Monday, August 24, 2015

SKIN TRADE


Skin Trade is kind of what I wanted (the first) Expendables movie to be but on a much smaller scale. Does Skin Trade have the same stacked all-star roster as The Expendables? No. But Dolph Lundgren (an Expendables alum), Tony Jaa & Michael Jai White (two actors who SHOULD be Expendables alums) are enough for a 90 minute movie without it being overkill (having Peter Weller, Ron Perlman & Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as the supporting cast isn’t too shabby either).
The same thing applies to something like Only God Forgives. Personally, I loved OGF but it’s a movie I absolutely cannot defend. I see why folks hate it. Although I understand Nicolas Winding Refn’s intentions in trying to mesh the world of arthouse cinema & action cinema (cant you picture Dolph Lundrgen or Van Damme in the role of Gosling?). But at the end of the day it’s very difficult to make an arthouse film for an action crowd and vice versa. The whole theme of the “tough white guy in south east Asia” (which is what Only God Forgives tried to emulate on some level) was a pillar of the straight to cable/straight to video action genre in the early 90’s, and many folks felt Refn didn’t pull that off well.
But Skin Trade was a success in my book. It brought back the late 80’s/early 90’s style of action film where men tossed away their guns like disposable lighters in favor of fighting hand-to-hand with each other (every time someone threw their gun away Skin Trade I was reminded of the dialogue between Jim Jarmusch & Harvey Keitel in Blue In The Face where they discuss this very same phenomenon).

@01:03

Skin Trade also features rogue police officers just breaking the law at every turn; rocket launchers; men just being savages (the film is centered around the trafficking of young girls by gross, greasy villainous men); and we get protagonist police officers just killing suspects even after they’ve been subdued & captured. Who needs to bring in the bad guys for additional questioning, right? They’re scum and they deserve to die (at the beginning of the film we see Tony Jaa drop a guy off a building and later on he kills one of the main villains even after he’s been defeated). In real life I hold police to a higher standard (a standard they usually don’t come close too) but in movieland, rapists, pedophiles & traffickers deserve to be murdered on sight. That’s the kind of action movie I grew up on (not to show my age, but I hope younger critics & bloggers appreciate the fact that Lundgren & Cary-Hiroyuki are still collaborating with each other decades after Showdown In Little Tokyo).
Part of the plot to Skin Trade comes right out of Hard To Kill (a movie I remember HBO playing on a continuous loop as a kid back in 1990/1991)...

In Skin Trade Dolph Lundgren plays “Nick Cassidy” – a dedicated police officer on the trail of “Viktor Dragovic” (Ron Perlman) – a Serbian gangster who runs a human trafficking ring operating out of south-east Asia. In the first act of the film Cassidy’s family is executed which causes him to go rogue and extract revenge (very similar to Segal in Hard To Kill). Additionally, the relationship between Lundgren’s Cassidy & Jaa’s “Tony Vitayakul” is similar to Lundgren & Brandon Lee in Showdown In Little Tokyo (in the final act of Skin Trade we see Jaa & Lundgren team up in order to take down Dragovic’s operation).



This film has been described as Lundgren’s “passion project” and I can see that. The script is solid and there is an obvious socio-political angle all throughout the film (poverty and the trafficking of young girls) but it doesn’t get in the way of the action (let's be honest, we all care more about the roundhouse kicks & incredible stunts than we do the serious political stuff). This was my beef with the first Expendables. The entire middle part got too caught up in the impoverished South American country (I understand Stallone & Statham needed motivation to carry out their mission, but that entire section could have been heavily edited down in my opinion). With Skin Trade there’s a lot of gun fire, one-on-one fighting (it would have been nice to see Lundgren go toe-to-toe with Jai White but oh well...), cool stunts and men slowly walking away from exploding buildings in the background. And, most importantly, Skin Trade has replay value (for me at least). After watching it at home, I found myself watching it again on my phone on the subway (I know that’s not the preferred way to view a movie but it's a testament to how entertaining it is. Plus my iPhone 6 screen is pretty big). These days I don’t watch too many new movies back-to-back. Perhaps my enthusiasm for Skin Trade has to do with the fact that I don’t watch too many action packed straight-to-video movies like I used too, and this is just a breath of fresh air from all the arthouse movies I watch (I also have to give credit to Mad Max: Fury Road for restoring my enthusiasm in the action genre). I recommend Skin Trade to those Gen-Xers & older millennials that truly appreciate the style of action film that birthed folks like Loren Avedon, pre-Tai Bo Billy Blanks, Van Damme, Don “The Dragon” Wilson and post-Rocky 4/Pre Johnny Mnemonic Dolph Lundgren.

