ok, not particularly surprised that got picked up:) .
Thankyou Rik, for informing me that I did not find Heinlein’s novel ‘fun’. I sincerely believe it doesn’t stand up to Verhoeven’s film - I think Verhoeven took a fairly poor example of Heinlein’s work, turned it on its head and made something great. That is all IMO - you will not convince me, I will not convince you, I rather suspect.
Also, comparing Heinlein to Shakespeare is a new one for me.
Anyway, why would it be asinine of me to equate the source material to the adaptation, and find the source lacking?
Seriously: Rik, Miller, et al.: are you saying that we have to form a secret club, and get a hidden web address, before those of us who want to can have this conversation in peace?
If you want to have a conversation totally insulated from those with whom you disagree fundamentally, you should probably do it via email. If you do it in a public place that invites public comment, people WILL disagree with you.
The fact is, Verhoeven is a no-talent hack and would be whether or not he made the debacle that is Starship Troopers. He’s made one good film in his life (Soldier of Orange) and one passable action flick with delusions of relevance (RoboCop). Everything else he’s made has been low-class, bad-taste, low-brow garbage, including Basic Instinct. To suppose that he somehow, to quote Paul Rubens “meant to do that” is ludicrous. He makes garbage because garbage is his usual product and he has surpassed these limitations only twice.
Hmmm - it’s a slight tangent, but the criticisms you’re firing at Verhoeven are very similar to the kind of thing DH Lawrence had to put up with, and he is now recognised as someone who very much ‘meant to do that’. I’m not trying to equate Lawrence and Verhoeven in any other way than that necessarily, mind you. But it’s food for thought.
The concepts of lowbrow and highbrow are subjective, and played around with as a matter of course by most interesting modern artists.
I’m one who is apt to call BS on the crap that gets passed off as art, but . . . but, f*ck, there’s something subtle and captivating about Showgirls and the same goes for Starship Troopers.
My impression of Heinlein’s Starship Trooper, was that it was reasonable sci-fi, but seemed to suggest the Author was a sexually repressed fascist. Much more so than H.P.Lovecraft stories suggest the same about that author.
I know nothing about what Heinlein was realy like, but nothing in that book makes a good impression about his character.
My impression of Verhoeven’s Starmship Trooper, was that it was a fun cheesy sci-fi romp, with almost no connection to the Heinlen novel, and with lots of antiwar dark humor.
Apparently you aren’t familiar of the concept of an author describing a society of which he doesn’t necessarily approve. Read Stranger in a Strange Land and then come back and call Heinlein sexually-repressed or a facist.
Cervaise and lissener, while I have been somewhat impressed with the outflowing of text on the subject of Paul Verhoeven, and, indeed, your analyses are most thought provoking, the phrase that immediately comes to mind after reading them is “Occam’s Razor”.
Ummm…Showgirls…subtle…captivating. Three words I would not associate with each other. We DID watch the same movie Showgirls, right? The one with Elizabeth Berkely trying to cultivate a bad-girl image to get over Saved By the Bell?
I’m a huge fan of Occam’s razor, where applicable. But it doesn’t always work in art. If it did, then Ulysses is just about some guy wanderin around Dublin.
All Quiet on the Western Front, far from being an clinical view from the outside was the most excruciatingly personal depiction of war I’ve ever read. It succeeds because we care about the characters. We shared their horror. When they die we grieve. Through those characters we come to understand and share Remarque’s contempt for war itself.
Starship Troopers failed, IMHO because, intentionally or not, the characters are so repellent and interchangeable, what is on the screen is so numbingly repulsive, that it is simply impossible to care. If I am angry as a viewer, I don’t think it’s because I am confronting my own baseness, as lissener suggests. I’m mad because I just spent over two hours subjecting myself to the director’s.
But koeeoaddi, you can approach the same subject from two different perspectives; one is beautiful but tragic film (happens to be in my lifetime top 25) about the unintended victims of war; one is a vicious satire about the creators of war; cf. Dr. Strangelove. Who did you care about in that movie?
Brilliantly put. If you’re going to make an anti-war paean disguised as a propoganda film, it might serve you well to get the audience to IDENTIFY with your supposed protagonists rather than see them as laughable idiots from minute one.
That sounds like a great movie, Rik; why don’t you go make it?
My point being is there’s always room for another approach to any particular subject; that your suggestion is valid doesn’t make Verhoeven’s invalid.
In the first place.
In the second place, that was Cervaise’s point. Did you read his long posts above? The kids are NOT the protagonists: they’re part of the society that promulgates such pointless, posturing wars.
The protagonists–insofar as there are any; not always necessary in a satire–are probably the bugs. But only by default. The real protagonist is democracy and rational politics, which have no place in that world. The real protagonist is YOU, to stretch a point; is the audience: we’re the ones whose ridiculous nationalism and jingoistic patriotism and worship of hollow idols are the breeding ground for a future such as the one envisioned in ST. It’s a cautionary tale; since when does a cautionary tale require a sympathetic protagonist?
Ummmmmmm. . . this is a public message board. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that you can have a peaceful conversation via email instead of a place where not everyone is going to agree with you.
Now see I loved everybody in Dr. Strangelove. I know the reasonable answer would be, well, I identified with Peter Seller’s Capt. Mandrake. But the truth is, there was something about each of them that I recognized and so I was riveted on 'em all: Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper, Gen. ‘Buck’ Turgidson, President Merkin Muffley, Slim Pickens riding the bomb and even Dr. Strangelove himself.
That movie is probably a better one for comparison than All Quiet on the Western Front. It may have been satirical and ultimately dark, but at the same time the characters were accessible and I loved every minute of all of watching all of them. It had a humanity that allowed the satire to work on its viewer, rather than [in my case] repelling her.