollywood could use a bit of crazy, idea-filled fandom, if you ask me. But if the idea of watching naked women get slashed open to song in a world of corruption and despair – yeah, those parts were not so fun and idea-filled, as Fantasy Magazine pointed out. So if naked gore is a dealbreaker, stick to rewatching Chicago and The Matrix back-to-back this holiday season. For the rest, it's time to shoot some Zydrate and get ready to rock.

The new stills are from Christina Aguilera's upcoming greatest hits album, Keeps Gettin' Better - A Decade of Hits, and she's rockin' all sorts of sexy space woman shots.

Perhaps this new found pop love of all things scifi is due to the culture's ability to foresee the trends, and with J.J. Abrams' super optimistic Star Trek themed undertaking maybe it's time for everyone in Hollywood to start donning the pointy ears and learning how to "hug it out" Klingon style.

I personally welcome the happy pop-go-lucky scifi trend because look what it gives you:

Nicole Richie made her crazy-faced butt kicking chica scifi debut on Chuck this week, and even though she was all bullets and fists, it's Chuck, the "aw shucks ain't he cute," of science fiction shows.

Paris Hilton has brought her sexy swagger and "singing voice" to the freaky scifi musical Repo! The Genetic Opera, and while it's about harvesting organs off the living, it's still a musical with a pretty happy beat.

Janet Jackson is working a fierce Ms. Tron get up on her brand new tour.

Always the trend setter, Beyonce has been rocking a cyborg arm in her new music video "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)":

"Scary Spice" rocks the alien get up, what's not to love when you've got scifi fashion on the red carpet.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Now that Britney Spears is back to working with the Joseph Kahn (of Toxic fame among many others) in her new Womanizer music video, I think it's safe to say that we can only expect great scifi things from our pop princesses.

If only we could teach George Takai and William Shatner a little bit about J.J. Abrams' optimistic scifi message, those two could stop fighting like little babies and get with the new trend that is happy-go-lucky science fiction:

[Repo]

On September 30 you can digitally download the entire Repo! Opera soundtrack (but for a price). Lionsgate has a sampling up of the tracks and you can purchase the soundtrack at Repo!'s official site.

Repo! follows the story of a man hired to do the dirty work for a future corporation, Genco, who loans out organs (human organ failure being the number one killer of future humans). But when you miss a payment, Genco sends out the repo man to get its product back. Which is why Paris needs to look so hot. Wait, did that make sense?

So this shell of a human being gets to be the Muse of Stan Lee? Okay fine. Let's at least take some past experiences and input them into her character. So what should her costume be? A government issued orange jumpsuit, or perhaps a a teeny tiny dress made from a magic sweatshop? Or a white leotard with a giant red bullseye and then we can send her to Iraq to stop the war?

What about super powers? How about the ability to regurgitate champagne across a room with great accuracy and speed? What about the ability to deflect mind control. Remember Magneto's mind-control-blocking helmet? Paris' super power is like that, but only because she doesn't actually have a mind to control. Still, she should definitely have night vision.

What should her weakness be? Shame? No that hasn't been proven to work yet. What about class or tact? Whenever she's around someone with social decorum she begins to weaken until she says something inappropriate and regains her strength.

Suddenly I'm really excited for this super-cartoon.

[Comic Book Movie]

It's easy to think that this year's SDCC was a poorly-ran, over-attended mess if you've been paying attention to some of the press complaints that have leaked out from the show:

Anyway, we are posting this after midnight because there is no filing room. We were directed to an outlet in the hallway for all our computing needs. We promise to never bitch about the burnt gratis coffee in normal press rooms again.

Wait, sorry; that was just press whining. I meant press complaints:

[A]t Comic-Con, the press pass is essentially a complimentary pass that grants access to nothing that isn't covered by a regular four-day badge. This policy worked fine as recently as four or five years ago, before the crowds hit six figures and there was far less press covering far fewer mainstream events. But when folks from Variety, the L.A. Times and countless other legitimate press outlets who have busy schedules of events and panels to cover are told to stand in line for an hour or two with everyone else just to get in to a panel, it interferes with those outlets ability to cover the event and — by interfering with their ability to do their job — makes them testy, angry and overall unhappy with the show.

It wasn't just those waiting in line who found themselves unhappy with the show, however; con guests weren't so happy, either:

"It's really hard getting into the parties,” explained Colin Ferguson, who plays U.S. Marshal Jack Carter in the Sci Fi series “Eureka.”
Sedan-sized balloons promoting “Fringe” carried this come-on: “Imagine The Impossibilities.” OK, here's one: crossing the Gaslamp, by limo or cattle car, without becoming mired in gridlock. And once you reached party central, you had to run the name-checking, ID-inspecting gauntlet. The list keepers took no chances even, it turned out, if you were a guest of honor.
“With all the restrictions,” said Ferguson, who was due at the EW/SF shindig, “it takes 15, 20 minutes to get to the parties you are supposed to go to.”