Monday, August 17, 2015

MY EDITORIAL ON STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON FOR CUTPRINTFILM

Check out my latest editorial on F. Gary Gray's Straight Outta Compton for Cutprintfilm or read the text below. Enjoy...


http://www.cutprintfilm.com/features/straight-outta-hollywood-hip-hop-on-the-big-screen/


It’s the opening weekend for F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton, and I have a lot of mixed feelings swirling around in my head after watching it. I’m reading all these in-depth reviews written by critics with little-to-no basic knowledge of hip-hop culture and that bothers me. Don’t get me wrong – anyone should be able to write about and have an opinion on any movie. But to a guy like me (a film critic with an extensive knowledge of hip-hop history) it’s a little strange reading a review written by a guy who probably never owned an actual NWA album or truly knows the impact that hip-hop’s first true “super group” had on not only west coast rap music, but hip-hop culture as a whole (whether you’re a fan or not this fact is undeniable). I also envision quite a few critics watching this with ironic smirks on their faces, as the subject matter in Straight Outta Compton is so far removed from anything they know that it comes off more like a really long SNL sketch instead of an actual movie. So how can these critics truly understand and appreciate a movie like this? I know there’s more that goes into critiquing a musical than just knowledge of the particular music scene at hand, but it still counts for something and makes for a better understanding. I also need to accept the fact that not all hip-hop films are made for people like me but rather casual viewers who don’t have all the nerdy inside knowledge that I do.


But at the same time, Straight Outta Compton isn’t a movie I really want to defend that much or go to bat for too hard, plus it’s doing just fine at the box office so it doesn’t need my defense. I’m a hip-hop nerd but I’ve never been a die-hard NWA fan. I certainly recognize and respect their iconic status and the artistry that went into their overall sound, but I also believe they’re heavily responsible for certain negative stereotypes that still plague some rappers today.

Straight Outta Compton chronicles the history of legendary rap group NWA along with the solo careers of Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and Eazy-E (NWA members MC Ren and DJ Yella kind of play the background for the most part). Straight Outta Compton is energetic, Oshea Jackson Jr. does a fine job portraying his father Ice Cube (not since Geraldine Chaplin played her grandmother in Chaplin have I seen an actor portray a direct family member so well in a movie), Jason Mitchell shines as Eazy-E, Paul Giamatti does his best Paul Giamatti impression, and F. Gary Gray tips his hat to the next generation of rap music that came after NWA (Straight Outta Compton makes it a point to show a young Warren G and Snoop Doggy Dog as key background players).

The representation of west coast hip-hop in Straight Outta Compton is very important, as most prominent hip-hop films focus on legendary east coast/NYC figures like Nas (Time Is Illmatic), Grandmaster Flash (Wild Style), Rock Steady Crew (Style Wars), A Tribe Called Quest (Beats, Rhymes and Life) and The Notorious B.I.G. (Notorious). It’s cool that audiences are getting a light history lesson on the west coast hip-hop scene whether they realize it or not. I only hope people go home and google other west coast legends like Arabian Prince, Egyptian Lover, Joe Cooley, DJ Quik and Aladdin after watching this.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again – I’m glad hip-hop on the big screen has finally started to push forward and move beyond subjects like Tupac and The Notorious B.I.G. (although the history of NWA does tie in to Tupac as Death Row records, Tupac’s former record label, kind of came about from NWA’s demise). Straight Outta Compton whets the appetite of a guy like me. Having watched it I now want films about Public Enemy, Wu-Tang, De La Soul and more. These things all seem a little more attainable now thanks to Straight Outta Compton, Time Is Illmatic, Beats Rhymes and Life and even Top Five (say what you want but Chris Rock really went out of his way to incorporate classic hip-hop into the fabric of that movie). And I’d be remiss not to mention my friend Mtume Gant’s short film S.P.I.T. as an even more ambitious example of good hip-hop on the big screen due to the fact that it takes a more abstract stance on the subject.

