MOVIES (ACTUALLY) BY BOWES

When not blogging about movies, sometimes I actually make them. In the past year, after a decade or so of endless yammering—for listening to which I compliment my friends on their patience—I finally wrote, produced, and shot two short films: Byron Invented Boredom, a 15 minute drama about a womanizing writer who, upon meeting the now-adult son he never knew he had, discovers the need to take responsibility for his actions; and Monday, a seven-minute short for Bryan Enk's horror anthology The Sinister Six Must Be Destroyed, about a woman—guided by some unspecified but malignant inner Other—who mutilates herself to death (that one was for the kids).

Toward the end of the editing process on Byron, I was stumbling home drunk one night when it occurred to me to make a series of films of similar length about a large, interconnected group of characters dealing in various ways with matters of the heart. The second, Until Death (wherein a married couple each hires their respective lover to kill their respective spouse), is currently in pre-production (specifically, the stage in pre-production where I tear my hair out going “Fuck! I need a couple thousand dollars! Help!”) and the third, as yet-untitled installment (I was thinking of calling it The Elusive O; it's a comedy about a woman with really bad taste in men) is still being developed. The idea with this series is that each film, although interconnected through its characters, may be in a completely different genre from all the others. I'm also experimenting with process: for example, Until Death is going to very tightly scripted, blocked, composed, and edited, and the third as-yet-untitled one is going to be developed through improvisation and maybe even shot hand-held. Hopefully, once I get a couple of these under my belt, I can start showing them at festivals, and some nice person from California will give me lots of money.

Although I've only recently discovered industriousness and focus, I've wanted to make movies for a really long time. I started writing in junior high, churning out a number of three-to-five page short stories about a character named Agent 000 who was the last line of defense against nefarious villains attempting to nuke Brooklyn (though one time I branched out and had Agent 000 investigate the assassination of George Bush in Grand Army Plaza). Then when I discovered Raymond Chandler I started my hand at detective fiction, though my detective only ever managed to solve one case. I must have started about thirty different whodoneit premises, and the only one I ever finished prompted this kindly proffered but nonetheless stinging note: “Your detective doesn't seem to do any actual detecting, people just come up to him and tell him stuff.”

Due to a failure of imagination, it never occurred to me that being a writer meant anything other than being a novelist or short-story writer until I was just about to turn 16. In October 1994, Pulp Fiction came out, in a perfect confluence of age, mindset, and movie. The final title card “Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino” made me say to myself: that's what I want to do. “Written and Directed by Danny Bowes.”

So I started studying photography at school, because I could, thinking that learning what I could about framing and composition could come in handy. I wrote a play for a citywide student playwriting contest, and started several abortive attempts at screenplays—influenced though I was by Quentin Tarantino and to a lesser extent Kevin Smith, it had failed to dawn on me that their scripts were anything more than endless, idle chatter.

When I arrived at Bard College, I intended to major in film, though due to a youthful inability to focus and a (related) Pac-Man-like tendency to gobble every chemical in sight I was all like, “I'm going to be a novelist, historian, economist, philosopher, and filmmaker while racing stock cars and being the left-handed short reliever for the Yankees in my spare time.”

My first film production class was a nightmare. The only introduction they gave us was a semester of theory and history, which was fruitful intellectually, but from a practical standpoint pretty useless. Still the first day, the professor's first words to us were, “So you've all made movies before, we don't need to spend too much time on boring shit like how the camera works, how to make a work print with sound, et cetera.” Now, I probably should have raised my hand and said, “Sir, not to be a dickhead, but this is Intro to Filmmaking, and I've never made a movie before, so could you maybe cover all that 'boring shit'?” But I was 18, and terrified of appearing uncool, so I didn't say anything.

I went and bought a Bolex, not realizing that the reason I was getting a good deal was because it didn't have a viewfinder. Out of caution, I signed up to present my first finished film a ways into the semester, after a few other people had already done theirs, so I could look and see what they'd done. Happily, none of their movies made any sense or were about anything, and seemed to just be a random collection of shots designed to look cool and pretentious. Awesome, I thought, I can do that.

My first couple test reels came back from the lab completely blank. I screened them for my class, not knowing that they were completely blank because I'd had to take the train back from the lab in Manhattan up to Bard the morning I had class, and only made it back to campus five minutes before class started. One of my classmates—who had previously been very condescending to me because, among other reasons, he'd had to explain who Stan Brakhage and Will Oldham were—got very excited and started chattering with a huge, sincerely delighted smile on his face how I'd redefined cinema, employing brutal minimalism as a defiant, dare he say Marxist, act of rebellion against the bourgeois Cult of Pretty. I spent about thirty seconds thinking, “Seriously, if Nathan convinces the professor that that's what I was trying to do, I will literally blow him” until the professor peered at me over his little half glasses.

Professor: Danny, is that really what you were trying to do?
Me: Yeah, totally, I mean . . . minimalism is like more effective when it's practiced brutally. I, um, I . . . I did this as an homage to Stan Brakhage! Yeah! Stan Brakhage!
Professor: Did you load the film in the camera properly?
Me: No.

So my professor heaved a melodramatic sigh and explained to the veteran filmmakers in the class that it appeared we needed a lesson on how to load film into the camera. He kind of sounded like the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket explaining that everyone else had to do pushups when Pyle fucks up, except fortunately I wasn't beaten with bars of soap by film students.

After that debacle, I got some more film and walked around DUMBO with my Bolex and shot a few reels of 16mm black & white and spliced it all together randomly. I made a recording of a phone conversation between me and a playwright friend of mine that had nothing to do with the footage in “an ironic juxtaposition between sound and vision” (the only reason I survived five years of college was because hippies don't have guns) and screened the film for the class. Reaction was less than stellar.

Professor: This is just random footage that you didn't even edit.
Me: I edited in camera.
Professor: No you didn't, you just strung a bunch of random shots together.
Me (under my breath): Just like everybody else in this class . . .
Professor: What was that?
Me: Nothing.

And, when he yelled at me for running a print with tape on it through the projector and I asked, “How are you supposed to screen edited footage if you can't run tape through the projector?” instead of doing a punishment lesson on what a work print was—to my naïve mind, possibly useful knowledge—he just shook his head and moved on.

Because I'd turned in a film, he couldn't fail me, so my professor gave me a C- and wrote “Danny has very little talent and aptitude for cinema” on my report card. The next semester, the rest of my class and me had the other Intro to Filmmaking professor, who was much nicer and actually didn't say “narrative” in the same tone of voice as “chlamydia.” She had us write an outline of our movie and present it to her so she could say “Hey, this is gonna be too expensive/time-consuming/impossible” if necessary. I proposed a silent comedy—since a buddy of mine in the class had just showed me how to make title cards and I still didn't know how to work the sound equipment—about a shy, introverted Bard kid who stumbles upon the idea of starting an escort service, gets popular and successful, becomes full of himself, and loses everything, except the love of the girl he liked from the beginning but was too shy to talk to.

