"Starship Troopers" - Verhoeven is a mad genius!

i was flipping channels the other day and came across what seemed to be some kind of made-for-cable sequel to this film. i didn't bother watching it.

i have really mixed feelings about this film. it's already a certified "classic" amongst a growing number of cinephiles, with one of the few voices raised in protest being noel carroll's. it is definitely wonderfully made, and VERY scary (some will no doubt disagree with me on that point, but i was scared shitless). as for it's political pertinence, hm, i'm not as sure...

the parts with the giant bugs! especially the dien bien phu-like part.

i don't remember the details well enough to recall if the film lends any ambiguity to the buenos aires thing in particular (part of the intentional cartoonishness of the film: despite being from buenos aires, the characters are hardly latin, not to say barely differentiated). but certainly there are a few mentions that if we had just left the bugs alone, they wouldn't be bothering us. it's a critique of hawkishness that's pretty broad; one can see it in "troy," too.

i think a LOT of the credit (and i suppose blame) for this film should go to its screenwriter--Ed Neumeier (sp?). he wrote the scrip to "RoboCop" as well, and both films exhibit a similarly pungent satire and a similarly elegant plot design (and a similar black humor).

my film prof. thought "showgirls" was v's masterpiece, and he had to do a lot of rhetoric contortions (read: rationalizations) to express this feeling. i think part of it was that he wanted to exalt verhoeven as "auteur," and since joe esterhasz (sp?) can be fairly easily dispatched, "showgirls" is prob. a better object for doing so.

yes i think the lack of ethnic signifiers can be read as a joke about macdonalization.

well there is a play of voices in the film.

you have the overt "propaganda" shorts (like with the kids stomping on the bugs), most of which--like those in robocop--are both hilarious and too over-the-top to be mistaken for anything but satire. IIRC, the film concludes with one of these propaganda pieces, celebrating the heroes of the film in a too-cheery-for-comfort way. i really have a hard time imagining anyone taking it at "face value"--which is almost a misnomer, for it is satirical on its face.

the film ITSELF, as opposed to these little segments which are overtly eminating from the future reality of the film, is organized like a lot of war movies, both jingoistic and not. the focus on the home lives of the characters--with the various interpersonal problems being carried over into and sometimes resolved by the war--is in keeping with, say, "the big parade" and a zillion others since.

yeah, exactly. the world in the film is run by a one-world government.

"if anything i think VERHOEVEN"

this was meant to answer the comment about the producers. but i typed "like" instead. sorry.

verhooeven has always been, imo, a heavyhanded director who has gotten way more positive press than he deserves - imo, the films that 'made' his reputation do not hold up on later viewing - feel its like early Tony Scott in Hunger era, something looks cool, stylish, feels smart but when you look back with the unfortunate hindsight of later works makes you wonder why you bothered in the first place.

What, Top Gun wasn't a masterpiece? Surely you jest!

Starship Troopers is incredibly entertaining, but all the "classic" talk could kill its enjoyability by implying we should respect the film.

Jake Busey on neon violin! Huzzah!

well, maybe or maybe not, but interviews with the filmmakers from before and after the movie was released make it clear that they intended on satirizing fascism with the movie.

robocop and starship troopers---hit! showgirls and hollow man---steeerike!

i'm sure not i know what you mean. the only film i can even imagine conforming to this notion is "showgirls."

what do you mean by a "bad" movie? most of his movies are--if nothing else (and never nothing else)--very well put-together. "showgirls" included.

things i like in starship trooper: it is based on the premise that the entire human race = utterly dim but underwear-model gorgeous gay men, some of them by chance in girl's bodies
-- mark s (mar...), November 4th, 2002 7:34 AM.

Yes but Mark, it is set in the FUTURE. Surely this is what we will evolve to?
-- N. (nickdastoo...), November 4th, 2002 7:35 AM.

i am evolving into the brainbug
-- mark s (mar...), November 4th, 2002 7:46 AM

when the movie came out he thought it was very accurate in it's portrayal of how life in the military was and how it portrayed the military mindest. he also perfectly understood what the film was satirizing as well.

Which led to my two word review: Aliens 90210

Look closer. The film suggests the bugs DID do it, but only as a defensive move against the humans invading their space. The implication being that the humans are the true evil imperialistic force in the universe.

