Ventured out to the theater and saw Nope.
It’s pretty good. Once you realize the kinda movie it’s aiming to be, it clicks in a pretty good way.
edit: I forgot, and it’s played for laughs (but I’m sure it’s sincere!), but there’s a scene where a character expresses enthusiastic acclaim for Chris Kattan that feels long overdue.
Starship Troopers rules
Jupiter Ascending is hilarious
I’m just here to counterbalance Felix’s bad takes
I really like Q the Winged Serpent from the same director
this dude’s marriage lasted six weeks
a) a different criticism comes to mind lol
b) rewatching now the structure is basically the matrix. maybe more jargon but nothing beyond the pale for sci-fi that looks this fucking good
also channing tatum is like a wolf hybrid with hover boots ok
he also pissed off Tracy Morgan for life which feels like something
bees recognize royalty
I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s perfect camp, and that line is exactly why it works so well as campy sci fi that reads like a teenage girl fanfic of a shojo manga, it’s the kind of thing i’d expect to see in a naoko takeuchi comic that isn’t sailor moon
that line did not faze me but I love clamp so to each their own
it’s a line to celebrate imo, it’s given as an explanation that just demands I ask more questions, and those questions go unanswered.
The ending leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but that’s the only time the camp charm fails for me.
Did you know that they made Channing Tatum wear some weird mouthpiece to change the shape of his jaw to be more doglike, and it doesn’t really work or look convincing, so it just makes channing look like he’s doing a ron perlman impression
I love clamp too btw
My brother in Verhoeven, he’s been making this all along.
his actual jesus book is very good though, he talks about how much he loves the idea of jesus doing wacky exorcisms
Oh yeah, I bet it is.
His love of Jesus stories and just inserting them into everything is part of why the end of Starship Troopers never fails to make me smile.
Starship Troopers does it twice! Our hero Johnny Rico also dies and has a resurrection, but it interestingly features an implied castration (along the medieval allegorical sense, thigh wounds are euphemistic of castrations in medieval and early modern lit, and I have no doubt verhoeven would channel that with the particular wound johnny had in the film and how this ties into the umberto eco ur-fascism of the story and setting)
I have thought just the right amount about why Starship Troopers is awesome
symbolically, though johnny rico goes through a christ-like experience, he is the fascist christ (as contrasted to the bug brain being the insect christ) so his life is composed of veiled and overt ‘humiliations’ that he overcompensates for by becoming more crass, more violent, more unhinged, more fascist.
He is publicly humiliated and whipped, his home and family is destroyed, his girlfriend dumps him, he gets metaphorically castrated in the opening moments of the movie, and yet he is the ideal man to the fascist viewer. The fascist christ goes through ordeals that exist to humiliate and geld him, because it is a reflection of the ideal fascist self-image
What’s funny about this is nearly every detail here is straight from the book! Except the brain bug stuff.
Yeah, Verhoeven conveyed all those details in a way that the unconscious subtext of the novel was exposed and subverted as a text. That’s why he’s the best at satire; he can take something like starship troopers the novel and turn it into its exact opposite, alchemy-like.
I sometimes wonder if Paul Verhoeven ever read Norman Spinrad’s the Iron Dream. It feels like the book he actually adapted.
The Stuff rules. I love how the protagonist is this sort of slimy corporate saboteur who dumped all his points into charisma. “No one is as dumb as I appear to be”.
I love Ghosts of Mars. It’s Assault on Precinct 13 on Mars, and also something I experienced at around the same time as Pitch Black, so in my head, they’re almost like sister movies.
Chronicles of Riddick has to be one of the weirdest and unexpected sequels to a movie. Pitch Black was an Alien knock-off, so the sequel being some Space Marine DnD fantasy shit sort of catches you off-guard. I personally like it a lot more if you sort of cut out most of the Necromonger stuff, but it’s still worth experiencing for the “what even the fuck?” factor. This same sort of “what?” factor is probably why I like Tokyo Drift while being absolutely bored by every single other Fast and the Furious movie, except, the only way it could’ve matched Chronicles of Riddick in relative weirdness is if it starred Vin Diesel as the teenage foreign exchange student.
Serial Mom. I had bits of Serial Mom on a few months back and all I could think of was, this would’ve been a great David Lynch-John Waters collaborative TV series.
I don’t think they’ve made a single movie that doesn’t bore the everloving shit out of me.
Venom felt like the Raimi Spider-Man movies to me, in tone, anyway.
RE: Camp. Depending on what your definition is, and what exactly it is you’re looking for, and what level of camp you’re looking for:
A lot of stuff from the mid 90s into the early 2000s has a very campy vibe to me but might not be the same for others.
