I’ve frequently compared Paul Verhoeven to Douglas Sirk, for their common tendency to disguise an unpalatable subtext with a cliche-Hollywood spoonful of sugar to get the medicine down the unwilling throats of many unsuspecting–and, to be fair, frequently apathetic–audiences. And while this usually sparks a debate in these parts, which of course is what’s great about CS, it’s nice to occasionally find a similar view expressed by someone with way more credibility than me.
From one of my favorite movie bloggers, a critic first brought to my attention by Roger Ebert:
[QUOTE=Matthew Dessem]
Let’s say you want to make movies that critique the patriarchy and consumerism. And as long as we’re talking, let’s say you’re not independently wealthy, and so you’re gonna need someone else to pay for it. How do you operate in a world where the economic realities of the film industry relentlessly push everything toward the middlebrow? . . . work in a genre that studio executives don’t pay too much attention to. Take that genre’s conventions and turn them up to eleven, so no one can accuse you of not making the movie you’re getting paid to make. Put so much bombast into your filmmaking that inattentive viewers won’t pay attention to the underlying message, but clever viewers will hear what you want to say. . . . The current world-record holder for subversive, poison-pill filmmaking is Paul Verhoeven, for *Robocop *and especially Starship Troopers, in which Verhoeven spent $100 million of Sony’s money to more or less explicitly accuse Americans of being latent Nazis waging endless war against vaginas. Before Verhoeven, though, nobody did this better than Douglas Sirk.
[/QUOTE]
Obviously YMMV, but I remain firm in my belief that in 20 years Verhoeven’s gonna be a fixed part of the canon, along with Sirk, Hitchchock, Kurosawa, and other members of that pantheon.