On a side note - I always found it strange that Penelope Spheris never tried to make a hip-hop chapter in her Decline Of The Western Civilization series. West coast hip-hop was just as prevalent in Los Angeles during the time she was documenting all those other LA-based music scenes. I’m not saying she would have made a great film or anything like that but it would have certainly been ahead of its time...


It’s also nice to see F. Gary Gray in the spotlight again, this being his first film in six years. His presence in the movie industry has always been hard to pin down. Although his work chronicles Los Angeles, he’s never mentioned alongside other LA-based filmmakers like Tarantino, PT Anderson and Robert Altman. He’s a prominent black filmmaker yet he’s never been grouped in with the likes of Spike Lee, John Singleton, Ernest Dickerson, Robert Townsend, Bill Duke or The Hudlin Brothers. He’s always had to make his own path. Given Gray’s filmography and preexisting relationships with Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and Paul Giamatti, I honestly can’t think of anyone else that could’ve pull off something like Straight Outta Compton.


It takes a lot for me to give Straight Outta Compton any credit as I wasn’t expecting much. I had no immediate plans to see this until I was tapped to write an editorial for CutPrintFilm. I just didn’t think the story of NWA could fit the mold of a studio film. I still don’t think this was a completely successful movie but I was pleasantly surprised at how entertained I was. I’m also glad this clocked in at almost 2-1/2 hours. NWA’s story is too layered for a 105 minute movie (although I will say a lot of the content in this movie can be attained by a quick Wikipedia search and watching the Dr. Dre episode of VH1’s behind the music).

I absolutely prejudged this movie before seeing it and quite honestly a few of my prejudgments were on point. With Ice Cube and Dr. Dre acting as producers, I knew Straight Outta Compton would make them out to be way more awesome than they really are. Again – Dre and Cube are legends but at no point in the 147 minutes of the movie did F. Gary Gray address Ice Cube’s anti-Korean and Black separatist lyrics (he touches on Ice Cube’s anti-Semitic lyrics in one quick scene but that’s about it). And of course we don’t see Dr. Dre’s assault on Dee Barnes. But for some reason the movie had no problem showing Eazy-E as the shady guy he sometimes was.

I’m a little surprised at some of the historical inaccuracies and omissions in this movie given how close Ice Cube and Dr. Dre worked with F. Gary Gray. For example – there’s a scene in the first act where NWA is harassed outside of their studio for no reason. This encounter inspires them to write the famous song “Fuck The Police”. In reality, NWA wrote that song after they were stopped by the police for shooting off paintball guns at innocent bystanders on the street. And I know MC Ren isn’t as popular as some of the other members in NWA but you’d think someone might want to address the fact that he was one of the music artists to go platinum off an EP!
(the film also places the beating of Eazy-E, which ultimately led to the release of Dr. Dre from his ruthless records contract, ALL on Suge Knight as if Dr. Dre had nothing to do with it)

My insecurity does kick in and I get a little weary of large audiences watching a movie like this and getting the wrong idea about rap music and young black men as a whole. Rap music always gets a negative wrap so the last thing we need is to rehash the violent, misogynistic and negative content associated with NWA (I don’t care if I lose cool points for saying that). However, their legacy is based around a lot of positive aspects too (from the song “Express Yourself” to the influence they had on Kendrick Lamar).

At the end of the day Straight Outta Compton was entertaining. There’s no disputing that. But know that this is a movie about NWA, one of the most controversial rap groups of all time, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that there are some scenes that objectify women — in fact, there isn’t much of a female presence at all besides tour groupies, Eazy-E’s wife and Dr. Dre’s mother. But that was part of their image. I don’t condone any of the negativity associated with NWA but if their legacy bothers you in any way – and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that – stay home.

INSIDE THE PHOENIX PODCAST EPISODE 81: MTUME GANT

Here's my latest appearance on the inside the phoenix podcast where I sit in on an interview with my good friend Mtume Gant to talk about his latest short film S.P.I.T.

