Time to make a fool out of myself!
Also, time to stop making a fool out of myself!
The second refers to how I have to stop making grouchy comments on other people's blogs.
The first refers to something else.
So don't cry for me, for I shall blog again some lucky day.
I have not been killed in a grievous accident involving a UNESCO truck, twelve midgets, and a packet of Jaffas. At least, not yet.
Go back to your lives. NOW! NOW! Get off the internet you fools, before it's too late!
Writer Ed Neumier and director Paul Verhoeven took Robert Heinlein's pro-war pro-facism sci-fi potboiler and turned it into an anti-war anti-facism satire on modern American foreign policy. Then they got accused of being Nazis by people who didn't get the joke.
This is one of my favourite movies. It's a fully-functional action-packed war movie that satirically subverts the form. For $100 million you usually get a ton of action and FX, but you don't usually get brains and this movie has brains everywhere... in the script, splattered all over the walls, and memorably sucked right out of people's heads.
Structured as a propaganda movie, and consciously borrowing from both Nazi movies like Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and Amerikan shorts like the Why We Fight series, SS Troopers (as it was waggishly advertised in my home town) now looks to my eyes like a parody of Fox News.
I know people who hate this movie, saying that the gung-ho attitude overwhelms the satire. But like Fight Club, this is a movie which rewards multiple viewings. There are many layers here, and as usual for Verhoeven there is a lot of subtlety to go with the bombast.
I rate it as essential re-watching for right now, because it describes what's actually going on in the global political arena.
For my money this is Verhoeven's best English-language movie. He made better movies in the Netherlands (Turkish Delight and Soldier of Orange in particular) but even the glories of Robocop don't live up to this. I've got to give it the full 10/10.
Hm, maybe I should do a career retrospective on Verhoeven now that I have all of his movies on DVD. (Hope someone releases an English-friendly version of Floris, the tv series he did with Rutger Hauer in the late '60s.) This blog's got to be used for SOMETHING now I can't waste work-time with it...
Blog got banned by work net-nanny, which is probably just as well 'cause daily break-time blogging scratches that writing itch and takes impetus away from the novel.
Don't have too much else to say right now. *shrug*
"Religions are the cradles of despotism."
- The Marquis de Sade
probably the most misunderstood writer who ever lived