My professor liked it. She told me: “It's transgressive. If you can pull it off, it'll be fun.” Feeling more confident than I had yet in my embryonic filmmaking career, I went around and started casting: a friend of mine who'd never acted before as the lead, a couple theater girls (I had, completely by accident, been cast in a couple plays, about which more later) as the escorts, and a random selection of non-actor friends of mine in incidental roles. So I shot like hell, never more than two takes, and took my footage down to the lab in the city one weekend to develop. I chilled out at home, told my mom all about the movie while she nodded politely and said, “Sounds great,” probably distracted by the astronomical fucking credit card bills I was running up buying and developing all this film. Then come Monday I picked up my footage and headed back up to Bard.

Whereupon I found out that the lab ate a good half my footage, and what was viewable was murky, dark, and all fucked up. The next day I had class, and went up to my professor, who I liked, respected, and got along with, figuring she'd understand:

Me: The lab ate half my footage, including most of the stuff that makes it all make sense.
Her: Seriously, Danny? That's the film student's equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.”

Stung, I went back to the editing room to try and salvage what I could. I basically had a (very badly lit) nighttime party sequence, about half the footage of a—very attractive and topless—female friend of mine, and some random stuff I shot of this tractor behind my dorm. So I slapped it all together and played a tape of “Rock n Roll” and “Stairway to Heaven” because they kind of fit my footage. Fingers crossed, I screened it for my class:

Proto-hipster classmate: So, wait . . . do you like Led Zeppelin unironically?
Me: Ye—no—well, kind of . . .
Professor: Thank you, Danny. Who's next? (Translation: “You won't be majoring in film at Bard.”)

At that point, the hundreds (I really hope it wasn't actually thousands) of dollars I'd pissed away making a couple unwatchable student films were starting to weigh on me, so I called up a theater professor I'd met in the course of my acting dilletantery and asked if I could switch over and major in theater. Not only was it okay, they pulled all kinds of strings so I could take two years of intro classes in one year and basically made me feel like I was home and among friends.

Nice as that was, and as seriously as I took my acting training, playwriting classes, design seminars, part of me always treated my theater education as enrichment for my eventual—though delayed—career in film. When I graduated, my department head called me out on this.

Department Head: You keep citing films and filmmakers as your primary artistic influences. Why did you choose to major in theater and not film?
Me: Um . . . because . . . well, I flunked out of the film department.
Department Head: I see.

Needless to say I didn't get a whole lot of grad school recommendation letters from the theater faculty. It was only due to the generosity of the same friends of mine who cast me in the first show I was ever in that I was able to get a foot in the door of indie theater in New York after I graduated.

Meanwhile, I was still movie-crazed, and in 2002 I finished my first novel, The Van Damme Papers, narrated from the point of view of Jean-Claude Van Damme, renaissance man nonpareil, musician, philosopher, lover, savior of humanity. A friend of mine living in Bordeaux, France, serialized this craziness, and I had had plans to try and make a movie out of it someday . . . until I got scooped by JCVD, which would have pissed me off if it wasn't a terrific movie.

Since then, I've been doing a fair bit of indie theater, meeting people, having experiences, gradually meeting enough theater people who also made movies that it finally occurred to me, “Hey, asshole . . . why don't you just fucking make a movie?” Why indeed?

And so we arrive at the present day. And a glorious future in which I keep making movies, which when I'm totally honest with myself, have been my main obsession in life since seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark in the theater. Long live cinema!

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF NERVOUS ANTICIPATION

Here's a brief little piece about Mr. Scorsese's upcoming Shutter Island. Based on the 2003 novel by Dennis Lehane, this will surely be the subject of another Book to Film post in the near future. God, I hope it's good . . .

PAUL VERHOEVEN: THE HOLLYWOOD YEARS (PART 3)

Parts one and two available here . . . for the exciting conclusion, read on!




Starship Troopers (1997)



After the Showgirls fiasco, Verhoeven decided to reunite with a lot of the behind-the-scenes talent from Robocop and return to SF, with an adaptation of Robert Heinlein's legendary (and legendarily controversial) 1959 novel Starship Troopers. (Hilariously, they were developing their own giant bug movie and bought the rights to the novel in pre-production so Heinlein's estate wouldn't sue them).



I'm hard-pressed to think of a writer and director more suited to each other than Heinlein and Verhoeven, simply because both of them are so batshit insane. Heinlein was capable of a bit more lucidity, and the thing that's so scary about the novel Starship Troopers is just how lucid it is. Although it's been accused of advocacy for fascism so often that it has its own corollary to Godwin's Law (“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1”) stating that due to Starship Troopers, whenever Heinlein is mentioned in an online debate, the maximum time before Nazis/Hitler are dragged out of mothballs to participate is three days.



Starship Troopers is not fascist. Its utopian society is not a dictatorship, it is actually a democracy, but it's a democracy where the franchise has been restricted severely: only military veterans are eligible for citizenship, but citizenship confers all the same freedoms in Heinleintopia as it did in the US at the time he was writing. Heinlein's justification for this is that you should have balls if you're going to be voting and stuff, which is a fair point—balls are important—but many of his critics counter that there's more than one type of balls, more ways to demonstrate possession thereof, etc etc. I'm definitely on the side of Heinlein's political critics, but I can't get with the cats who try to undermine his skills as a writer and rhetorician: he makes the case for his militaristic society very well. As for the accusations that there's no plot, just Heinlein surrogates lecturing the protagonist in his History and Moral Philosophy classes, sure, that's basically the whole book, aside from some loving descriptions of military life, but keep in mind that's the book Heinlein was writing. His two points were a) the military is awesome, and b) you're only worth a shit as a human being if you man up and enlist. Disagree with either point? Fine, I do too, but don't sweat the technique.


Heinlein's influence on SF was, it goes without saying, massive, and his books where he isn't typing one-handed while maniacally fapping to military recruitment posters are pretty fuckin' sweet. Starship Troopers, though, resonated in three historically important ways:

(1) The concept of powered armor was introduced to SF. Sound like a minor point made by a geek who overinflates the importance of SF minutiae? Nuh uh uh, my friend, without powered armor what the fuck is Ripley supposed to kick the Big Bitch's ass with in Aliens? And are you seriously telling me you're willing to live in a universe without the climax to Aliens? That's what I thought.


(2) Starship Troopers, combined with his experiences in Vietnam, pissed Joe Haldeman off enough to write The Forever War, which is one of the best SF books of all time on top of being some damn fine lit-crit (although the “enemy” in The Forever War is, like in Starship Troopers, an alien hive-mind, Haldeman's take is that humans need to evolve to finally communicate with the bad guys—a nice fuck you to Heinlein's “we rule and are the clear superiors” bluster—and it's only a couple thousand years in the future when humanity has become several million genetic clones of the same individual and thus a hive-mind of its own that we can finally talk to the aliens and end the war.)

