What movies have you seen and enjoyed lately that your friends did/would not understand?
I have Galaxy Quest (loved it!), Iron Giant (ditto!), and Stuart Little (if you like SFX without excessive violence & gore, this one’s for you!)
I also like any American International beach/teeneager movie from the 1960s, Doris Day/Rock Hudson flicks, and Christmas movies (I have a trunk full of 'em!)
And cartoons, especially the Warner Brothers ones from the 1940s.
I could blame my taste in movies on having a small child, but I’ve liked movies like this all my life.
Galaxy Quest, Iron Giant, and Stuart Little are all great movies.
I recently showed my wife Bill Plympton’s I Married A Strange Person. She was worried about me for a week.
My friends also don’t know what I see in Hong Kong flicks. I love 'em all, even the bad ones. They’re just so… so… I have no idea what. The Seattle International Film Festival started on Thursday, and there’s a ton of Chinese movies I have to catch. Ah, obsession…
Hmmm…my taste in movies differs wildly from yours. But movies I’ve seen that my friends probably wouldn’t get (the majority of them, anyway):
Three Kings. They’d probably see it as a clever war movie, and not the FILM that it was.
Fight Club. They’d get grossed out by blood and teeth getting knocked out and not appreachiate the post-modernism.
Throne of Blood. It’s Kurosawa, and I really think that unless you study it, or are a film student, you won’t get all the brilliant little gems of cinema.
I’m a big fan of Katherine Hepburn, but I doubt my friends would vote for a Kate Marathon.
I liked all the Star Trek movies, at least to some degree. However, my wife doesn’t care for Star Trek at all. It’s a big mystery how we got married at all! :D:D
The crummy lip synch, the dialogue that you suspect doesn’t entirely survive translation and cultural differences, the totally inappropriate sound effects. My favorites include “Seven Mantis Hands of Death” “Golden Trail Path of the Dragon” “Drunken Master” and “Monkey Ku Du”.
Clockwork Orange is amazing, one of my all-time favorites.
Then there’s Spartacus, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, etc.
I’ll admit, all his films aren’t gems (I hated Eyes Wide Shut), but I think the man was a genius and most of my friends just didn’t get it. Most of them think 2001 is boring and unintelligible. One friend told me that Clockwork Orange is a celebration of violence (he apparently missed the point of the film).
Okay, I’m taking this as an opportunity to get to grips with something that’s been on my mind on and off since I saw the film a couple of years ago.
Is anyone else perplexed by ‘Starship Troopers’ ?
It’s not a film I would normally venture to see and, on the surface (I think) it could be viewed as of little substance – the odd homage, due’s paid, tongue in cheek references, gruesome imagery, goodies vs. baddies, etc but otherwise a fairly unmemorable boys adventure yarn.
However, I think it’s deceptively clever - I almost missed what I thought I saw (if that makes any kind of sense).
In essence, we’re asked to sympathise with the humans against the nasty alien invaders. The super earthlings go off and give the baddies something to think about but in the process the leader ends up in several widely scattered pieces.
Ultimately (it seemed to me), the Director of the film succeeds in persuading us to cheer on the Nazi humans - who themselves are misled by their leaders – as they go about destroying another, less advanced species. I think.
Are the themes – and I think there’s more to this film than I can shake a phaser gun at – deception on a grand scale, propaganda as a weapon…… the whole Nazi Germany story OR should I just accept this SF genre isn’t my strong space suit ?
Is it a great, original and very cleverly manipulative film ?
~whew~ finally a thread where I can share my secret fetish–the movie Night at the Roxbury. I only know of ONE other person that actually enjoys this movie. It cracks me up everytime. Also, Groundhog Day…wonderful!
London_calling: Starship Troopers does, indeed, have a flickering satirical subtext. Much of the presentation is deliberately designed to echo WWII propaganda films (costuming, “it’s war!” and such). You’re correct, we the audience automatically assume we’re on the side of the humans vs. the big nasty bugs, but if you really watch, you see that the humans invaded the bugs’ home planet and are now irritated that the bugs won’t let us just move in and take over.
However, I don’t believe the film succeeds in conveying the subtext. It’s there, but it comes and goes, preoccupied as the movie is with splattering blood and guts, and making misogynist references. Director Paul Verhoeven grew up during WWII, and regards all the pro-war propaganda from both sides of the battle with a rather jaundiced eye, but he also likes making movies full of mayhem and eye candy. He communicated irony and satire much more effectively in Robocop, in my opinion.
It’ll be interesting to see what he’s got up his sleeve with his new flick, The Hollow Man…
Cervaise, You mean I’m not mad. Thanks for that, it’s a relief to know someone else read it similarly.
You clearly know your subject but I wondered abut this: ‘sub plot’ means to me a secondary theme (related or contrasting) and I’m not sure I can agree. Also, you say “flickering” – both of which I can understand.
But in my mind it’s there, stage centre, in almost every frame of the film. Whay made it so interesting, for me, was that it was central but disguised, you don’t notice it because he guide’s you away from it so that (even) the constant manifestations of an Arian style mind set and culture nag, but somehow don’t leave a bad taste. And the implausible justifications that make the aliens a threat reflects, not just on the Nazi era, but the whole Cold War.
