TS: verhoeven vs. cronenberg

Grievous: "You fool... I've been trained in your jedi arts by Lord Tyranus himself!"

Robocop: "Your move, creep."

Then again, I don't know.

So... one sucky movie each?

This is an excellent thread question, now that I think about it.

I mean, so far. Who's done what? What has it meant to you?

I still choose Verhoeven, since I can appreciate his movies as campy action movies as much as (if not more than) satires. I don't think I even knew Starship Troopers was supposed to be taken as a satire until I read about an airline magazine article. I remember seeing it for the first time and thinking it was a great marriage of 90210-level melodrama to state-of-the-art special effects, which was odd at the time since I hated both categories with a passionate ferocity. Plus isn't he generally regarded as a technical pioneer? I know Starship Troopers got taught in a class at my school as an example of mixing live footage with CGI, and I seem to remember Robocop being pretty high-end for its day.

Cronenberg, not so much. I would probably like him more had I not gone to film school and had to put up with four years of people using his movies as intractable, inexplicable endpoints for their opinions ("HOW CAN YOU SAY YOU DON'T LIKE SCIENCE FICTION IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN TEH FLY OMG" etc).

I would be interested in adding Michael Bay to this discussion, although mostly that's because my admiration for Michael Bay is comparable only to Alex in NYC's admiration for Killing Joke.

Um... no offense intended, but...

Ok, fuck it, offense intended. The person who does not understand that Starship Troopers is thick, heavy satire is the kind of person who likes the new Star Wars movies. OMG there's a satire-and-humor-and-irony--detection sensor missing from people! These people are not my friends! I will never understnad these people!

But yes! Robocop works *because* it's satire! What, did you think it was good science fiction?

*shrug* I fully accept this possibility. I saw Starship Troopers before I learned how to critically differentiate between intentional shittiness and inadvertant shittiness, especially in movies which weren't being pitched to me as possible sites for satire. Pulp Fiction probably did a lot of damage to me in that I spent much of my teenage moviegoing years expecting movies to announce their intentions to me, but then again I probably had ska CDs in my car when I went to go see Starship Troopers, so there you go.

This was, not coincidentally, the period where I tricked myself into liking an unimaginable quantity of deeply shitty indie movies simply because they weren't being shown in the same theater as Rush Hour.

(no prob. about adamantine reactions, incidentally. I want no part of an internet which wants no part of kneejerk reactions - lord knows I've had my share.)

(anyway I'm more interested in the relationship between ambiguity relating to satire and the actual quality of a product.)

do you mean "history of violence"? has anyone seen it? viggo's a hottie, he was married to exene!

Or is just among 95% of the ppl who saw Starship Troopers? And a satire of WHAT, exactly? Much more '90210' than 'fascism', I'd say, so so what. It had some goofy cute moments -- I'd whip C van (von?) Dien anytime -- but it's just brainless-with-an-attitude. RoboCop and The Fourth Man are cute; has anyone seen Spetters or Soldier of Orange? Both apparently aimed at grownups, which he's known better than to try in Hollywood.

I vastly prefer 'mature' Croney -- Videodrome, Dead Zone, The Fly, Dead Ringers (man, what a run those four are!), Crash, hell even eXistenZ -- to the grotty gross early stuff, effective as it could be.

OTMFM. There's moments in most of his films that imply the director COULD be applying subversion, but if every moment of his Hollywood films is pure auterist hollywood undermining he must be keeping it on the DL from his producers. I do wonder sometimes if people aren't mistaking flights of personal amusement for his part as part of a Every Pieces Fits Oh-So-Secret-But-I-See-It masterstroke. ESPECIALLY when Joe Fucking Eszterhas wrote the script.

-- slightly more subdued (fluxion2...), May 24th, 2005.

no, no, no. i knew it was a satire because everyone was like OMIGOD hollywood movie "slightly satrirical". but if this is your idea of satire, in any full-blooded sense, then i pity you. it's a fucking piece of cynical, know-nothing shit. "thick" is right.

it's cronenberg all the way.

BTW, I never realized until yesterday that Rutger Hauer played Cardinal Roark in Sin City.

Oh man, we could start a whole separate thread for people I didn't recognize in Sin City.

The winner in both cases is clearly Michael Ironside.

And maybe the asteroid was, well, just an asteroid, and a random event used as an excuse for war.

"it's about life and love, and this and that."

gotta love that crazy dutchman verhoeven though.

"OMG 'A Modest Proposal' is so goddamned obvious, is not satire is uncut snark, et al."

verhoeven: BAAAH CHEWED HAMBURGER PFRRZ AAHAHAHAHA

i prefer verhoeven

its love story done the russ meyer way! come on, how can you not love it

(the political "subtext" of Starship Troopers is simple and elegant: in order to function, fascism requires a perpetual state of warfare. the film itself is just filling in the details of *how* it functions.)

but, i can name two fascist countries that, you know, weren't in a perpetual state of war. also the fact it's fuckin' space aliens vs humans doesn't make it very effective.

like omg 'aliens' is so "about" grenada...

Hahaha, this is very apt. I just saw Turkish Delight thanks to a friend who spent a year in Amsterdam picking up an advanced degree in media studies, thus he ended up ripping/burning a number of films, including that one. I was actually kinda surprised by it at many points -- it's an incredibly kinetic film, actually, lots of quick cuts and sudden flow and so forth at the start that when it starts to slow down it actually feels like taking a necessary deep breath. It's not a perfect film by any means, but it tries to pull off bizarro humor, visceral imagery (in a couple of cases near literally) and melodrama in equal measure and almost makes it work. Hauer's great throughout, the long hair was a surprise to see.