(3) Paul Verhoeven read about the first ten pages of the book and said, “Vot de fock is dis boolshit? Dis esshole writes booook vere Nazis err goot gice? Fuck Rubbert Heinlein, I mek moofie vere ve mek fun of dis kind uff shit vith scathing satirical perspectif unt indict mess media een complicity vith muddern feshism. Fuck de Nazis . . .” as he threw the book down and walked away mumbling to himself.

Starship Troopers the movie has very little to do with the book. Some character names are the same, and people are fighting giant bugs, but that's about it. The quotes from the book, like when we sit in on Casper Van Dien's History and Moral Philosophy class and Michael Ironside is lecturing with Heinlein's exact words, the perspective is different—Heinlein's not in charge, Paul Verhoeven and his mighty Verfremdungseffekt are.


I mentioned this when I was talking about Robocop, and may have seemed like a pretentious wiseass while doing so. But to thine self be true, I say, and since I am a pretentious wiseass let me expand on this idea. Starship Troopers is, on every level, deliberately slick and artificial. The choice to cast people in their late 20s and early 30s to play high school students was deliberate, as was the choice to make all of those people impossibly beautiful. The acting may look stiff—if you're a fucking civilian—but it's because Paul's not concerned with reality here, he's making a self-reflexive post-modern giant bug movie where the observed is the primary observer and is the first line of aesthetic and political defense. People and events exist for their semiotic value, not as representations of reality. Tropes like the periodic internet browser scenes where the movie asks you, the audience, if you want to know more about things like televised executions, the torture of military prisoners, and the rule by fiat of the Wehrmacht-uniformed world military government basically serve to remind the audience that if you agree with any of this shit you're watching, you're an asshole. In the end, Starship Troopers is an anti-propaganda movie made to look like it's pro-, due to the immense skill and insanity of the director.


The story opens with a news broadcast of a battle where the people are getting their asses handed to them by giant bugs. Casper Van Dien runs in front of the camera, hollers some shit at the cameraman before the cameraman gets impaled by a giant bug, who subsequently fucks Casper up. Fade to black, flashback to one year earlier, where a freshly scrubbed Casper is in high school, with best friend Neil Patrick Harris showing off his nascent psychic abilities, cocktease girlfriend Denise Richards, and awkwardness with the quarterback of the football team, who has a crush on him, but it's not gay because the quarterback's a girl, Dina Meyer.
NPH and Denise enlist in the military to become citizens, but Casper's pussy-ass limousine liberal parents want him to go to Harvard and attempt to bribe him with a vacation to a fairly hedonistic-sounding alien planet, but Casper is desperate to impress his cocktease soon-to-be-spaceship-pilot girlfriend, so he enlists.



Basic training goes pretty well, as Casper realizes immediately that drill sergeant Clancy Brown is only busting his and everyone's balls as motivation. But soon there's trouble in paradise as Dina Meyer transfers into Casper's unit, re-introducing their weird sexual tension resulting from her being too hot for Casper to want to fuck or something (why he's so hung up on Denise Richards is an eternal mystery), then Casper gets dumped by Denise Richards and accidentally gets one of his fellow grunts killed during an exercise, for which Casper gets publicly flogged. At loose ends, Casper decides to quit the infantry, but before he can, the Bugs bug-nuke Buenos Aires—Casper's hometown (globalization has turned the whole world into Southern California)—and he goes back to Clancy Brown and asks to take back his resignation. Clancy Brown—being awesome at this kind of thing—barks “Is this your signature [on the resignation form]?” and Casper says “Sir, yes, sir,” because it is, but Clancy Brown rips up the form and says, “Doesn't look like it to me.” BECAUSE THIS IS HOW MEN DO THINGS. Having testicles means never having to reveal your sentimental side.


So our intrepid heroes go to war. Casper gets into a fight with Denise Richards' new boyfriend, a smarmy asshole whose football team Casper's beat right before they all enlisted. Jake Busey settles nicely into the role of big, backslapping hick best friend, and Casper gradually warms up to Dina Meyer (seriously, it takes him so long I started thinking he was gay), and his former high school civics teacher Michael Ironside shows up as the leader of a particularly hard-ass unit Casper gets reassigned to after getting “killed” (which only requires a brief stay in the hospital under the right circumstances, though mysteriously some other people actually die when they get killed). Also in this unit is a pre-Wire Seth Gilliam, playing a scenery-chewing lunatic nerd.



So a lot of machine-gunning of Bugs happens. Casper finally fucks Dina Meyer. And the Bugs lay a terrific ambush for our heroes by butchering a bunch of Mormons (though this accidentally makes the Bugs a little too sympathetic . . .) and leaving a raving Marshall Bell the only warning that the people are about to get their asses kicked. Michael Ironside and Dina Meyer both die (unless Michael Ironside gets killed earlier; it's a little confusing with all the Bugs running around) and Casper is left in charge to rescue Denise Richards and Patrick “Smarmy Boyfriend” Muldoon from the Brain Bug, who is really fucking disgusting. Muldoon is toast—the Brian Bug eats his brain—but Casper gets Denise out of there, and ultimately Clancy Brown captures the Brain Bug (he had himself busted back to private so he could go kick ass BECAUSE GODDAMMIT THAT'S HOW MEN oh never mind) and Neil Patrick Harris, looking tres fasciste, reads the Brain Bug's mind and announces triumphantly “He's AFRAID!” to full-throated cheers. And we close with a military recruitment video starring all our surviving protagonists.



Starship Troopers, due to its deliberate use of artifice to make its political points, sounds kind of retarded when you recap the plot, precisely because the plot has to be retarded in order to make the political points about the dangers of unthinkingly supporting militarism and the way diagrammatic pro-military cinema does so by being so constructed, leaving nothing for the audience to think about, resulting in the audience accepting the message by default because they've shut down though. (Who's got my bail money when I get popped by the grammar police?) In a funny way, Paul Verhoeven made a better movie by not having read the book (or the whole book, either way he clearly didn't give much of a fuck about fidelity to source material) because a careful reading of the not-quite-fascist perspective of the book would have weakened the force with which Paul put militaristic fascism on blast in the movie. Everything, Casper Van Dien's seemingly genetically engineered Master Race look, the military uniforms taken directly from WWII German designs, it's all about sticking it to the Nazis.


This makes Starship Troopers, bizarrely, the kind of personal/political cinema advocated by the French New Wave. Granted, Truffaut and Godard weren't envisioning personal expression as requiring $100 million, giant CGI bugs from horizon to horizon, or the expression of gender equality through gratuitous coed barracks shower scenes. But clearly for Paul Verhoeven, who grew up during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, this anti-Nazi middle finger has personal resonance, and that personal resonance makes this more than just a Giant Bug Movie.



