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Princess Bride. Every single person I talk to says it’s about true love but it’s really the most important lesson is to never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line.
Misunderstanding The Princess Bride is one of the classic blunders, right up there with getting involved in a land war in Asia
Trump has never seen this movie.
I don’t know, seems pretty inconceivable.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
It’s about fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles…
AND KISSING
ew
lol - I love the lack of context the inbox gives so I was thinking “…what did I say???” - makes me laugh every time something like this happens. :)
Some day you might not mind so much.
I’m sad he never ended up completing the sequel Buttercup’s Baby. I read the sample chapter ages ago and was very excited about it, but I’m pretty sure the author has died since.
Then again we already have The Fitz and the Fool books by Robin Hobb, which I think hit a lot of the same notes we would have gotten.
Maybe when Stephen King finally finishes his abridgement.
They committed one of the classic blunders!
Am part Sicilian, can confirm.
I’m gonna go in against you because death isn’t on the line.
No it isn’t. Its a public health statement warning people about being “Mostly Dead”.
Truthfully it is a revenge movie … “Hello, my name is …”
I know some people that had the sarcasm and satirical nature of Starship Troopers fly right over their heads.
Starship Troopers taught me one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned: I am not immune to propaganda
Definitely understood that it was satire, but the idea of unifying to fight against a common enemy hits me in ways that I need to understand and account for
the idea of unifying to fight against a common enemy hits me
Organized cooperation is basically one of the human superpowers though, so it’s hard to hold that against you.
Yup! It just becomes a problem when the common enemy is another group of sapient beings (even worse when they’re humans) instead of things like climate change or starvation
I watched that movie when i was way too young and it was one of my favorite movies. I had no idea that it had any message besides cool bug fights. In hindsight, it’s pretty weird that there are apparently adults who never see past that.
I think that’s Paul Verhoeven’s fault. He doesn’t understand the difference between satire and farce.
In a farce, the world the characters inhabit is entirely different to our own. In Airplane!, the characters are deadly serious, but the world and culture they inhabit is 1000% sillier than ours. You don’t watch Airplane! and come out of the theater thinking “man, air travel is the stupidest thing we could be doing, it’s time for anti-aviation social reform.” You spent your evening laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.
Compare that to Dr. Strangelove, which is also over the top ridiculous, but it has some serious and sane characters in it to help ground the satire. There’s a theme where the higher in rank a character is, the more crazy they are. The crew of the bomber, enlisted through lieutenant, are perfectly professional. Captain Mandrake is the movie’s straight man. Major Kong is a bit of a character but he takes his job seriously. Colonel Guano is checked out, General Ripper is elbow chewing insane, and The War Room is full of nutcases. The grounding in reality provided by the straight characters who respond realistically to the situation is what makes the satire effective.
Paul Verhoeven doesn’t let any normalcy into his movies. I think Showgirls is the worst for it because it doesn’t take place in a Sci-Fi future, it’s supposed to be the film’s present day…except people don’t talk like that. People don’t act like that. Sex doesn’t look like that. Vegas doesn’t work like that. So, this movie isn’t set in our reality. The closest thing the audience is familiar with to what’s actually on screen is a Skinemax flick. People don’t act like that and sex doesn’t look like that but the actress really took her clothes off, so…am I supposed to be whacking it right now? Metallica managed to get the point across more effectively in their music video for their cover of Turn The Page than Verhoeven did with a $45 million feature film.
I like your post, but it reads more like you don’t get/don’t like Verhoeven, than it sounds like youre describing an objective problem with his narratives. Showgirls is one of his best movies, all the things you describe about it in the negative, is where Verhoeven’s commentary actually lives. It isnt the artists job to only show people the art they understand.
In a thread about what is the deeper meaning that people miss, criticizing Verhoeven on this basis stands out because without Verhoeven, Robo Cop Starship Troopers, Basic Instinct all get made, and they suck. Theres no deeper meaning to them at all. Nobody else could have told ST story quite that way. Verhoeven read the satire into the scripts, and was telling stories nobody else was even capable of telling in Hollywood. ST didn’t work with American audiences, because Americans fall for fascism, thats the point. the same guy who wrote/conceived RoboCop and ST 1 also wrote the garbage ST sequels. Verhoeven read his own experiences living under Nazis into ST using satire.