While the Washington Post wasn't impressed with the sea of hype ("Comic-Con is all about the buzz. The kind of buzz you get when living in a vacuum," they wrote, despairingly), The Hollywood Reporter was just one of many places to openly wonder whether Comic-Con Jumped The, uh, Fridge?:

There is talk that despite the high numbers of conventiongoers, or maybe in spite of them, Comic-Con as a measure of geek cool may have reached a tipping point.

Critics are pointing to the scheduled appearances by tabloid mainstays Paris Hilton, who will join Thursday night's panel for Lionsgate's "Repo! The Genetic Opera" as well as host a party, and fellow party girl Kim Kardashian, who is supposed to hit DC Comics' party Friday night before appearing at a "Disaster Movie" panel Saturday. When Comic-Con becomes fodder for the Us Weekly crowd, has the event nuked the fridge? Folks wonder.

Sure enough, when Jaime King feels as if there's too much Hollywood hype, then something's definitely out of whack:

Slowly but surely the entertainment community is taking over to promote their projects here even though they have absolutely nothing to do with comics. What's next? A panel for 'Deal or No Deal'?

Comic book retailer Chuck Rozanski foresees disaster:

San Diego is about to lose its crown as the top comics show in America. With fewer than 100 real comics booths left in the entire show, this convention is now a primarily media event... The people on the San Diego committee have been so busy sucking up to Hollywood that they let their core group of comics dealer support wither and die. Is it any wonder that they took the comics characters off of the banners they traditionally place on the lampposts around Sand Diego, and instead have a new motto of “Celebrating the Popular Arts?”

That feeling was compounded by the news that IDW Publishing announcing midway through this year's convention that they won't be at next year's. Publisher Ted Adams explained:

The show has never been a profit center for us. It's a marketing cost. I think it's reasonable to expect that a comics publisher has to have a marketing cost associated with attending Comic-Con. I don't expect it's reasonable to expect that the show is going to be a break-even or a profit center.

(It's worth reading other comic pros' reactions to that news to see a much less downbeat assessment of comic publishers importance at the con.)

Comic-Con International's Director of Marketing David Glanzer tried to respond to some of the criticism in a recent interview:

You know companies sometimes think of our event as a marketing opportunity. And while that’s certainly understandable, we don’t look at our event as a marketing opportunity, we look at our event as much more than that. So if it's just somebody who wants to spend money and take X amount of booths, that isn’t something that we would entertain. We want to make sure we have a diversity of content on the floor and also in programming. This year we have even more programming than we have in the past, and we try to make sure it’s diverse... The decision to stay in San Diego was made knowing that we were going to have to forgo growth. A major part of that reason was because there has been talk of expansion of the convention center... We haven’t seen any movement on an expansion, and that has us very concerned. If nothing happens, as in a groundbreaking or some other solid movement, by 2010, we’re going to have to explore options.

That means we're in for potentially two more years of sold-out passes and Hollywood taking over the con, right? Well, maybe not; movie industry eyes are undoubtedly going to trained on Paramount's big three geek-friendly 2009 releases (Star Trek, GI Joe and the second Transformers movie) to see whether the studio's lack of presence at this year's con affected both buzz and box office. After all, there wasn't a Watchmen-esque Dark Knight presence at last year's con, and that seemed to turn out alright... As comic artist Aaron Alexovich notes, there are other - potentially cheaper - ways to tell (more) people about your project:

The engine behind all this insane expansion is the big Hollywood machine that rattled and churned and got itself twisted around in the direction of “geek culture” a few years ago. Which is great; more attention for the comic world is a good thing. But I can’t help but wonder when the great Hollywood behemoth is going to realize you don’t need to hurl a million dollars into Hall H to sell Watchmen to nerds. Nerds, as it turns out, can occasionally be found on the internet.

Additionally, with so many media-noses out of joint after this year's con (Personally, I thought it was fun to post stories while sitting on the floor of the hallway, but then, I also secretly wanted a fedora with a card in it that said "press," so you can pretty much ignore my opinion), it's not impossible that next year may also see a smaller press turnout, as well. Will 2009 be the year that San Diego Comic-Con begins to move back towards some semblance of comprehensibility for everyone attending?

Ask us again this time next year.

Flickr images by Andy Castro (Signage) and ColorBlindPicasso (crowd).