I here it did far better on this side of the Atlantic where it touched nerves with people and stuff, while in America it was seen as film about people being eaten by bugs.

that's like a description of my perfect movie

actually amateurist, i would be interested in hearing why you think his films are well made, i find that (based on other films you like) to be a bit surprising.

If I remember correctly, the brain bug was killed by a random trooper who hadn't been in the movie until then.

I'm sorry, that's spelled bazoom.

It's been captured/found by Ricos former drill instructor from boot camp who we found out asked for a demotion to private so he could fight in the war.

Then they lez up.

If Bruckheimer was the guy who made the T-shirts that say "PORN STAR" then Verhoeven would be the guy who came along and designed one that said "SUCKS DICK FOR BLOW" *applause*

But don't get me wrong I like Starship Troopers a lot

I just like Johnny Mnemonic a lot better

"IT'S AFRAID."

"Alien 90210" is correct, but it works! In a bland, fascist, pretty future, of course all the people would be plastic. The bad acting becomes an element of the satire.

"Starship Troopers is good but it's really nothing more than ID4 for people who like their subtext in 40-point Arial Black"

ID4 had no subtext, as far as I could tell. And sure, Starship Troopers is broad satire mixed with broad entertainment, but the comparison is still unfiar. ID4 was brainless entertainment mixed with... um... Will Smith. Starship Troopers is a movie that's smart about everything it's doing, even when it's being stupid. (Which is also a good description of Robocop, which... come on. Great and also great.)

And I'd pick Futura Black for my money. If you have to say it big and loud, at least go with a classic. "Arial Black." Haha. A Microsoft font. Yes, I'm mocking you.

-- Paunchy Stratego (fluxion2...), November 28th, 2005.

you are SUCH a DICK.

Possibly the reason that it didn't do well in the US was that too amny people got the joke he was having at their expense.

...which is why Verhoeven is a genius and Bay is just a hack.

Verhoeven knows how low he's going and RELISHES it. He's like a scuba diver swimming in shit to uncover lost ruins.

xpost

Which to finish my point means the movie works as a satire not about theoretical Fascism but about very real Manufactured Consent.

* The most brilliant scientific mind in the universe belongs to TWO MARTIANS (who combine to form a single, giant martian) - not a member of the human race, as Bill & Ted had assumed!

* The Grim Reaper sucks hard at inane family games like Clue and Twister!

* Hell is nothing like their album covers!

I think perhaps the most telling thing about Bill & Ted is the way they just shrug off the innumerable paradoxes created by all their traveling back and forth through time and from the afterlife into the world of the living, and then just out of the blue become heroes, nay, leaders and unifiers of the entire world, with presumably no real qualifications - it's exactly their completely aloof approach to reality that makes them the greatest candidates for the job! Bill & Ted ought to make people who see today's world as being dystopian think hard about why they feel that way all the time instead of kicking back with a Pepsi and some Megadeth.

Don't ask me why I know that this film exists

PS I clicked on this thread by accident.

for what it's worth, the screenwriter of "starship troopers" mentioned "kiss of the spider woman" at some point--i can't recall the exact context.

i taught this film a few months ago.

xp

gee, ally, thanks.

Why does ST get so much credit for doing what loads of other war films already do, but with bold WINKY WINKY stamped all over it? Especially since the source material is already 4000x more challenging and incisive than anything in the film?

i think the book was written pre-war. and he and bardeche were fascists, right? not playing with fascist imagery, actually being fascists.

Karl Rove: BELCH

DOOGIE HAUSER IN A FUCKING BLACK LEATHER SS COAT.

i've had this thought too. i haven't decided how i feel.

th: you're right, brassilach was executed as a collaborator. it's bardeche (his brother in law) who revised and extended the pre-war history of cinema. i got confused because it's those post-war revisions that are probably best known. weird for a book half-written by an executed fascist collaborator to have been a strong seller.

xxp

I admit, that is a valid point being raised here.