Criticizing Showgirls because it doesn’t follow a formula for satire doesn’t quite land because Showgirls is a metacritique of formulas. “Las Vegas doesn’t work like that” because the movie is about Hollywood. It was critically panned because it showed a mirror to the industry. By creating a glamorous Hollywood musical in the tradition of An American in Paris, My Fair Lady, and Singing’ in the Rain (itself a meta-satire, albeit a warmhearted one); but taking on the form of Skin-emax movie, bad sex scenes included, Verhoeven’s message was clear. But no one who makes these movies wanted that message to be received by audiences.
I don’t dislike Paul Verhoeven. I think he’s bad at making his point though.
Communication is the art of making oneself understood. Paul Verhoeven, more than any other filmmaker I can think of, belongs in this thread. Because people miss the points of his films a lot. Because he’s bad at making his point.
Starship Troopers doesn’t come across as a satire of fascism to people who haven’t experienced fascism; it comes across as a big over the top dumb action movie. If you have to already know the message to get the message, you haven’t communicated an idea. Can you find me any evidence of Paul Verhoeven saying something on the order of “Watch, I’m going to make this movie and the Americans aren’t going to get it and that’s my real artistic intent”? Because if you can’t, that’s not the point. He set out to make the point that fascism is bad, then forgot what he was doing and made a blockbuster action movie that’s way to easy to turn your brain off and enjoy unironically.
Showgirls is a beautifully shot terrible film. It’s not an innovative story: Innocent young woman with stars in her eyes heads out west to seek fame, fortune and glamor in show business only to find a crass and cynical world that at first won’t even talk to her, so she eeks out an existence as a waitress, auditioning for parts where she can, only finding success by compromising her own values; a topless scene here, sucking a director’s dick for a bigger part there, until she’s finally the star and she’s just as corrupt and twisted as her environment now.
Showgirls is built on the bones of that story, by a man who doesn’t know much about storytelling but a lot about exploiting young women. You don’t get to tell me this movie was even intended as a satire of sexually exploitative Hollywood when they sold a special edition DVD that came with two shot glasses, a deck of cards with strip games on them, a nude poster of Elisabeth Berkley and a pair of tassels on suction cups so you could play Pin The Pastie On The Stripper. “Fresh off the back of my hit film The One With Sharon Stone’s Pussy In It, I’m going to satirize sexually exploitative Hollywood by sexually exploiting harder than any Hollywood director has sexually exploited before!”
There’s more to satire than making the biggest example of the thing you think you’re satirizing.
Lol well said. I’m not convinced that he is just a bad story teller, and wrt ST being just another dumb action movie to Americans, nothing more, I think this is where your argument is too sweeping, because without Verhoeven there is no deeper meaning. The ST sequels were all just dumb action movies and none landed with audiences at all. Og ST resonated with Euro audiences, and the sequels were disliked by all. Imo for your argument to have real teeth, you’d see some popularity of ST sequels among USamerican audiences which supposedly can’t tell the difference.
And Showgirls was beyond heavy handed. “We are critiquing decadence by giving you more of it” is a very mid- 90s take. To undercut my own argument a bit, while I don’t believe at all that an artist has a responsibility to communicate a fully realized and internally consistent worldview, I think that the female form is an extremely loaded subject for artists and has been for 1000 years and more. Disregarding that gives a black eye to any work of art, even if the object of criticism is the desecration of the artful female form. I think its fair to say that Verhoeven might want to have a cake and eat one. Esp with Showgirls. I think ST is unique in that Verhoeven’s perspective on fascism is actually unique. It doesn’t matter what people think because it is his experience and his movie. With Showgirls, he isnt a woman and he never had to make it in Hollywood as a woman. And to an outsider maybe all you see is sleaze, and dehumanization. But pointing out sleaze and dehumanization in the negative while creating a sleazy dehumanizing work, exposes a deep cynicism that warps the point. I think you make a good point here, by the end of the move everyone is just completely vapid and meaningless, products of a machine that turns out vapid meaningless art to which there is little real alternative. You either get everything you want and it ruins you, or you get nothing or lose everything and youre still ruined. There’s no humanity in it at all, and it takes some problematic liberties to make a point, that is perhaps a worse point than could have been made. I think you are definitely correct that overdoing it to make a point only gets you so far. And I think its fair to say Showgirls is a particularly egregious example.