Enjoy...

http://insidethephoenix.com/#!?p=1944


Sunday, August 9, 2015

THE CINEMA OF PAUL VERHOEVEN TOLD THROUGH IMAGES & STILLS: PART TWO (*SPECIAL GUEST BLOGGER: JOHN CRIBBS*)


In part two John Cribbs of The Pink Smoke delves deeper into the cinematic world of Paul Verhoeven (seriously this one is for Verhoeven scholars so you should get familiar with part one before you go any further)



THE DISEMBODIED

The subconscious elements can be very powerful, and if one isn’t careful, they can take over the conscious parts of your brain...The physical self, the cruelty of the world, to recognize that and put it on screen was my means of warding off my subconscious. - Paul Verhoeven 

If Verhoeven's amazing science fiction trilogy could be pared down to one big linked moral tale, the lesson would be "don't lose yourself." Whether the heroes of these films are quite literally removed from their body - Murphy receiving his "whole body prostheses" and Doug Quaid flying off to become the savior of Mars while his physical form remains comatose at Rekall (possibly) - and/or have allowed themselves to become anonymous automatons in the cogs of an oppressive republic like Robo and the soldiers of Starship Troopers, they are their only true liberator. Even in his earlier films, forces outside the body (or planted inside the mind) threaten the individual. The director allows his characters to disconnect from their bodies in more ways than one, but holds them by a tenuous tether that just barely keeps them from reeling into the dark abyss of total psychosis. There's redemption to be found in the realm immaterial, but true liberation derives from returning to that original world, that original reality, that original self, in some form or another (and in rejecting the false offers to return, re: Total Recall).




CHRIST FIGURES & CHRISTIAN SYMBOLISM 

In my opinion, Christianity is nothing more than one of many interpretations of reality, neither more nor less. - Paul Verhoeven 

Verhoeven is an outspoken atheist, yet religious imagery remains one of the most recognizable aspects of his work. Another contradiction, especially considering his parallels to the story of Christ in which the individual lives, dies and is reborn. He's clearly drawn to the story of the crucifixion for its blood and guts catharsis, but even moreso its theme of being removed from the earthly body only to return to it. Most famously, Verhoeven stated in various interviews and the Criterion commentary track that Robocop is his "Jesus movie" and a recently re-Murphyed Robocop walking across a large puddle of water to stop ultimate sinner Clarence Boddiker is intentionally symbolic of Christ walking across the Sea of Galilee. The idea of resurrection in Robocop is perverse, scientific rather than magical, and the real miracle is Murphy being able to remove the inhuman face of which crooks and cops alike have stood in awe and reconnect with his human identity, which Verhoeven finds to be the more sacred. While he's staunchly anti-religious, Verhoeven definitely has a spiritual side - it's just steeped in realism. Gleefully blasphemous imagery, such as Gerard sucking on the feet of his nude lover posing as the savior in a church, abounds in 4th Man, but the movie ends with the indication that Gerard has been saved by a reincarnation of the Holy Mother. Flesh + Blood seems to acknowledge that blind religious fools end badly yet the flawed false-martyr can rise from the flames, while Showgirls marks the fleeting eminence of "goddesses" anointed under the cheap lights of Las Vegas.
Basic Instinct 
Black Book
Flesh + Blood
The Fourth Man
The Fourth Man
The Fourth Man
Keetje Tippel
Robocop
Showgirls
Showgirls
Speeters
Speeters




SURREALISM & OTHER REALITIES 
Something that doesn't get brought up often enough in discussions about Verhoeven is the high level of surrealism in this films. Weird stuff happens in his movies, to the point that they're easily the most Bunuelian of mainstream genre films. Glimpses of the afterlife (Turks Fruit), psycho-sexual symbolism (The Fourth Man) and otherworldly grotesqueries (Total Recall) all become unlikely doors to exploring various interpretations of reality. 
The Fourth Man
Robocop
Total Recall
Turks Fruit




PREMONITIONS

I have, in my own life, had the most terrible dreams about my death. The essence of the dream is the tangible feeling of being in hell. It is the complete isolation of the soul. Complete aloneness. - Paul Verhoeven 

Of course death is the ultimate corporeal concern, and Verhoeven's characters are haunted by it. Ominous portents like the burning noose in Flesh + Blood, the worms on Olga's chest when Erik lifts the flowers in Turks Fruit and foreboding hallucinations in The 4th Man set the tone for a journey that will ultimately end in annihilation (at least for some). The beginning of Total Recall is one long premonition of the rest of the movie, the face of a girl Quaid's never seen but will meet later popping up on the screen at Rekall. 
Basic Instinct
Black Book
Business Is Business
Flesh + Blood
The Fourth Man
Total Recall
Turks Furit