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/f/f3/180px-CabaretNeilPHarris.jpg

Perhaps part of the idea with Starship Troopers is something like ... well, our standard movie familiarity with fascism comes in the form of sneering cold-eyed Europeans doing horrible things to small children. Part of what Verhoeven might be playing with is how a fascist threat might look if it weren't coming from the outside -- how it would look if it came, as it now seems more likely to do, from the inside. Outside = cold-eyed Germans. Inside = wholesome well-muscled blondes trooping off to save the day in a glorious no-consequences enemy-isn't-human battle-for-humanity! (I mean, notice how much the high school at the beginning resembles an episode of Dobie Gillis, some kind of apple-pie 50s aw-shucks dream?) I think you're expected to have Molina's consciousness when watching this, the ability to completely fall for the over-the-top camp beauty while still seeing through it and understanding the hollowness. The subtext frees the movie to totally revel in the adventure camp way more than a "real" movie in this genre could get away with -- plus the subtext charges all of that revelry, since it's always meaning something more than it says, both in terms of your intellectual reaction to it and in terms of the film's meaning.

How much of this is about Verhoeven's intent is probably pointless to think about; I don't want to read interviews about it, or anything, and learn what he was "actually" shooting for.

the screenwriter is extremely sophisticated and articulate about all the points you've brought up, n. verhoeven on the other hand has a more rudimentary understanding of the different levels of meaning--i think he was more interested in making the bugs look really cool and scary. which sounds like a veiled insult, but it's not. i think something about verhoeven's earnest interest in sci-fi and skill with cartoonish visuals combines with the screenwriter's more writer-ly ambitions to form something more interesting than either would have come up with separately.*

*this seems somewhat borne out by verhoeven's films made without neumeier, and neumeier's films made without verhoeven.

xpost

OTM.

what about tom of finland, reclaiming fascist aesthetics, when he was actually under the threat of death by fascists?

can you start a thread about this?

there's too much looseness wrt fascism for me to take this seriously, the whole 'aestheticization of politics' thing is such a tiny sidebar issue within fascism i don't even think it's particularly relevant. it's a bit like associating the russian revolution with constructivist poster art. i don't think the appeal of fascism in general has all that much to do with 'hollow beauty' and aestheticism. perhaps it appealed in that way to a few aesthetes. but is molina an aesthete?

you jump around from one thing to an irrelevant other: if this is 'fascism from within', what does the 'apple-pie 50s aw-shucks dream' have to do with anything? unless 50s americana is fasicst...

The subtext frees the movie to totally revel in the adventure camp way more than a "real" movie in this genre could get away with -- plus the subtext charges all of that revelry, since it's always meaning something more than it says, both in terms of your intellectual reaction to it and in terms of the film's meaning.

i don't know what you're on about. there's a subtext that this film is celebrating 'fascist' heroism and so 'the movie' does the revelling. how so? i don't understand how a movie can mean more than it says 'in terms of the film's meaning'.

50s America pretty much was fascist wasn't it? (This is from the perspective of a Brit and also someone who'd have been dangling from a tree for having the wrong skin colour; so what do I know?) Anyway, one could argue that any art that lauds that period or looks back on it with rose-tinted spectacles is also a celebration of a certain kind of fascist aesthetic.

it was bad, but it's imprecise to use the word 'fascist'.

(This is from the perspective of a Brit and also someone who'd have been dangling from a tree for having the wrong skin colour; so what do I know?)

we-ell ok, but i don't think all people of colour were lynched in america in the '50s.

Anyway, one could argue that any art that lauds that period or looks back on it with rose-tinted spectacles is also a celebration of a certain kind of fascist aesthetic.

not really! i mean, if america had elements of 'fascism' (i think we actually mean racial segregation and anti-communism), i can't think of much US art from the '50s that resembled anything from italy or germany. and things which look back fondly, like 'far from heaven' or even 'blue velvet' don't celebrate any kind of fascist aesthetic, let alone fascism.

OMGWTF?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

susan sontag to thread.

And this was the whole point of raising Molina, who manages to make an explicit distinction between adoring the aesthetic vision of fascism -- watching this film and going into raptures about the tall blonde wonderful German soldiers, so trim, so masculine -- and rejecting the concrete ideology behind it.

And if the issue is fascism-from-within (or the possibly better-put "manufactured consent" from upthread), then how could the apple-pie 50s aw-shucks dream NOT have to do with it? For God's sake, that right there is the last really strong common aesthetic vision Americans have had about what things "should" be like -- the most recent ultra-strong rallying point for American nationalism, the last vision of perfection. And it's the kind of perfection that, like all aesthetic/political visions of that sort, comes along with a flipside -- the nationalism in it pairs with xenophobia towards the outside, and the ideal it erects has to come with a non-ideal, an idea of the "degenerate."