I like the movie, I get what he is trying to do, and I think he accomplishes it. But there are things that are objectively wrong about it, even in the context of its deeper meaning, and the route it goes to tell a story. It relies on artistic license to get away with it, but ignores all of the conventions of artistry because there is supposedly no artistry in the subject so why depict it? So in that way I can agree with you about Verhoeven’s storytelling
It’s got to be The Matrix.
These red pill people view “liberals” as the Matrix they’re escaping…when the film explicitly says the opposite.
Do red people know that both of the writers are trans…?
They spell it out in plain words in the 4th movie too lol
To be fair, everything past the first movie is pretty ass.
They never read the article. Ever. Doesn’t matter if it’s the bible or playing Born in the USA at a rally.
Dune 1 and 2.
Moral of story: beware blind loyalty to messianic figures
Audience reaction: Paul is so cool and admirable, I hope he wins!
It gets worse. Even Frank Herbert started having a cult, his answer was: “did you guys not read my book??”
I think he mentions it in one of the commentaries at the end (or beginning) of Dune Messiah.
In my experience, the fans of the Dune book series are pretty much always cultish.
More than any other book series, people think they’re special if they like Dune.
Holy shit, that checks out. The two most Dune-obsessed people I know well are both born-again Christians (previously agnostic/atheist of Catholic upbringing) and both initially fell into the MAGAsphere.
I’d put Enders Game as a contender, though the demographic obsessed with that book seems to be former gifted kids who somehow missed how screwed up Ender’s life was.
I love Dune, but Herbert was all the way up his own ass by the time he got to God-Emperor. The books were still good, but his giant ego wasn’t helping. I mean, he, and a bunch of his fans, thought, or still think in the case of the fandom, that Star Wars ripped off Dune when they only have some surface similarities at best. It’s like claiming that Sonic the Hedgehog ripped off Mega Man on the basis that they’re both sidescrollers that feature a blue protagonist. But he was really fucking adamant about it, so people still keep repeating it.
I agree to an extent. However, on the Star Wars thing, I’m pretty sure we have it on record that Lucas wanted to make a Dune adaptation first, but couldn’t get the rights. This led to Star Wars.
It’s not an exact copy, but it does share a lot of similarities. It also copies plenty of other sci-fi (and a lot from other storytelling, like it’s an almost exact copy of the hero’s journey) too though. Lucas was (maybe still is) a great artist, and, as the saying goes, great artists steal from other works.It’s obvious to anyone paying attention that there is Dune DNA in Star Wars. It isn’t a rip off, but it is taken to be used.
He wanted to make a Flash Gordon adaptation, not Dune. It shows, too, with Star Wars’ aesthetic being heavily inspired by both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.
Narratively, the original trilogy is heavily influenced by pulpy sword-and-sorcery books and comics and Kurosawa’s films, but with the twist that it’s in space.
Dune, meanwhile, is Hamlet crossed with Lawrence of Arabia in space.
Spice appears in both, except what spice actually does in Star Wars wasn’t explored in anything Lucas made and Frank Herbert died before any of the expanded universe existed. There are only three mentions of spice in the entire original trilogy, all in ANH, and those are a bit about Luke believing his father was a navigator on a spice freighter, 3PO mentioning the spice mines of Kessel, and Han having to dump a load of smuggled spice. It’s clearly just a shout-out; the spice is just a background reference and doesn’t feature in the story. You could replace spice with beanie babies and nothing would change.