In Conclusion, some anticipated FAQ's:

Q: Hey, Bowes, why the fuck did you need three parts to write about one part of Paul Verhoeven's career when it only took you one each to write about Tony Scott and Kathryn Bigelow?

A: Fuck you.


Q: What's so special about Paul Verhoeven's middle five American movies?


A: I'm glad you asked. Ever since the Hollywood studio system started absorbing UFA expats fleeing Weimar and then Hitler, foreign directors have provided an important perspective. It's basic human nature that one's perspective on one's own people is different from one's perspective on someone else's people. Immigrants have defined the American experience because, by choosing to come here, they clearly like the place a lot more than most of the rest of us do. And, as with any observer, if you actually observe rather than use your observations to reinforce preconceived results, the observation of a strange place using one's own previous experiences in another place can lead to new insights to the natives of that place. Which is a murky and convoluted way of saying that Paul Verhoeven sees a lot of the fake sex, obsession with violence, and omnipresent artifice in American society.



Q: Why didn't you talk about Flesh + Blood or Hollow Man, since you're talking about the movies Paul Verhoeven made in America?


A: Because they both suck.



Q: You claim Paul Verhoeven is an auteur. What is/are his directorial signature(s)?


A: (1) Meticulous and unique framing (watch his movies, adjectives fail me), (2) the smoothest steadicam shots you'll ever see, (3) a tendency similar to Sam Peckinpah, John Woo, and Quentin Tarantino to stylize his depictions of violence, but in a more graphic and brutal way than any of the others mentioned who, respectively, are slightly more realistic, far more dance-inspired, and more cartoony, (4) the mistaken belief that a woman can come while doubled over backwards and grabbing her ankles with her teeth, and (5) the way his characters walk—the only way I can describe it is as “striding determinedly with upright posture.” Maybe it's the way his steadicam operator shoots those shots, but I swear I've never seen anyone walk like they do in Paul Verhoeven movies.


Q: Which is more awesomely ridiculous in Paul Verhoeven movies, the dancing or the sex scenes?


A: Definitely the dancing. Some people actually tried to do the sex positions in Basic Instinct,
even though they all pulled hamstrings in so doing.


Q: How come you didn't mention the triple-breasted whore in Total Recall?


A: So I could mention her here. One love for Hitchhiker's Guide!



Q: Can I stop reading now?



A: Sure. Thanks for sticking around for all this!

PAUL VERHOEVEN: THE HOLLYWOOD YEARS (PART 2)

See part one for discussion of Mr. Verhoeven's early years, culminating in an endless discussion of Robocop and Total Recall.



Basic Instinct (1992)

After Verhoeven's massive commercial success with SF with the above-mentioned titles, he decided to change things up a bit. Revisiting his earlier exploration of sex in his Dutch work, Verhoeven teamed up with screenwriter Joe Eszterhas for an erotic thriller called Basic Instinct.


Eszterhas had a couple hits under his belt as well—Flashdance, Jagged Edge—that also dealt with matters of the loins, and his script for Basic Instinct sold for a then-record $3 million. Verhoeven had the script re-written extensively, then Eszterhas did rewrites of his own so he wouldn't get killed by the LGBT community, then they ended up basically going back to the original script. Then there were casting problems: every actor and actress in Hollywood turned down the male and female leads, which eventually went to Michael Douglas (who, although taking the part, demanded even more rewrites) and old Total Recall hand Sharon Stone.


Basic Instinct was notorious at the time of its release (bi and gay women objected for some odd reason to every woman in the movie except the Mexican maid being a bisexual sociopath), which led to massive commercial success. It's not hard to see why in the finished product: Verhoeven's typically flamboyant blend of dangerous sex and vivid violence, as meticulously crafted and smoothly executed a piece of craft as you'll ever see in Hollywood.


We open with a scene of a man and woman having very athletic sex. The woman's face is obscured, and has the same slender build every major female character we encounter shares, to give an element of mystery as to who she is (spoiler: the actress in the scene is Sharon Stone). At the point of climax, the woman leans way back, grabs an icepick, and goes berserk stabbing the shit out of the guy.


Enter homicide cops Michael Douglas and George Dzundza. The deceased is a retired rock 'n' roll star with political connections, which Distict Attorney's representative Chelcie Ross tensely reminds Michael Douglas, upon Michael Douglas' discovery of cocaine at the scene. Douglas and Dzundza go to interrogate the deceased's girlfriend, Sharon Stone.


They go over to her place (Dzundza: “Ain't that sweet, they got his and hers Picassos.” Michael Douglas: “[Dzundza], I didn't even know you knew who Picasso was.” Dzundza: “Sure, [pointing to signature], it says so right here”) and meet who they think is Sharon Stone, but who turns out to be her similarly slender though slightly less blonde “friend,” Roxy.


Douglas and Dzundza then meet the not-terribly-distraught Sharon Stone at her beach house, whereupon she and Michael Douglas exchange repartee and establish sexual tension. Back at the station, Michael Douglas has a meeting with shrink Jeanne Tripplehorn (with whom he's had an affair, and who though a brunette has a very similar physical build to both Sharon Stone and Roxy). Then, the cops all compare notes and discover that Sharon Stone has, aside from her looks and talents for repartee, a) a genius IQ, b) a double major in psychology and literature, which leads to c) she's a successful writer of psychosexual potboilers, one of which features a retired rock 'n' roll star who gets murdered by his girlfriend.


And so Michael Douglas and George Dzundza go to bring Sharon Stone in for questioning. She “accidentally” leaves an old newspaper about Michael Douglas having killed a couple tourists, and lets Michael Douglas see her naked as she's changing (a very accommodating hostess, it must be said), and they head into the station for the movie's most famous scene, wherein Ms. Stone crosses and uncrosses her legs in such a way that the whole room full of cops interrogating her get to see her chocha. She passes a lie detector test re: her guilt in the murder, though Michael Douglas expresses doubt as to what that proves. He then volunteers to drive her home—leading to more repartee—before joining George Dzundza and his lieutenant at a bar, where Michael Douglas has his first drink in rather a while.


This arouses the interest of smarmy Internal Affairs cop Daniel von Bargen, who attempts to provoke Michael Douglas into some untoward display of violence, which bait Michael Douglas takes before Jeanne Tripplehorn intervenes and gets him out of there. Back at her place, Michael Douglas' demons are let loose, as they have brutal, unpleasant sex. Jeanne Tripplehorn attributes this to Sharon Stone's influence, and it transpires they knew each other in college. She kicks Michael Douglas out.


Michael Douglas gets to know Sharon Stone a little bit more, as it turns out she's basing a character in her newest book on him. He discovers that she has a history of befriending violent, dangerous people, and soon finds that she's manipulating him, and knows things about him that he only told Jeanne Tripplehorn.


Pissed, Michael Douglas confronts Jeanne Tripplehorn, who, terrified, tells Michael Douglas that IA schmuck Daniel von Bargen extorted the file out of her. Redirecting his pissedness, Michael Douglas confronts Daniel Von Bargen and tries to beat the shit out of him in front of the whole IA office before Skinner from the X-Files puts a gun to his head and gets him to leave.