The film isn't "celebrating" fascist heroism -- it's essentially finding a way to, yes, revel in all the aesthetic perks of it, all the idealism and romance and bordering-on-camp beauty that nationalism and fascism were always very good at selling. (It's reveling in the same part of the vision that Molina revels in when describing those German soldiers.) And that kind of aesthetic idealism is at the heart of loads of entertainment; it's fun; that's why it can sell ideologies so effectively. My point is that this movie keeps the political undercurrent of that also in operation, and so all of that revelry, yes, means more than it says -- we're asked to enjoy its conventions in a way that approaches camp, but we're also kept aware of what lies underneath it, so each bit of revelry is also kind of questioning itself from the inside, or asking us to question it. Like I said, the bug-fucking metaphor at the end is the most on-the-nose bit of this. On the surface of the film it's a victory moment ("hell yeah, they fucked that bug!") with all the attendant good-feeling entertainment that would normally come from that, but -- also pretty much right on the surface -- it's a somewhat grotesque parody of the urge to fuck the enemy at all.

This isn't even as complicated as this post makes it sound.

(In future releases of this film the bug will be credited as "Abner Ghraib Louima.")

it's probably for another thread, but i think i'm estimating this just fine! i think concepts like 'maufactured consent' are interesting and have their place but they cannot serve as explanations for fascism.

For individual citizens, actual policy agendas and concrete rhetoric are often just one subset of what an ideology really offers, which is some aesthetic/emotional vision of what the world could or should be like.

in yr scheme ideology is the master set -- i don't believe this. the real fight between fascism and social democracy in germany was not just about idealized world-views, still less their aestheticized expression.

This is particularly true of nationalism, and particularly true of, say, Nazism, which -- above and beyond the nationalistic spectacles it was so in love with -- had an artistic aesthetic ("degenerate art!") and even a HUMAN aesthetic! A vision, but explicit and implicit, of what human beings, at their best, should be and look like!

well of course they did, same way most societies do. but critiquing this seems awfully peripheral to me--esp the degenerate art thing. yr critique of nationalism is too blunt here -- you miss the very real (and not unjustified) sense of injustice felt by many germans (not all of them nazis) at the confiscation of german territory. you lose a lot of explanatory power by writing this kind of stuff off, and lose perspective by making a big deal of the impact of nazism on modernist art, imo.

What was that Onion column you posted, NRQ? Aha:
Why Can't Anyone Tell I'm Wearing This Business Suit Ironically? For some reason I think this is appropriate. That guy, that's Verhoeven.

Paul Verhoeven's 1997 film Starship Troopers was not originally intended to be a Starship Troopers film at all but a film known as 'Bug Hunt'. A friend of Verhoeven pointed out the similiarities between his script and the book however so the license was bought and the script edited to fit more in line with the book. The film takes up the political themes by satirizing the book's attitudes mercilessly, using references from propaganda films such as Triumph of the Will and wartime news broadcasts. At its premiere in Chicago, Illinois, several viewers sarcastically referred to the film as "Head of the Class Goes to War."

i think i am confused now. 'starship troopers' is the bug movie yes?

The Bugs would be the Poles.

ok, ur still comparing bugs and humans.
-- Theorry Henry (miltonpinsk...), December 1st, 2005.

xpost

SO WHAT? THEY'RE BUGS FFS

http://pekingduck.org/archives/my%20pet%20goat.jpg

XPOST

And a bigger point: Has there ever been a military which DIDN'T incorporate some of the tenets of what we now call "fascism?" I mean when you boil it down the term really describes the attribution of military models of discipline and structure to all aspects of society, doesn't it? Trains running on time and all that shit. Heinlein's novel is pretty frightening because he's kind of fully ESPOUSING this idea, that a democracy run by veterans of warfare is a great concept and totally workable and that said veterans would never turn against the civil liberties of disenfranchised civilians. But I digress.

So, in order to make a war movie, you have to cast some people as soldiers, and soldiers by nature of their occupation must have some "fascist" (uh, military) characteristics (even Owen Wilson in Behind Enemy Lines). Pointing this out, making a laff of it the way Verhoeven does, is kind of like saying "romantic comedies have awkward kissing lol." And then to come out and say "That's so great, dude made a movie that rather unsubtly makes the point that romantic comedies have awkward kissing lol" well, nobody would listen, would they? Because you'd sound like a fool.