What parts of Star Wars do you feel originate from Dune? I’ve never actually gotten a straight answer and I’m genuinely curious.
It doesn’t have the story of Dune, but it has elements inspired by it. As you mention, Spice. It’s just an homage, but that’s obvious.
It also has Luke starting on a desert planet, with an emphasis on gathering water. His family is killed, leading to the start of his journey (though this is common in storytelling in general, so it could be from a million other places).
The force has some similarities to the pseudo-magical aspects of Dune, with a heavy focus on meditation and understanding your body and the universe. (Both the Bene Gesserit and Mentats have forms of This. BG are more internal-focused and Mentats external.)
Im sure there’s a lot more that could be pointed out. That’s just a small list off the top of my head.
Any of it could be argued as coming from any number of sources. After all, Frank Herbert was inspired by other sources to create his world too. The desert planet was inspired by his experience with dunes. The religion and cultural stuff are all inspired by real life religions and cultures. None of it is from nothing.
No one has ever had an original idea. It all comes from other aspects that we absorb in our life. Lucas didn’t “rip off” Dune. He certainly borrowed pieces from it though, along with a lot of other media, sci-fi and otherwise.
Ok, sure, uh… This sounds the equivalent of MAGA cope, to be honest.
Not to say that I disagree with the cultish behavior of the Dune Fandom in the general sense.
But your tirade is basically at the same level. So, like… Chill out?
Ah yes, the original Imperial Truth -> Imperial Creed pipeline.
This is the correct take of the message. It also, given the universe the story is set in, is the only way towards success. Within the big picture, I have empathy for Paul, as he is put in a situation he cannot win and has to follow for the better outcome (for himself, family, humanity).
Wishing for omniscience is like wishing for immortality. Be careful, you might get it. I love the scene after the awakening. Seeing all paths, knowing the only one that will work, and seeing its horror.
The books do a far better job portraying this. The characters tell the reader. The trilogy spends more time giving Momoa extra scenes than it does following the story. (Yeah, it could be worse, but they miss a lot of critical events).
As long as Denis doesn’t wuss out and gives me at least some on screen God-worm, all is not lost.
One thing to note that I think we’re supposed to question is that we mostly only have Paul’s (and later Lato II’s) perspective. In the version we hear, what they’re doing seems evil but is the only path to a good outcome, where humans have free will. However, I think we’re supposed to question if they’re actually fully omniscient. I think we’re supposed to consider that there’s other ways to achieve the same goal. This is just the only path Paul and his descendants can see.
Also - the allegory for oil dependency and the Middle East?? Went right past so many people I talked to
the third movie will be based on Dune Messiah, which I believe is the book where Herbert finally understood that subtlety is for people who don’t really care about their message :p
well Paul does have powers that no one else has …
No one else has -yet.
It’s even more broad. The lesson is to not blindly trust charismatic leaders. The longer Dune story is about teaching humanity to think for themselves. Most people are far too easy to control.
If you continue to Dune Messiah, Paul talks some about all the destruction that he causes putting humanity on the “golden path”. This is referring to that. He needs to create so much suffering that humanity stops blindly obeying leaders. Paul actually is too good of a person to give up the last of his humanity and turn into the worm God Emperor, so his son ends up having to do this instead.
Fight club. Haaands down
Was it the movie they misunderstood, or did the movie misrepresent the book. I haven’t watch or read either in years but I feel like it’s similar to how Starship Troopers, misrepresents the book.
Starship troopers movie is a lampoon that goes way over the top. Unfortunately so do most Hollywood blockbusters so it kinda missed the mark
Fight club was a deconstruction of toxic masculinity as an outcome of capitalism and the fact that a generation of men are being lead about like pigs by the nose, their lives manipulated and stripped of purpose and meaning. Fuckbros took it to mean “me big man fight shit”
Going off my age’ed memory here but I don’t remember Tyler being described quite so fashionable in the book. Yes the movie is an attempt to lampoon toxic masculinity, but compared to other castings nobody else had the I want to be Brad Pitt star power. I think it overpowers that you’re not supposed to agree with Tyler. It’s like how people will subconsciously mimic those they admire.
