I have heard of but not read Ellison’s screenplay. How closely did it follow the stories? Being like I said, a fix-up, the book is episodic, the nine stories presented as happenings in Calvin’s life as a roboticist told by her to a reporter in an interview. Perhaps the best format would be a nine-part series.
You listening, Netflix?
Ellison basically stole the format from Citizen Kane and told the stories in the form of flashbacks. It works surprisingly well.
Ugh, I made the mistake of seeing it in the theater. I agree it was awful.
I dont hate it, I find it entertaining, and it is interesting how it has the same tile as a RAH book. In other word, ignore that it is supposed to be an adaptation, and go with the silly flow.
I’d rather not. That racist POS has to be taken off every “Great film” list.
This is exactly what happened to William Gibson’s The Peripheral; Amazon took the characters, settings, and some ideas from the novel, and made an entirely different story. Not been as much pushback (that I’ve seen) as Starship Troopers got; probably because The Peripheral is not one of Gibson’s iconic stories, like Neuromancer or the Bridge Trilogy, and because the Amazon series is an interesting story in its own right, with some decent writing and solid performances from Cloë Grace Moretz and others.
But it’s not The Peripheral, and I wonder why the producers bought the rights if they planned to tell a different story. Perhaps it’s something like “authorized fanfic” - the showrunner liked the characters and world, and wanted to tell his own story with them. And Gibson’s name drew me in to watch the series, so that might have been part of the point, as well.
I kind of liked Starship Troopers. Casper Van Dien was divine to look at, the stupid story of decimating outer space bugs with guns, and Mrs. Charlie Sheen piloting a spaceship - all pretty stupid, but…kind of fun. … If I recall, ‘Entertainment Weekly’ magazine tried to give a review, and I can’t remember exactly what the consensus was. (some ‘for’, some ‘against’) - but they said it was the only time in their history of reviews they simply couldn’t give it a rating.
Can you show me any interview (or even quote) from Veerhoeven prior to the critic’s reviews that indicated that he was intentionally filming a satire?
I’m sorry, but I don’t remember. Was Johnnie, in ST, supposed to be Argentinian, like in the book? I recall in the book Johnnie’s chance meeting with his father at the spaceport, with his father hugging him and calling him Juanito.
I agree, well I kind of remember, that it didn’t get a reputation as being intentionally satire until it came out on home video and aired on TV.
I too don’t remember him saying it was satire. At least not initially.
It might be like The Room, where Tommy Wiseau later claimed some of its comedy was intentional.
Nope, he was from the Philippines, his mother was in Buenos Aires (I suppose as a tourist) when the Bugs blow it up.
I remember the title in an Argentinian satirical publication, about the Starship Trooperss movie: “Porteñito salva al mundo” (“Boy from Buenos Aires saves the world”)
I loved the book as a child, as a consequence I didn’t like the movie too much.
Why would I? I’m not saying that.
Well, actually, Love, Actually is fairly high on my movie hate list. Partly, it’s because it beloved by a large number of people, but I found it to be fake, brainless, and ultimately rancid.
The very rare movie my wife and I quit. I can not give a final analysis since we quit, but we hardly ever stop movies. It was that bad.
Well, I like Love, Actually. But I think the criticisms are 100% valid. I just like ensemble casts and love stories. I’m a big romance reader/writer but romance movies don’t typically do it for me. It figures that one of the few I do like is widely hated. Guess it’s back to The Cutting Edge. (I promise my books are better than my taste in movies.)
While it’s not my favorite, Starship Troopers the book was written as a fantasy for teenage boys and so was the movie. In that sense it lined up pretty well.
I just thought of another stupid movie—Grunt: The Wrestling Movie
I don’t understand how Starship Troopers can be seen as anything but satire, with the over the top military propaganda segments throughout.
And if Kevin McCallister says it’s satire, it’s satire.
I love Macaulay Macaulay Culkin Culkin.
I always use his full name, mind you.
The 1983 Czechoslovak film “Slunce, seno a jahody” (Sun, Hay and Strawberries). Depicting a Czech village in the declining days of Communism, it includes a character, played by the late Helena Růžičková, who is a mother who is a domestic bully and is generally an unpleasant character in the village. She acts abusively especially toward her children, and her young son bears the brunt of it.
So for example, there is a scene where the boy asks his mother an honest question: “Mom, what is a slut?” The mother gives him a hard slap across the face and yells at him.
In another scene, the boy has to hold a rabbit while the mother skins it (in the Czech Republic, eating rabbit is common, and raising your own in hutches is also common among country folk). She grumbles at him: “Hold it properly, or I’ll whack you one!” Later, the boy complains that they’re constantly having rabbit for dinner, and the mother yells at him: “Don’t you read the newspaper? There are starving children in Africa!” And there’s a lot more of this throughout the film.
In the sequels, there’s more of this. In one scene, the family gets a personal computer. The boy says: “We have this at school. We play on it.” The mother threatens him: “Playing with such a rare device? Don’t you dare, or I’ll whack you one!” In another scene, she gives a hard slap to her young adult daughter when they have a disagreement over the latter’s boyfriend.
And the mother doing the whacking is played by an actress who was an enormous lummox of a woman. See here.
The thing is, Czechs find these scenes hilarious. Maybe it’s because they can relate to them. Things are changing, but during Communism and long after, Czech people tended to be quite authoritarian when raising children and were not averse to sometimes harsh corporal punishment. In general, the trope of a “hilariously abusive childhood” is fairly common in older Czech / Czechoslovak films. But if at least it was played with a subtext of clear criticism. Here it appears to be played purely for laughs, without any intelligent underlying point, and people, even young people, often laugh hard at it. As if whacking around your kid were something inherently funny. As someone who experienced similar things in my family, I find it offensive that people find such humor in this. Child abuse is no laughing matter. I would compare laughing at these scenes with laughing at pictures of the starving children in Africa mentioned above.
So this series of films, which makes humor out of bullying toward a weaker dependent person, and which paradoxically causes such general reactions of laughter, is highly offensive to me, and I hate it with a rabid vengeance.
Yeah, it legit worries me when people see these actors dressed up in SS uniforms and don’t think the movie is a satire of military jingoism.
When I got out of the theater, my response was that it was a satire that forgot it was a satire two-thirds of the way through and tried to be an action movie, and failed. But now I think that was part of Verhoeven’s plan: I think he hates the audience, and he wanted us to enjoy the action bits so he could make fun of us for lapping up the jingoism.
I’m not a fan of his, but I think about his stuff more than I think about the work of shitty directors.