Michael Douglas then goes home (to his apartment with a beautiful view of the Transamerica Pyramid that there is no motherfucking way a San Francisco cop could afford, and if he could, he would deserve to have IA up his ass) and gets drunk. While he does so, someone kills Daniel von Bargen in such a way that it looks like Michael Douglas did it, and he's temporarily relieved of duty pending an investigation.


Seeing that he now has more leisure time, Sharon Stone asks Michael Douglas to meet her at a nightclub. He arrives to find Sharon Stone and Roxy doing what, at that time, was probably the dumbest dance in the history of cinema (until the next movie we're going to talk about). He follows Sharon Stone around the club, almost catches her doing coke in the ladies' room, and eventually dances with her, and they go back to her place.


Cue one very long and involved sex scene (an on-set source insists “They straight up fucked in front of everybody”), after which Michael Douglas has a conversation with Roxy—who was watching—in the bathroom where he declares the night's diversions “the fuck of the century.” Roxy is not pleased, and storms out. The next morning, Sharon Stone warns Michael Douglas that he's in over his head, but he's like, hey, fuck it, I'm Michael Douglas in typical guy-who-just-got-laid swagger.


Roxy, unfortunately, doesn't just let it drop, and attempts to run Michael Douglas over with her car, but he as the hero does some fancy driving and it's Roxy who ends up dive-bombing into a conveniently placed rock quarry and dying. Sharon Stone is devastated, and Michael Douglas fucks her because he's caring and sensitive like that. Cuddling afterwards, Sharon Stone complains about her luck with women--Roxy being only the latest girlfriend with problems--and gives Michael Douglas a roundabout hint that leads to him discovering that she used to date Jeanne Tripplehorn in college. AND THE PLOT THICKENS.


Michael Douglas gets two stories from Jeanne Tripplehorn and Sharon Stone viz a vis the affair: they each say the other one dyed her hair, dressed like her, stalked her. Who to believe? Well, after a bit more detective work, Michael Douglas discovers that Jeanne Tripplehorn's ex-husband was murdered and that Jeanne Tripplehorn—who claimed Sharon Stone was the only woman she ever shtupped—had a girlfriend on the side but there was insufficient evidence linking her to the crime. Then, on top of everything else, Sharon Stone breaks up with him, citing completion of her book.


His mind swirling with possibilities (and a fair amount of whiskey, more than likely), Michael Douglas tags along when George Dzundza gets an anonymous phone call from someone claiming to know all about Sharon Stone/Jeanne Tripplehorn back in the day. However, while waiting for him, Michael Douglas realizes that George Dzundza is walking into a trap, and he tears ass inside to try and stop it, but George Dzundza gets butchered with an icepick by an unseen assailant of slender build. Michael Douglas discovers Jeanne Tripplehorn wandering around. She claims to have been summoned by the same anonymous caller who set up George Dzundza, but Michael Douglas is convinced it's her, and when she refuses to take her hand out of her pocket, he lights her up. As she's dying, he sees that she was going for the weird-looking keychain she kept his key to her apartment on. He's devastated: another mistaken shooting.


But is it? The cops find all kinds of shit all over the place implicating Jeanne Tripplehorn in not only George Dzundza's death, but all the carnage thus far. Huh. His conscience soothed, Michael Douglas goes back to his place, to find Sharon Stone, in classic noir/cop movie fashion, in his apartment without a key, but instead of being suspicious, he buys her tearful “I don't want to lose you” bit and they fuck once more. Afterwards, he romantically inquires if she wants to “fuck like minks, raise rug rats, and live happily ever after.” She demurs, “I hate rugrats,” so Michael Douglas, open-minded progressive that he is, says “Okay, fuck like minks, forget the rug rats, and live happily ever after.” Sharon Stone makes an ominous gesture down behind the bed, but reaches for him, her hand empty, and they reconvene the fucking. Fade to black. But then . . . we fade up, and pan down . . . and see an icepick. WHAT THE FUCK????????


Much like Total Recall, the ambiguous ending is a huge asset here, something to talk about as you leave the theater (or stop the DVD). You could infer that either a) Sharon Stone is just into kinky sex and put the icepick there for a little danger or b) Sharon Stone was the killer all along and set up Jeanne Tripplehorn. Each has ample basis. Sadly, a sequel was made years later when Sharon Stone needed money where it's (apparently, I've never been bored enough to watch it) said, she's the killer, she killed Michael Douglas, ambiguity ruined. Oh, well.


Reasons Basic Instinct kicks ass:


(1) Proof that Paul Verhoeven is a masterful director. The script is the fuckin medal ceremony of the Special Olympics—seriously, it's practically unreadable—but in the hands of an entertainer as skilled as PV, with the energetic acting style he directs his cast to follow, elegant steadicam shots, and peerless pacing, Basic Instinct is a real nail-biter.
(2) The sex, while ridiculous and warrants the always-redundant-in-a-Verhoeven-picture descriptor “over the top,” is nonetheless not gratuitous and reveals character. Granted, there are other ways to reveal character than to have the guy tear the woman's clothes off or have the woman tie the guy up with a silk scarf. But still.
(3) Warrants mention with Total Recall and Casino as the only good performances of Sharon Stone's career (older Sharon Stone afficionados might protest “but she was great in Irreconcilable Differences,” but that argument falls apart when one considers that Irreconcilable Differences sucks).
(4) Every movie where Michael Douglas makes the Michael Douglas Face is a classic and awesome, and he makes it in just about every other scene in this movie. The Michael Douglas Face, if any explanation is indeed necessary, occurs when Michael Douglas is either pissed off, fucked up on drugs or booze, or sexually frustrated. First, his eyes shift, then his face contorts, then his mouth starts shaking, then he usually throws the other actor in the scene as far across the room as he can. The Michael Douglas Face is usually an indication that you should leave. (See also Fatal Attraction, Black Rain, Disclosure, Traffic, etc etc).
(5) James Rebhorn and Stephen Tobolowsky have cameos. Not to mention Mitch (Skinner) Pileggi, kind of a poor man's James Rebhorn if he hadn't been Skinner. Newman shows up. Chelcie Ross, whose connection to The Last Boy Scout confers respect. Actually, back to the top of this point—James Rebhorn's presence in any movie, no matter how stupid, means that movie is at least awesome on one level.




Showgirls (1995)

I'm in slightly shaky territory here, since I've only seen Showgirls twice, and to recap the plot would cause not only every reader of this blog to commit suicide—and I really like all of you for being interested in this blog so that's not a happy thought—but the Internet itself to possibly melt. But, suffice to say, Paul Verhoeven's attempt to recapture the magic of Basic Instinct with screenwriter Joe Eszterhas was unsuccessful.