MEDIA & THE SINISTER SCREEN 
Verhoeven's mistrust of media was apparent from the beginning, when the manipulative mother of Turks Fruit is introduced as the overlord of a TV shop. While representatives of the media continued to be portrayed as suspicious in Verhoeven's later work (Jeroen Krabbe's shifty reporter in Spetters, the ominous eyes of the news team in Robocop), it's really the image on the screen he finds most untrustworthy. Dick Jones' murderous side reveals itself on Bob Morton's multiple television sets - the menacing omnipresence of media is signified in Verhoeven's films by figures appearing on several TVs at once. Later, yet another infinite image of Dick Jones will betray Jones himself, just as the "double" onscreen presence of Hauser that's led Quaid through his adventures on Earth and Mars will betray him. For Verhoeven, what people see on television isn't merely unreliable - those images confound the barrier between the real and the simulated. 
Basic Instinct
Hollow Man
Robocop
Robocop
Robocop
Spetters
Total Recall
Starship Troopers
Total Recall




COMMERCE & SELLING OUT

Sooner or later, you're going to have to sell it. - Showgirls 

Selling out, Verhoeven sadly recognizes, is a form of survival - the only way some people can exist in a capitalist world. Early in his career, Verhoeven seemed to have a romantic notion of the artist as the purest character, like Keetje Tippel's savior (the one guy who has no interest in sleeping with her). But even back then he acknowledged that the purest of these types were certainly not immune to hustling themselves, as Erik in Turks Fruit accepts a commission to design a sculpture for the local hospital and sells an intimate drawing of his wife to a fancy pants pervo. More recently, in Black Book, the artist among the resistance fighters is depicted as unrealistic, ultimately forced to compromise his belief in poetic humanity by executing a turncoat. Often he's incredibly cynical about the consequence: no sooner has Spetters' Fientje gotten Rien to sign himself up with Japanese sponsers who gift him a set of slick new motorbikes, Rien is involved in a horrible accident that ends his career and Fientje's personal dreams of independent success. Obviously, Showgirls is Verhoeven's neon-tinted dissertation on selling out, in which the artist arrives in Vegas to dance but finds herself becoming increasingly corrupted by the prominent backbiting graft all around her. And if the outcome wasn't harsh enough under normal circumstances, Soldier of Orange and Black Book show that in wartime situations selling out your own side is a sure way to a quick grave. 
Black Book
The Fourth Man
Showgirls
Soldier Of Orange
Spetters
Turks Fruit




WAR AND FASCISM
Growing up in The Hague under German occupation, Verhoeven experienced the war through a young boy's eyes, seeing it as a kind of exciting game. Said perception informed the way the director shoots his war films. Whether he's filming thrilling survival melodramas with complicated moral overtones or comic book-like adventures that reflect America's callous, aloof, salable approach to armed conflict, he takes the same approach. For the conquered citizens of Soldier of Orange and Black Book, wartime is one long perilous trek across a minefield where one false move means the end of the game. Verhoeven also cheekily has us rooting for the invaders in Flesh + Blood and Starship Troopers, impulsive war-mongerers who pride themselves in bullshit causes and vacant slogans. Despite this discrepancy of moral positions, all of Verhoeven's war movies are in equal measure satirical, exciting, romantic and vulgar. They're set almost entirely behind the scenes without giant glorious battle stagings and they're all played absolutely straight. Two things of which the director is assured: war is miserable to experience, but fun to watch. 
Black Book
Black Book
Flesh + Blood
Robocop
Soldier Of Orange
Starship Troopers
Starship Troopers
Starship Troopers




IDENTITY
Most Verhoeven characters lose themselves early and spend the rest of the film trying to return to some semblance of their former self. In the cases of Keetje Tippel and Showgirls, the transformation is temporary: the women we meet at the beginning of the film and the end of the film are basically the same person (Nomi's even wearing the same kind of outfit and literally leaves Las Vegas the same way she entered, miraculously flagging down the exact same driver). In Robocop, Murphy has to come to terms with his more permanent tranformation from man to machine. There's an obvious duality in many of the films: Gerard Reve the writer v.s. Gerard Reve the character, Martin v.s. St. Martin, Quaid v.s. Hauser, Rachel Stein v.s. Ellis de Vries, with one dominant personality typically cancelling out the other. 
Black Book
Keetje Tippel
Robocop
Showgirls
Total Recall
Total Recall