That's it, though - the tradition isn't overt fascism (much less Nazism) - it's more subtle than that. Verhoeven MAKES it overt.

I feel so CONFRONTED right now.

xpost - Starship Troopers isn't a 'war movie,' it's science-fiction action. And I doubt you'll find anyone today who sees The Dirty Dozen as fascistic. Maybe a few when it came out (Ebert didn't 'get' it), but not today.

No, it's entertaining because that one bug melts off that one girl's arm, and then he jumps on the back of it and blows the whole thing the fuck up and everybody gets covered in goo. And this is even before they do the brain-sucking part or the part where the one dude blows himself up with the nuclear grenade to save the others. It doesn't undermine, and it certainly doesn't thwart a goddamn thing. It just pokes fun while delivering those same old war movie good times.

So in that it might lead us to question the enjoyment vs approval of ideals nonense that often gets bundled together in these args then okay, there is something going on. But tend to agree that as a comentary on politics it is K-lameZor, as a discussion on Hollywood it is a bit bloody obv, but there are worse things to blow a special effects budget on.

It's.......afraid!

Like yeah, pretty much all war movies have the jingoistic / nationalistic undertones this film dwells on; they have the same weird resemblance to fascist aestheticization. (Except Rambo and such, dudes -- that's like a rugged-individualist model.) And like yeah, that is totally the point here, that's what's so entertaining about it! He's taken that whole jingoistic idealism -- the whole "our square-jawed boys march off to save us from the inhuman enemy" ticker-tape parade aesthetic -- and turned it into this great matinee camp-fest (half the movie is just like chanting "USA! USA!") where you get to (a) totally revel in those things as just pure romance/camp, and (b) also have some double-consciousness about what they actually mean in real-world terms. I mean, for me, that's enough for a movie to do; that's entertaining. If that's not enough for you guys, that's totally cool and understandable -- but you should be aware that nobody's claiming it as some complex political allegory about WWII or anything! It's just a really entertaining and fascinating twist-around of these kinda jingoistic militaristic (and yes, quasi-fascist) aesthetics that we both enjoy and are kinda wary of in real terms. If he was trying to make some allegorical/political point, then there's every chance there would have been some turnaround in the end -- say, the bugs turn out to be complex and misunderstood -- that would totally, totally suck.

Which has maybe made me realize something about my whole camp idea, which is possibly this: one potential root of camp is when there's some big lavish celebration of an ideal -- but then we cease to believe in the ideal itself. All that's left is the lavish celebration. Which will sometimes be funny -- say, when the ideal starts to strike us as silly, so we're looking at someone's earnest celebration of something laughable -- and which will sometimes be more complicated -- say, when the ideal starts to strike us as evil.

Anyway I just tried to think of what the equivalent to this would be in Tom's romantic-comedy example, and the best I can think of would be a rom-com where the central couple, instead of just jilting their fiance(e)s at the altar to be with each other, actually pushed them off a bridge or something, and the onlookers cheered and said "hooray, you were meant to be with one another" -- provided you could watch this and both (a) get some sort of swoony romantic thrill from that moment and (b) have that charged by a total consciousness of what it actually means.

I keep wondering what Starship Troopers would be like if it did get all point-serious at the end -- if it was a tragedy, where all the fun jingoism and such wound up with the square-jawed children being universally massacred, or else dominating aliens that we turn out to be sympathetic toward. That would pretty much suck, I think, which reassures me that it really is about the aesthetics -- the aesthetics call for the triumphant ending (with all its attendant hollowness and satire and grotesquerie). Which, ha, means that right now Starship Troopers is like a future-vision of what people wanted to think the Iraq war would be like, at first ("U.S.Earth! U.S.Earth! ... It's frightened!"), whereas a real-world complexity-of-politics turn at the end would make it just a bad future version of what the Iraq war is actually like.

I don't think it's really high-concept either, though. What Pete said is an excellent summary. The most annoying thing about Starship Troopers, to me, is the degree to which people keep wanting to talk it up like it's some really smart film, which to me it's not, it's about the same level as the South Park Movie. In fact, the South Park movie had them fighting Canadians, and putting all the black people in front. You could say that Starship Troopers wasn't going for laffs as obviously as SP:TM was, but you'd be essentially full of shit if you did.

xpost Tom I think we agree on this! I do think Troopers was going for laughs! Half of it is just toying with movie conventions -- the fact that they have to do with politics doesn't make them all complex or something.