Well, maybe. It's all a matter of perspective. Sometimes a fun movie experience involves a good movie, with good acting, good writing, good direction, all that kind of thing. Other times, a fun movie experience involves a very bad movie. A few months ago, I was fortunate enough to be hanging out with about a dozen friends after a read-through of a play at a nice, spacious apartment with a large HDTV. My friend whose place it was suggested that we watch The Room. Her boyfriend nodded quietly and got out the bowl and a large-ish bag of weed. I considered the situation; having seen The Room once when straight I could only imagine how amazing it would be high. Things being what they were I decided to let consensus dictate my vote (I'm not pushy), which fortunately was universally “yea” since there were people there who hadn't yet seen it. And so we watched what very well may be the worst movie ever made, while higher than giraffe ass. And it was good.

Since Tommy Wiseau did not direct Showgirls (as far as we know), I'll resist the temptation toward exegesis of The Room at the moment (but if you haven't seen it, see it with a roomful of people who've seen it already, preferably with your mind-altering substance of choice) and segue into the subject at hand by saying that Showgirls is almost as bad as The Room. Even the logline is hilarious: a small-town girl goes to Vegas with dreams of dance stardom. Wow.

I guess the box-office for Basic Instinct must have been impressive ($350 mil worldwide would still be good today but in 1992 it was nuckin' futs), since even the dumbest executive had to realize that with this premise and this writer-director team, who flat-out said even before one word was written that they were delivering it as an NC-17, greenlighting this essentially meant giving two crazy, horny guys $45 million to go get lapdances (at the very least) in Vegas for six months.

Looking at the script that resulted, that very well could have been what a good three-quarters of the budget went toward. Everything in it—even those bizarre sets for the dance productions—looks cheap, which isn't Vegas. The thing about Vegas that's crazy is that everything is gaudy and tacky, but when you look at stuff up close you realize, “wait, that's real gold . . . that's real marble . . . holy shit there's a lot of money in this town.”

It's not like the cast was all that expensive, either. Kyle MacLachlan is probably the most famous person in it—the injustice of Gina Gershon not being the biggest star in the universe is not the issue here, Dude—and even his rate probably wasn't terribly high in the mid-90s. But when you consider the kind of shit this movie had in it, it's no wonder big-ticket movie stars wanted nothing to do with it. Consider the following:

---The lap dance scene where Elizabeth Berkeley basically fucks Kyle MacLachlan through his trousers while Gina Gershon smiles and gets squirmy. Shot and blocked horrendously, kind of like a tweaked-out thirteen year old who'd never seen a girl naked, let alone ever been to a strip club, was directing.
---The swimming pool scene where Elizabeth Berkeley actually fucks Kyle MacLachlan and looking, at the point of orgasm, like Daryl Hannah after she gets shot by Harrison Ford in Blade Runner. Makes Sharon Stone's orgasms from impossible positions in Basic Instinct look like cinema verite.
---The scene when Elizabeth Berkeley expresses her rage by angrily squirting ketchup on her french fries.
---The ridiculous “big time” production numbers, with naked women coming out of volcanoes and all that jazz. Crazy enough real shit happens in Vegas, man, you can see tigers eat homosexuals onstage in Vegas for fuck's sake.
---That really long scene that happens between the opening titles and the closing credits.

Being as I am in a near-constant internal battle between conflicting impulses, polar aesthetic opposites, and the crushing existential questions about the defensibility of the kind of things I find entertaining, Showgirls is an inconstant pleasure for me. It is, variously, a shitty movie I can giggle at while high, a near-fatal blow to the career of one of my favorite directors, and simultaneously a horribly disappointing missed opportunity and a movie that had it not existed would deprive the world of great joy. It's hard for me to fully appreciate it as a cult classic—after flopping in the box office, Showgirls went on to earn very healthily on home video—when one considers that in flopping at the box office, Showgirls singlehandedly destroyed the NC-17 rating as a commercially viable option, thus reinforcing the de facto censorship Hollywood employs by insisting directors bring everything in at the very most an R. They turn around and say “but the NC-17 rating is commercial suicide,” forgetting that only one movie has ever gotten wide release as an NC-17: Showgirls. If Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas had managed to get their heads out of their asses and spent five to ten minutes a day without hardons during the creative process, maybe there would be a viable nationwide forum for pictures with adult and transgressive themes. Or maybe not. Someone else probably would have fucked it up even if Showgirls actually had been good (as opposed to so bad it's good) and made money in theaters.

Even managing to put dollars and cents aside, there's still the problem of a movie about sex that's 131 minutes long where the sexiest thing in it is a couple lingering shots of Gina Gershon with her lips parted and a twinkle in her eye (which is pretty sexy, but still). I mean, there is porn, fine, I concede. But look: I'm an immature douchebag with an occasionally sophomoric attitude about sex, and when I can say someone's an immature douchebag with a sophomoric attitude about sex, they done fucked up. Shame on you, Paul. Shame on you, Joe.

Fortunately, Joe Eszterhas no longer gets paid so much for his scripts that he forgets to revise . . . actually, he doesn't get paid anything anymore. But listening to him talk is awesome. The man can tell a story, even if he's had his problems writing them. And Paul Verhoeven once again pulled himself up by his wooden shoes (now carved by Gucci) and made a truly awesome comeback in fairly short order . . . for more on that, continue to Part 3 of this ridiculous, unwieldy look at one arbitrarily chosen period in his career!

PAUL VERHOEVEN: THE HOLLYWOOD YEARS (PART 1)

I've done a couple director profiles thus far, both of which looked at the subject's whole career. This time I thought I'd do things a little differently, not out of laziness (well, not entirely), but because there's one specific period in Paul Verhoeven's career that interests me the most, the decade from 1987 to 1997.

This is not to dismiss his Dutch movies. Soldier of Orange, Spetters, and The Fourth Man are all really good, and apparently Turkish Delight, Katie Tippel, and Black Book all are too. While not completely different from his American movies, they're nonetheless a little more low-key, and less overtly tin-foil hat crazy. And tin-foil hat crazy is what makes Paul Verhoeven Paul Verhoeven (to me, at any rate).

Paul Verhoeven was born in Amsterdam in 1938 and raised in the Dutch village of Sikkerveer. Most of his earliest memories were of World War II and marauding Nazis; he would later compare his experiences with the protagonist of John Boorman's Hope and Glory (one of my favorite movies of all time, closing the circle). He would go on to take a degree in both mathematics and physics at the University of Leiden, and began his filmmaking career making documentaries while in the Navy.

Here is where I, as an historian of such talent that I was bribed with a passing grade to never take a history class again in college, gloss over about thirty years of my subject's life and skip ahead to where Hollywood came knocking at Verhoeven's door in the mid-80s after the international success of his sexy, intense Dutch pictures (featuring repeated collaborations with the sexy, intense Rutger Hauer and Renee Soutendijk). Flesh + Blood (1985) served as a bit of a dry run; it's not very good even though Rutger Hauer is in it, and even though Rutger Hauer rules very, very hard. Undaunted, our cracked auteur hero picks himself up by his wooden shoes (?) and starts anew.