I agree it’s misogynistic, racist and contains an incredible amount of graphic violence but aren’t those devices to steer us away. There we are cheering on (not literally) the humans. Blind allegiance.
It’s just one of those rare films that left me thinking “What on earth did I just see”….and then the pennies start dropping. This is some significant filmmaker, looking forward to the next one.
I love all old movies, especially Casablanca. I actually shrieked when I found out it was re-released in theatres a few years ago. I also love On The Waterfront, The Lady from Shaghai, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, any Hitchcock, any Elia Kazan, any Audrey Hepburn. Unfortunately, these films do not go over well in movie night.
It also shames me to say that I LOVE cheesy 80’s movies, especially Brat Pack ones, including:
Say Anything (most favorite)
Dirty Dancing
BIG
Sixteen Candles
The Breakfast Club
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
the one with John Candy when they’re at a cabin
Caddyshack
Spaceballs
Teen Witch
The Goonies
I hate to admit this, but I never got the whole Star Wars thing. I think they are cool movies, but come on…I just can’t get excited enough to wait in line 14 hours for tickets.
Also, I recently saw American Beauty with some friends and they hated it. It’s my new favorite movie and I have seen it like 20 times, and I love it more each viewing. It just blows me away. And everyone I know who has seen it thinks it’s “OK.” Argh!
Me I’ll watch almost anything. From sappy romance (Ghost and City of Angels) to shoot em up westerns (Unforgiven and The Quick and The Dead) to war movies (The Green Beret and The Dirty Dozen) all sorts. I haven’t seen Galaxy Quest yet though (And I want to) and when I got Starship Troopers it was all messed and I haven’t gotten it out again.
I have to admit that I was fascinated by Starship Troopers, but for the wrong reasons. The film makers – director Paul Verhoven and the screenwriter (whose name escapes me) especially – have a philosophy diametrically opposed to Heinlein’s. It’s interesting to see how they handle episodes described in the book when they have so different a slant. On top of this, of course, the special effects are first-rate.
Heinlein would have hated this film, I think, on several different levels. The science is asinine. Heinlein has written about how easy it is to avoid collisions in space, for instance. “Bugs” that had no technology and were merely throwing rocks from half a galaxy away would pose no threat to us or our great-to-the-nth-power grandchildren. The Bugs seem to live on planets that are pure desert, with nothing to sustain life.
Heinlein would never have the overall military command be as extraordinarily stupid and profligate with the lives of its soldiers as it is in the film. Just what the hell were the objectives to be? Who would place expensive, highly-trained and equipped soldiers on the ground with minimal protection (the infantry in the book wore total body armor) against innumerable, brainless, practically indestructable living tanks?
Nor did Heinlein support the kind of virtually fascist militarism the film depicts. Heinlein liked to “experiment” with different forms of government in his books. It’s as if he was trying to show that our particular brand of representative democracy was not inevitable nor necessarily the best form achievable. This doesn’t mean that he believed in all of them. I suspect, though, that his government by veterans was closest to his heart. But it’s a far cry from what was depicted in the film. Read Heinlein’s own book Starship Troopers, and his collection Expanded Universe to see his defence of the system. (You might also see Alexei Panshin’s book Heinlein in Dimension if you can find it – although Heinlein wasn’t fond of Panshin’s criticism.)
There are a lot of other criticisms, but I don’t want to take up too much space. Suffice it t say that I still enjoyed the film, enough to pick up a copy. It should be great for starting debates, if nothing else.My wife refuses to watch it, and certainly can’t understand why I like it. And she’s a science fiction fan.
While the special effects were quite good, I also picked up on the Nazi-like characteristics of the human protagonists, but only subliminally. While I missed the part about the humans landing on the bugs’ homeworld first, the human military organization seemed to be based on a very dysfunctional model of how-to-get-things-done, they didn’t seem to have any clear objectives most of the time, they provided very poor air (orbital?) support for their troops, and they were hardly heroic, simply stoic. I’m ex-military and tend to view “military movies” with a different perspective than civilians (although I loved “Hot Shots”, both of them).
I could not cheer the protagonists and the bugs were big, impressive, ugly (but with the beauty of a well-oiled killing machine), and hardly sympathetic characters themselves. I probably would have enjoyed the movie if the humans had been a bit more heroic, not just in deeds, but in their objectives. I just can’t enjoy a movie where the protagonists are portrayed as a different sort of monster than the bad guys. I missed the political message, mostly because I recognized that the “good guys” were about as bad as the “bad guys”. Really, there were no good guys. Just bad guys you knew (humans) and bad guys you didn’t know (the bugs).
While I don’t approve of sucking people’s brains out through one’s proboscis to gain their knowledge, I felt kind of sorry for the big, wormy “brain bug” at the end.
I’m a sucker for Brandon Lee (R.I.P.), so Showdown in Little Tokyo and Rapid Fire are two of my secret favs. Showdown is probably the worse of the two…Dolph Lundgren was in it (need I say more)? It seems to me that Brandon probably would have been the Lorenzo Lamas of martial arts movies had he not died <as flashbacks of Snake Eater dance in her head…shudder>.