MIRRORS 
In a more conventional disconnect from the body than the science of memory implants, Verhoeven characters find themselves detached by their own image in mirrors, as if they've suddenly become a spectator in their own story. Most notably there's the scene where Keetje Tippel agrees to prostitute herself for the first time at the urging of her sister, removing herself by looking directly up and viewing the scene from a mirror on the ceiling. The ceiling mirror returned in Basic Instinct, in which Nick Curran is seduced by the femme fatale who's turned him into a character in her own story and for a moment actually sees himself playing out the scene exactly as Catherine has planned it: literally manipulated to the point of having no control over his own fate. Similarly, The 4th Man's Gerard Reve and Total Recall's maneuvered Doug Quaid find themselves doubled, seeing a second version play the part that was written for them. Gazing into the mirror and seeing nothing, Hollow Man's Sebastian Caine discovers the ultimate disconnect: being absent from the narrative, he finds that he's capable of anything. 

Basic Instinct
Black Book
The Fourth Man
Hollow Man
Keetje Tippel
Robocop
Robocop
Showgirls
Showgirls
Speeters
Robocop
Turks Fruits
Turks Fruit
Turks Fruit



MORAL AMBIGUITY 

I think perhaps people felt that, in some way, the ambiguity that's in the script [for Black Book], the moral ambiguity - let's say the fact that you cannot discern really quite well if a good person is really good or if a bad person really bad - might have something to do with the political situation in the world, especially provoked by American politics. - Paul Verhoeven 

Some people are better than you think and others are much worse than you think. - Paul Verhoeven 

Are the starship troopers earth defenders or alien invaders? Is Doug Quaid the liberator of Mars or its oppressor? Is 4th Man's Christine a she-devil who draws men to their deaths and, in a more straightforward scenario, is Catherine Tramell a seductive ice pick murderess? Verhoeven leaves lots of questions of moral character open, gleaning the possibility that characters can be more complicated than typical movies make them out to be, even if it means they're less than virtuous overall. Especially in wartime, when moral lines are greyest - is Van der Zanden a traitor in Soldier of Orange? who in Black Book's inner-circle is allied with the evil Nazi? - the simple act of raising a single finger can reveal the more dubious side of a someone's personality.*** 

*** I guess I should explain that fuller: in Soldier of Orange, the British army attache is making time with Jeroen Krabbe's Guus but really wants to spend time with Rutger Hauer's Erik. When they're about to head back to Holland to take part in a counterespionage mission, she recommends they leave it to chance which of the two men gets the more dangerous job of remaining in the country to set up the operation from within. She has them guess how many fingers she's holding up, and changes it to make sure Erik is the one who stays in England. Seemingly harmless, but she's rather callously putting Guus' life in danger just so she can mess around with Erik! (Sure enough, although it isn't directly her fault, Erik comes back and Guus doesn't.) 
The Fourth Man
Soldier Of Orange
Soldier Of Orange
Starship Troopers
Total Recall




RAGTAG SQUADS
A professed fan of Seven Samurai, Verhoeven loves a good gang of comrades in arms, old friends who go through tough times together and change: some for the better, others not so much. The motley crew of anti-heroes in Flesh + Blood was directly inspired by The Wild Bunch and like Peckinpah's team the audience can follow them even when their activities are less than righteous. There's a sense of wartime camaraderie that makes them symphathetic; even in the case of Robocop, where the gang are a bunch of depraved criminal anarchists, you can't help but smile as they giddily nuke an entire block together. Verhoeven's squads typically start out poor and/or inexperienced, share ambitious goals, briefly become rich and/or successful only to take the inevitable plunge. At least one of them ends up dead (in the case of Solider, Flesh + Blood, Robocop and Black Book, all or nearly all of them are ultimately wiped out). 
Black Book
Flesh + Blood
Robocop
Soldier Of Orange
Speeters
Starship Troopers