Robocop (1987)

Established the tone for Verhoeven's Hollywood career by having to be submitted about 30 times to get its X rating—for violence . . . yeah, you do not get an X rating for violence by fucking around—before the ratings board finally got tired of Paul storming in and screaming at them to “git dair fockeeng heads ut uff dair esses ent grow a perr uff fockeenk bulls” (hey, I'm not making this up, he really talks like that; watching an interview with him is almost as awesome as watching one of his movies) and gave him his R.

All violence aside, Robocop is very good SF. Set in a near-future Detroit where crime runs rampant and an extremely sinister private corporation called OCP (Omni Consumer Products, a great name for a sinister corporation) owns the police, the story follows one idealistic cop (Peter Weller, looking for a hit after Buckaroo Banzai) who gets transferred to a particularly rough precinct and promptly gets the motherfucking shit shot out of him by Kurtwood Smith, Ray Wise, Paul McCrane, the gay black guy, and the taciturn Vietnamese guy (his only line in the movie is “Man, fuck you,” which is also the movie's central philosophy). So there's our protagonist, dead at the 20 minute mark. But lo, out in the cold darkness comes ambitious yuppie Miguel Ferrer, an OCP executive looking to get one up on reptilian VP Ronny Cox, whose robot law enforcement unit, ED-209, has a habit of spacing out and machine gunning executives in board meetings.

So Miguel Ferrer and his R&D nerds turn Peter Weller into a pretty bad motherfucker—armor covering his whole body, lazer-sharp targeting, a digestive system that runs on baby food—and they turn him loose on old Detroit, little realizing that some personality quirks remain from Peter Weller's brain.

At first it doesn't matter, as Robocop foils a convenience store robbery while ironically probably putting the mom & pop who run the place out of business by destroying everything, puts the kibosh on a rape by shooting one of the rapists in the dick, and concluding one hell of a productive shift by defusing a hostage situation involving a disgruntled city councilman who's just lost an election:

“I want something that goes really fast, has reclining leather bucket seats, and gets really shitty gas mileage!”
--City Councilman Ron Miller, asking for a new car as part of his list of demands, about a minute before being defenestrated by Robocop

(The above quote, aside from being the best movie line ever, perfectly sums up a Paul Verhoeven movie during his 87-97 period: something that's an almost supernatural amount of fun but that makes sensitive people upset)

Robocop soon encounters an existential crisis when he interrupts Paul McCrane robbing a gas station, freaking Paul McCrane the fuck out: “You're dead. We killed you!” Robocop then develops an intense interest in his own barely-remembered past and in punishing the fuckos who killed him. Inconveniently, he discovers when interrogating a bloody Kurtwood Smith that Ronny Cox was behind the hit, and when he attempts to arrest Ronny Cox, he shuts down, courtesy of a bit of code Ronny Cox had put in his OS preventing him from arresting an OCP official. (This doesn't explain why Robocop can't just tell one of the human cops, “Hey, bust this guy, he killed me,” but enough shit starts blowing up that this question has to be put aside for a sec). Robocop gets fucked up pretty badly by first an ED-209, and then the entire Detroit police department. The loyal cops, who've been threatening to go on strike for the whole movie, finally do, and all hell REALLY breaks loose.

Paul McCrane (having just blown up a car with a rocket launcher): I . . . like it!

Eventually, with the help of his tomboy partner (Nancy Allen, who actually is the daughter of a cop, lending verisimilitude), Robocop recovers to the extent that he melts Paul McCrane with toxic waste, and although briefly crippled by Ray Wise dropping a couple tons of rusty girders on him (after which Nancy Allen blows up Ray Wise with a rocket launcher) he still manages to rip Kurtwood Smith's throat out.

In the final showdown at OCP when Robocop goes to arrest Ronny Cox and presents some evidence to the board of directors (a DVD recording of Ronny Cox admitting to having Miguel Ferrer killed, which Kurtwood Smith rather impolitely did a while ago, interrupting the poor man's coke and hookers evening like the brutish villain he is) but confessing that he is unable to arrest Ronny Cox. Dan O'Herlihy, as The Old Man who runs OCP, thinks quick and fires Ronny Cox. Robocop, being a nice young man, says “Thank you” and shoots Ronny Cox about 12 times, launching him out the 100th floor window to his death.

The main reasons why Robocop is awesome:

(1) The blisteringly cynical vision of the dystopian future, reinforced by all the great fake TV newscasts and advertisements. The most popular show on TV features a sleazy man with a mustache who always seems to have three blondes' fake tits in his face as he says “I'LL BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR!” which in a way is a pretty articulate (though negative) expression of the American dream.
(2) Top-notch action. The words “over-the-top violence” and “Paul Verhoeven” have been inextricably linked forever, partly because of this movie. I mean, sure, people waste a lot of bullets in this movie. But try this theory on for size: the more baroque and unrealistic cinematic violence is, the more the Verfremdungseffekt is reinforced, reinforcing to the audience that what they're seeing isn't actually real. Thus, the more violent a movie is, the better. You're welcome.
(3) Who knew Ronny Cox would be such a good villain? Lieutenant Bogomil from Beverly Hills Cop went bad.
(4) This is going to sound weird, but the background acting in Paul Verhoeven movies is always amazing, grounding the comic-book foreground in an almost perceptibly real-seeming world.
(5) Aside from a couple awkward-looking rear-projection shots, the special effects still hold up today. ED-209 even has personality.

Total Recall (1990)

Hmm, let's see. How do we improve on Robocop . . .? Let's keep a couple things the same, like the intelligent, well-written science fiction . . . the shitloads of violence worked last time, let's do that again . . . HOLY SHIT LET'S GET ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER!

Oh, Arnold. Arnold Arnold Arnold. Since I'm sure Verhoeven got annoyed by everyone making fun of his goofy accent on Robocop, he decided, you know what, let me cast a leading man with a goofy accent who can kick everyone on set's ass, maybe then they'll leave me alone. But in so doing he managed to land his generation's greatest movie star (it's true, so shut up), who also happened to be an underrated actor (seriously, shut the fuck up, do not argue with me about Arnold) capable of carrying a movie of ideas just as effectively as a movie of bullets (goddammit, kids, I WILL TURN THIS BLOG AROUND AND HEAD RIGHT HOME IF YOU CAN'T BE QUIET).

Originally adapted from Philip K. Dick's story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” by Dan O'Bannon right around when he did Alien, the script kicked around for years, getting re-written by a bunch of other people for a bunch of other actors (among them Matthew Broderick and Patrick Swayze) before Paul Verhoeven got his hands on it and said, “Fock Matthew Brodereek, thees ees un Arnolt Schvarseenayger mooffie, get dat mudderfucker on de phone.” Like a lot of Phil Dick it has to do with memory and identity, specifically in this case an ordinary guy named Doug Quaid who wants to have extraordinary memories.