Love Story for the basic plotline, yeah (definitely not Last Tango in Paris), but actually what fair amounts of it reminded me of was The Conversation -- definitely NOT in terms of plot or 'theme,' but in terms of tone and oblique suggestion (Harry Caul's stilted 'party' = the harshly-red-lit party/dinner scene, for one).

Black Book > M Butterfly

Oh man, just thinking about Jake Busey with the fluorescent violin - it's really tempting to pick Verhoeven.
The winner in both cases is clearly Michael Ironside.

-- miccio (miccio), Tuesday, May 24, 2005 2:22 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Link

lol otm

Yeah, when it comes to the quote-unquote respectable portion of their work, I'll take Verhoeven's bush-dying stuff over whatever the hell's going on in A History of Violence.

That said, there's still way more masterpieces in Cronenberg's first decade and a half.

Verhoeven is way more entertaining when he goes off the rails (Flesh + Blood, Total Recall) than Cronenberg who I just find tedious during his run in the 90s (with the exception of Naked Lunch).

I find it interesting that both of them now are making straight forward thrillers. I wonder what the heck Verhoeven is going to do with the Thomas Crown Affair sequel.

I'll take Black Book over Eastern Promises. I really should see some pre-Robocop Verhoeven.

i'd take it too.

Yeah, Black Book all the way.

I watched Black Book Friday and dreamed about it that night. Boy is that Sebastian Koch a great actor. I actually sympathized with a Nazi! I alternate between wishing Muntz had been saved, and then immediately thinking he got what he deserved. Koch was awesome in The Lives of Others, too.

Boy is that Sebastian Koch a great actor. I actually sympathized with a Nazi!

Well, some ppl didn't find that to be such a good thing... Black Book isn't exactly "straightforward,' it's way more of a moral whirlagig than any WW2 film I can recall, including Army of Shadows. (Verhoeven's previous Dutch Resistance movie, Soldier of Orange, was somewhat more str84ward.) Carice van Houten is deservedly getting a career boost, I hope. (ie, plz don't let her be consigned to Hollywood shit from now on)

"Well, some ppl didn't find that to be such a good thing..."

I thought it was a good thing. It meant I didn't just have a knee-jerk hatred toward the character, which I normally would have, given my history of doing exactly that. That's why I was surprised that I did sympathize. I'm either evidence of Verhoeven's wish to kick the black/white, good/evil conventions in the ass, or I'm a shining example of a simpleton who just doesn't "get it". Either way, I'm enjoying (more than I probably should :) )berating myself for feeling sad about Muntz. Maybe if Sebastian Koch himself weren't so damn dashing...!

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Film director Paul Verhoeven has written a book that contradicts the Bible by suggesting that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier who raped Mary.

Paul Verhoeven wants to make a film based on his imminent book about the origins of Jesus Christ.

An Amsterdam publishing house said Wednesday it would publish the Dutch filmmaker's biography of Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait in September.

Verhoeven is best known as the director of blockbuster films including Basic Instinct and RoboCop, but he is also a member of Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars and authors that seeks to establish historical facts about Jesus.

Marianna Sterk of the publishing house J.M. Meulenhoff said the book included several ideas that ran contrary to Christian faith, including the suggestion that Jesus could be the son of a Roman soldier who raped Mary during a Jewish uprising against Roman rule in 4 B.C.

The book also claims that Judas Iscariot was not responsible for Jesus' betrayal, she said.

The movie director's claims were greeted with some skepticism among those who have dedicated their careers to studying the life of Jesus.

One issue is that there is very little information about the life of Jesus outside of the Gospels. The Gospels as understood by Christians for nearly 2,000 years do not support Verhoeven's ideas.

William Portier, a professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, in Ohio, said the Jesus Seminar was known for making provocative claims, but "they are real scholars — you have to deal with them."

However, he said Verhoeven's ideas sounded "pretty out there."

John Dominic Crossan, a Jesus Seminar founder, agreed. He said that while Verhoeven was a member in good standing, there was little evidence for the view that Jesus was illegitimate.

Crossan said the claim was first reported in a polemic written in the second century against the Book of Matthew, intended for a Jewish audience.

"It's an obvious first retort to claims that Mary was a virgin," Crossan said. "If you wanted to do a hatchet job on Jesus' reputation, this would be the way."

The most likely scenario for people who don't accept that Jesus was literally the son of God and had no human father is simply that he was the son of Joseph, Crossan said.

Sterk said the book would be translated into English in 2009. Verhoeven hopes it will be a springboard for him to raise interest in making a film along the same lines, she said.

Verhoeven, 69, has dreamed of making a movie about Jesus' life for decades, she said.

Asked whether it would be difficult to follow Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, she said Verhoeven knew he might be somewhat late to market.

"He is painfully aware of that," she said. "However, he has quite a different angle."

i'll say

i'll be first in line to see this of course

Be sure Armond White doesn't cut in line.

http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/rockpj/maury.gif

Please let Verhoeven live long enough to make that Jesus movie.

Also, just got my hands on a set of five early films (Business Is Business, Turkish Delight, Katie Tippel, Soldier of Organge, 4th Man) - s/d on those anyone?