RUTGER HAUER: VERHOEVEN'S KINSKI
As Paul Cooney correctly pointed out to me recently, while Verhoeven's leading ladies only got more attractive the more movies he made, the director never really found another Rutger Hauer. Not to disparage Casper Van Dien and Kevin Bacon, but they make poor substitutes for the animal magnetism of the blonde beefcake from Turks Fruit and Soldier of Orange. The pairing of passionate director and unpredictable star resembled the prosperous collaboration between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski - they also made five feature films together, Hauer became internationally recognized thanks to Verhoeven's films, and their work covers roughly the same era (Herzog/Kinski was '72 to '87, Verhoeven/Hauer '73 to '85). And like Herzog and Kinski, Verhoeven and Hauer were two powerful personalities who often clashed with one another, leading to a sad but inevitable falling out. Hauer remains Verhoeven's most prominent actor, although he made four with Dolf de Vries, three films with Jeroen Krabbé and worked twice with Monique van de Ven, Carry Tefsen, Andrea Domburg, Derek de Lint, Hannah de Leeuwe, Renée Soutendijk, Thom Hoffman, Ronny Cox, Michael Ironside, William Shockley, Sharon Stone, Jack McGee, Ungela Brockman, Marshall Bell, Michael Gregory, Mark Carlton, Dean Norris, Greg Travis and Christian Berkel. 
Flesh + Blood
Keetje Tippel
Soldier Of Orange
Spetter
Turks Fruit




THE FAIRY TALE PRINCE
In one of the more fairy tale-oriented of Verhoeven's favorite plot designs, his princesses find temporary happiness with a rich, cultured hunk who turns out to be disappointing in the best case scenario (Keetje Tippel) or downright evil in the worst (Showgirls). The exception is Flesh + Blood's progessive-thinker of a monarch, notably the only one of this bunch who is actually a true-born prince. (Also there's the second non-Rutger Hauer rich guy Keetje Tippel ends up with, in an ending that kind of ruins the whole movie even though that's apparently what really happened to the woman whose autobiography the film is based on.) 
Business Is Business
Flesh + Blood
Keetje Tippel
Showgirls




PARTIES & CLUBS
Verhoeven loves grinding bodies and orgiastic celebration. Even in his period films, he can't help having a night club where everyone's having a good time. The only appearance he's ever made in one of his own films is in a split second-shot as a dancing fool in Robocop (he claims Jost Vacano tricked him into doing it and snuck the shot into the film). Aside from the occasional knee-to-crotch injury, spastic stalker dance, random flying gun or rhythmless white guy getting served, nothing bad ever happens in these anonymous social hang-outs. 
Basic Instinct
Black Book
StarshipTroopers
Keetje Tippel
Robocop
Showgirls
Spetters
Total Recall




INSECTS & ANIMALS 
Animals pop up in several Verhoeven movies, many times as the target of human mistreatment: a plague dog hacked to bits in Flesh + Blood, the lab gorillas driven insane in Hollow Man, the poor monkey with the lipstick in Showgirls. Insects in particular are frequently crushed, the god complex of Hollow Man's Sebastian Caine at its least subtle when he thoughtfully holds a fly between his invisible fingers (the bugs get their revenge on petty humans in Starship Troopers). Their torment is equated to the suffering of Verhoeven's heroes - other than the slab of dead cow being cut up while Keetje Tippel entertains her first lascivious client, there's the bird Erik nurses back to health in Turks Fruit and the shot of the suffocating fish as the population of Mars breathes the last remaining oxygen in Total Recall. Even Robocop, which has no animals, has ED-209 roaring like an angry leopard then screeching like a frightened cat once he's immobilized. 
Business Is Business
The Fourth Man
The Fourth Man
Hollow Man
Showgirls
Soldier Of Orange
Starship Troopers
Starship Troopers
Total Recall
Turks Fruit




THE WORLD ACCORDING TO PAUL VERHOEVEN
I include this category because Marcus has made it a staple of the Stills & Images entries, even though there aren't too many clear templates of Verhoeven himself in his films. The one that's obvious is the bespectacled gas station attendent in Robocop who looks like a young Verhoeven and studies an analytic geometry textbook (Verhoeven studied math in college). A random drunken goofball in Spetters kind of looks like Verhoeven, but to go through each film and pick which character is closest personality-wise to the director would be tough. Although he's pointed out several scenes based on his own experiences (like Rien's disappointing revival in Spetters), Verhoeven obviously doesn't personally relate to many of them beyond a basic need to seek knowledge, to survive, to get laid and hopefully do what's right.
Robocop
Spetters



RECCURING IMAGES
The Fourth Man
The Fourth Man
Flesh +Blood
Showgirls
Showgirls
Total Recall
Black Book
Flesh + Blood




head on over to the pink smoke for more elitist cinema garbage...


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