(And Ethan I mean "high-concept" in exactly that "rests on a simple trick" sense -- the trick here being "let's make a total over-the-top jingoistic go-get-em space movie, like verging on camp and/or nationalist-porn.")

So you're getting off on the fact that other people are getting off on it in a different way than you.

(The sentence after that is more what you're talking about -- I wouldn't be surprised if Verhoeven et al got some kind of kick out of thinking they could make a big camp thing that audiences might take at face value. I don't get off on that, though I imagine they might.)

Yeah! and fine! but it's not MAD GENIUS and it's not got anymore "subtext" to it than ID4. I mean, same fucking thing! But will smith/jeff golblum/bill pullman, so kind of even more camp, and less goo/bigger explosions.

I'm tired of talking about the people who watch this movie and don't get that it's basically a big joke. That "angle of the concept" is horseshit, whether or not it's factual that large numbers of people didn't get the big joke, I mean high concept, well, hey, some people think Vincent Gallo is for real. ha ha, right?

xpost OTM

Except for the whole fascism thing. And the structure. And, like, everything except that they're both sci-fi films featuring aliens.

Seriously, people. Sub-custos at best.

A satire of fascism wouldn't be an action movie - it would be (as mentioned upthread) something like Far From Home or Blue Velvet.

I liked "Independence Day" because it had a scene of Vivica A. Fox pole-dancing in it.

Which would debunk it? It wouldn't. But no, he hasn't said this of every movie he's made. I doubt he'd see Turks Fruit as a critique. hah.

Well, you have to take into account he's dutch, hence the porn-style flicks he did. I don't know, Ally, why not make a film like this? You could say it's easy - which I think is just deceiving - but I love the combination of humour and critique.

Okay, Captain Arbitrary.

I've never seen ID4. And I'm still not sure why people are upset that Starship Troopers isn't some brilliant highbrow marvel, or something, cause I'm not sure many people would say that anyway. (I dunno, maybe it has some sort of Donnie Darko religious contingent behind it that I'm just unaware of.) So far as I can tell it's just entertaining, clever, funny, etc., and also really fascinating to think about once you start bringing in your own notions about politics and aesthetics and political aesthetics and how satire and parody and camp work and so on. This isn't stuff that the movie spends time unravelling; it's just stuff that the movie provokes. It's like one of those jokes where it's just as interesting to figure out how it works as it is to just laugh at it -- the movie makes use of all that stuff, in a pretty straightfoward way, for laughs and action and whatever, but then trying to work out exactly how that stuff is functioning is really interesting to me too.

Casting shitty actors and writing a terrible script with bad FX and sophomoric situations is enjoyable, funny, entertaining, whatever sometimes, but playing it like it is high art critique of other forms of art is really kind of dressing up a donkey like Secretariat and that's really all I'm going to say about this topic. Thank you all for completely ruining Starship Troopers.

The only way I think you could take fascism to task, cinematically, is to ground it in some kind of pleasant normality and then attack it. Pleasantville about the Nazis instead of Leave it to Beaver.

He goes on to talk about how much of the war stuff and propaganda was inspired by his childhood on the receiving end of the Germans during WWII.

Anyway, this is what makes it satire, not of fascists, but of the fascist nature of action films and, in particular, the tendency of patriotism and nationalism to lead followers unwittingly straight to fascism (which is why the film resonates so strongly in today's world, especially from an American perspective).

Also, for Verhoeven haters, "Showgirls" and "The Hollow Man" are his only truly terrible films, and the latter was a Hollywood sop to make up for the former.

All the daschunds, meanwhile, are archangels.

http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/roll.gif

There's weird cross-talk going on here, too, where everyone agrees. To wit: "Fascism is action" -- this is basically the jumping-off point for half of what this movie is playing with!

http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/7198/joneskuato300w8gi.jpg

Just to bring it all back around.

cred Spencer Chow

-- Josh in Chicago (Vitesse9...) (webmail), December 1st, 2005. (link)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

i agree, yet the university is treating it with the same matter of seriousness as said incident.

-- maria tessa sciarrino (mari...) (webmail), December 1st, 2005. (link)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And we all know that "water buffalo" stuff was as serious as it gets! Ah, Ivy League, so much to answer for...