Well . . . as ordinary as a guy played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and married to Sharon Stone can be. First red flag. This guy thinks he leads an ordinary existence? Okay, keep watching. Arnold wants, for some inexplicable reason, to take a vacation on Mars, even though his wife reminds him Saturn is a much better vacation spot and there are “long space cruises . . . the kind with nothing to do,” except, as her tone implies, have sex with Sharon Stone. A normal man would say “I'll get the tickets, you pack,” but Arnold just goes to work. Red flag two: is he gay? Shut it, he's Arnold. Keep watching.

Arnold eventually decides to go to Rekall, a place he saw an ad for on TV on the subway (it's the few-cha, baby!) “vair dey sail doze fake memories,” but his co-worker on the construction site cautions him against it, as a buddy of his “tried one of their special offers . . . nearly got himself lobotomized . . . don't fuck with your brain, pal, it ain't worth it!” Arnold, however, goes anyway.

An awesomely sleazy salesman talks Arnold into “the latest thing in travel, we call it the ego trip.” So Arnold gets strapped into the implant chair, where they prepare to give him the memory of being a secret agent on Mars. The techie looks at the program and says, “That's a new one . . . blue sky on Mars . . .” Arnold specifies that the chick he wants to remember fucking looks like Rachel Ticotin (who's already popped up in a dream sequence). But then:

“It looks like we've got another schizoid embolism.”
--Dr. Lull

Oh shit. Arnold flips out (“My name is not Quaid!”), and it takes everyone in the place to hold him down and knock him out. Apparently, he really is a secret agent, and from what Michael Ironside says later after chasing Arnold through the subway (a chase many civilians pay for with their lives), he used to work on Mars.

Turns out nothing's what Arnold thought it was. Sharon Stone was a plant by The Agency to make sure Arnold's memory erasure worked. She's fucking Michael Ironside, who it turns out is the head enforcer for none other than . . . Ronny Cox, Mars Administrator Vilos Cohaagen (nifty touch, having a Dutch bad guy). Arnold left a whole bunch of money and toys for himself, as previous self Hauser, along with a message explaining everything.

Arnold/Hauser: “You are not you. You are me.”
Arnold/Quaid: “No shit . . .”

Since the message ends with the firm entreaty “Git yo ass to Maahhhz,” Arnold gets his ass to Mars, where in short order he befriends a chatty cabbie and meets up with the Resistance, run by a possibly mythical figure named Kuato. (“they think he's fucking George Washington.”), but more concretely represented by Arnold's ex-girlfriend, hooker Melina, played by Rachel Ticotin, the literal woman of his dreams. And a whole bunch of mutants (courtesy of radiation that Ronny Cox was too cheap to do anything about). In fact, Rachel Ticotin is the only non-mutant local Arnold meets on Mars.

So Arnold's chilling in his hotel room, when a doctor from Rekall knocks on his door, to tell him that all that has transpired thus far is part of the “delightful vacation” Arnold bought. The doctor brings out Sharon Stone, who urges Arnold to listen to the doctor and take the pill he gives Arnold. Alas, Arnold sees a bead of sweat roll down the doctor's face, and so Arnold shoots him. Sharon Stone then brings in a bunch of guys with guns, kicks Arnold in the balls, and has him dragged along the hotel corridor unconscious until Rachel Ticotin shows up, shoots Sharon Stone's dudes, and then the two of them have a fuckin hawt chick fight, which ends with Arnold, after Sharon Stone, temporarily disarmed but reaching for her second gun, says, “But, we're married.” Arnold shoots her.

“Consider that a divorce.”

Arnold meets Kuato, who like all the mutants on Mars is psychic, and discovers that the Big Secret Ronny Cox is hiding, and part of the reason he wants Arnold dead, is that they found “some alien shit” deep inside a mine, and said alien shit is capable of—through some very fictional science-fiction science—melting Mars' ice core (look, I just said it was bullshit, simmer down) and providing Mars with a breathable atmosphere. Sounds great, right? No, no, no. Silly rabbit, Ronny Cox's whole power structure is built on charging Martians for air. Now that's a villain, baby, making people pay for air.

In the middle of this, Michael Ironside and a bunch of henchmen smash into the Resistance headquarters, and Arnold, Kuato, Rachel Ticotin, and the cabbie all escape . . . or they do until the cabbie reveals himself to be a collaborator and machine guns Kuato to death. Ronny Cox can't resist the temptation to gloat. He reveals to Arnold that his current identity—Quaid—was a plot cooked up by Ronny Cox and Arnold's previous identity—Hauser—so that the psychic mutants wouldn't know he was a plant. To really twist the knife, he shows Arnold a video of Hauser telling Quaid “sorry for all that shit I put us through, but hey, what are friends for?” and “That's my body you've gut theya. And I wonnit back.” And so they drag Arnold and Rachel Ticotin to be mind-wiped and reprogrammed.

Of course it doesn't work, because Arnold and Rachel Ticotin kill all the scientists and escape, whereupon they kill Michael Ironside (memorably) and all his henchmen and head to the alien atmosphere gadget to turn it on, only Ronny Cox interrupts them. They end up getting sucked into the inhospitable Martian outdoors, although Arnold does turn the alien atmosphere gadget on, and although Ronny Cox asphyxiates, Arnold and Rachel Ticotin are fine, as are what few non-machine-gunned Martians left, free to appreciate Mars' new blue sky.

Rachel Ticotin: It's like a dream.
Arnold: I just hadda terrible thought . . . vut if dis is a dreeeeeam?
Rachel Ticotin: Then kiss me quick before you wake up.

And the movie, as movies should, ends with the hero kissing the girl as the music swells, but Paul Verhoeven, tricky motherfucker that he is, fades to white, leaving us to ask the question . . . was it a dream? Having the balls to end a mega-budget action movie on an ambiguous note earns you a lot of style points around these parts, and Paul Verhoeven is nothing if not ballsy.

Reasons Total Recall kicks ass:

(1-5) See reasons Robocop kicks ass.
(6) Unless you've seen it before, the plot twists are genuinely surprising. The script is really, really good, which is a pleasant surprise considering about five guys get writing credits.
(7) Young Sharon Stone = hell yeah. See part two for further expansion on this idea.

Because this is running a little long, we will rejoin Mr. Verhoeven's career in Part Two: The 90s!

IN HONOR OF SUPER BOWL SUNDAY

The game's a little boring--the Colts are up 10-0 in the 1st, which would piss me off if I cared--so I was havin' a look around the Internets and found this:

If Filmmakers Directed the Super Bowl

Still wondering if I make some coffee if it'll wake the Saints up.


EDIT (2/8/10): Hey, it worked!

"WE'LL HAVE TO HACK THE INTERNET. . ."

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