Don't Sell 'Em Short

David DiGiacomo · 13 Apr 2007, 02:10 · from 2007-April.txt.gz

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From: david at slack.com (David DiGiacomo)
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 19:10:21 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Don't Sell 'Em Short
Message-ID: <10704130210.AA12597 at slack.com>

I've been sitting on my hands trying not to join this off-topic-athon, but
this comment on Starship Troopers finally pushed me over the edge:

>I'm not sure whether the film was intended as a satire or not - but
>that's certainly the only way it can be enjoyed.

Here is what Verhoeven has to say about it:

http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Paul+Verhoeven/

"I always thought the movie was badly understood. There was an article in
The Washington Post when it came out that was not written by a movie
critic. One of the editors wrote it saying that this was a neo-Nazi movie
and I was promoting Fascism. That same article was published in all the
European newspapers. When I went to do the publicity tour in Europe,
everybody was already looking through that lens. The Washington Post is
not a reliable newspaper anyway but they said the film was written by a
neo-Nazi or a Fascist and directed by one. I strongly disagree with that.
I saw it as a critique of American society. It is done in an ironic way
but not pushing it very hard, which I hate because then it becomes
dogmatic and becomes something else other than filmmaking. It was more
that the novel by Robert Heinlein is very militaristic and has a tendency
to be pro-Fascist a bit. We took a lot of cues out of American society at
that time, which was [President Bill] Clinton, not realizing that a couple
years later this whole situation would be much more acute and now you can
put the film as a blueprint over Iraq or Afghanistan. But of course, I
didn't know of bin Laden at that time."

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