-- Josh in Chicago (Vitesse9...) (webmail), December 1st, 2005. (link)

To say that incident wasn't serious is hardly the same thing. I just recall thinking it was really blown out of proportion. Sorry if you were offended, Dan, either by the post or for being called an asshole. But I didn't remotely say what you said I did, which is defamatory and inconsiderate.

Sorry, but that just doesn't compute.

or Aliens!

:-(

There's weird cross-talk going on here, too, where everyone agrees. To wit: "Fascism is action" -- this is basically the jumping-off point for half of what this movie is playing with!

-- nabisco (--...), December 1st, 2005.

OTFM. Nabisco OTM throughout the thead.

What is it about ILE film threads?

All ILE film threads are alike. All other types of threads degenerate into fites in their own fashion.

How is 1997 the cusp of either Gulf War?

or Uwe Boll?

t

YOU IDIOT

-- Theorry Henry (miltonpinsk...), December 2nd, 2005.

;-)

http://www.bdt.com/david/images/rs003.jpg

I'd watch it.

http://ourworld.cs.com/WeezelX/rs/maybegood.jpg

HOW IS THE MAGIC BUTTON IN REN AND STIMPY EPISODE "SPACE MADNESS" A METAPHOR FOR THE COLD WAR? WHO DOES REN REPRESENT? DISCUS.

http://renandstimpy.org/img/106_4.jpg

Starship Troopers
Big Lebowski
Fargo
Royal Tenenbaums
Suicide Kings
Rushmore
How High
Something About Mary
Zoolander
Dogma
Good Will Hunting

fuck xpost with a nairn nevermind.
Rush Hour
The Fifth Element

-- TOMBOT (brucewillisandbenstillercontroltheunivers...) (webmail), May 14th, 2004 12:10 PM. (link)

2004 SUMMER SESSION COURSES
POOP 514 USG OF "IMPRTNT" + "MNSTRM" FR MGMT MTWRF 0900-1700 INSTR: TOMBOT LOC: URANUS

recognizing bludgeon-you-over-the-head satire and liking it or respecting it are vastly different things but let's not get into that again.

RUSH HOUR?

moley is right, though! that's what it is!

Why is it the US military? The US military is actually extremely diverse. Why would the US military be any more or less fascist than the military of any other country. Why is it Western foreign policy? What about what we were doing in 1997 bore any resemblance to the action in Starship Troopers? I certainly didn't hear about any boots-on-the-ground scorched-earth invasion operations in the Balkans.

At any rate, read one thread before you post self-congratulatory bullshit repeating what 90 other posters have already said better, then you don't get called a nincompoop. It's pretty simple.

Is it worth it?

http://img79.imageshack.us/img79/6392/giantrobottattoo7dt.th.gif

Can anybody recommend any of Verhoeven's pre-Robocop work that's actually worth tracking down? (assuming it's available)

Flesh and Blood is pretty brilliant.

Can anybody recommend any of Verhoeven's pre-Robocop work that's actually worth tracking down? (assuming it's available)

Just about all of his early Dutch films are worthwhile. Spetters, Soldier Of Orange, and The 4th Man are essential

Verhoeven is directing the sequel to Thomas Crown Affair

Met Het Oog Op Morgen

good lord, they now have dutch morning zoos

hollow man is more interesting when you look at it strictly as a take on what horrible things a pretty typical asshole might do if given a chance to do them without consequence, and less as a "mad psycho scientist run amok" thing. but it's still a bad flick.

Jake Busey on neon violin! Huzzah!

-- Anthony Miccio (Anthony Miccio), Saturday, 29 May 2004 15:22 (3 years ago) Link

starship troopers 3: marauder

There was a Starship Troopers 2?

lol "This movie sucks. Would you like to know more?"

still having neumeier writing + directing is a good look

i heard there's a musical sequence in this one! wtf is up that

ledge otm, i accidentally caught the beginning of ST2 on telly recently and was all WTF? It was shit, much like this one will be prob

what about tom of finland, reclaiming fascist aesthetics, when he was actually under the threat of death by fascists?

can you start a thread about this?

-----always tackling the big issues

http://io9.com/5550437/heinlein-slammed-fans-who-didnt-help-with-the-war-effort

what shocking news

just throwing it up there