The obvious one for me would be Wolf of Wall Street. Clearly tried to exaggerate excess and hedonism, but people praised the lifestyle and tried to think “that is what I want to be one day”
Same with the movie Wall Street: it was meant as a cautionary tale about greed and callousness in modern society, but Reagan era yuppies ended up identifying with the villain.
Several decades later, they made the atrociously titled sequel “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” which had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer blow to the genitals and Trump cult members STILL managed to consider the obvious villain admirable.
I truly do not understand what makes people think that way.
Starship Troopers I think, though that’s a bit of a weird one since I remember that the movie is a lot more antifascist than the book it’s based on.
The book is fine. The opening pages tell us clearly that we are nuking bugs on planets with intelligent beings, using all the ammo (because it’s too expensive to return with nukes) and leaving for another planet with bugs.
After that we jump to our protagonist, who is being brainwashed in high school.
Finally, Heinlein was writing his father’s worldview and wanted to take it to its logical end.
I love that book and movie.
So how do you rate it as an adaptation?
Good but not great. They dump the battlesuits entirely. For budget reasons this makes sense at the time but that investment in equipment (and to a lesser extent the soldiers within) shows the cost of space travel and how we are spending insane amounts to kill space bugs that are on most worlds.
But they, in turn, use the infantry rush of unarmored soliders pretty well to show the cost of war.
The use of propaganda in the media mirrors the indoctrination well enough. It keeps the audience from completely getting on board with the propaganda since it’s so on the nose. (Some will still swallow it, the same way some people saw The Boondock Saints as an awesome hero flick rather than an over-the-top action comedy.)
Shooting the cat and it exploding into the wall should have been a clue for most people.
In a lot of ways the movie is a spoof of the book. Verhoeven famously hated the book and it’s depiction of military fascism.
The book doesn’t so much promote fascism as explore it. It’s more obvious when you read his other works that that’s just what he does, explore premises.
Stranger in a Strange Land came out less than 2 years later and depicts the creation of a free-love hippie space religion.
its seems loosely based on nazi too, even down to the uniforms.
Whiplash
Some people think it’s an inspiring story about resilience and persistence towards one’s dreams. But it’s basically a story about textbook abuse and how pandering to the abuser ends up consuming you, erase your personality and turn you into his puppet.
The solo in the end is tragic, it is not a climax. Andrew started it to stick it to Fletcher but ended up pandering to him. Fletcher won. He now was his little trophy. Andrew is now a great drummer, for Fletcher to brag about, but sacrificed everything for it and he will die young, sad and alone. All for Fletcher’s ego. And when Andrew is gone, Fletcher will find another toy to mold.
Wait, did anyone not think that’s what it was?
Most people I know that saw the movie thought that.
500 Days of Summer.
Everyone thinks it’s another one of those “manic pixie girl” rom com movies that were all the rage in the mid 00s but it’s not. It’s more of a story about Tom’s inability to have a healthy relationship with just about anyone. He builds this ideal girl in his head for Summer, falls for her, but she’s just not into him. For her Tom is just a fling, that’s it. People wanted the two to be together but she just never had feelings for him. And he doesn’t learn his lesson at all because at the end he does the same thing again with another woman named Autumn thus further proving it’s all going to happen again. they meet because they have a similar interest in ONE topic and she even initially declines his offer for coffee. He builds these women in his head without actually taking them for who they are. He constantly falls for the wrong women. like the changing of the seasons.
I always felt it was a little bit more open ended, possibly even hopeful at the end.
Him finally moving past the 500 days of “summer” to find autumn would imply that he’s “changed with the seasons” and has learned more about himself during his relationship with summer. There are definitely allusions to him potentially sliding back, but it’s not something the movie really commits to in its ending.
American Psycho
apparently there’s communities that take Patrick Bateman as some kind of role model
Its hard to know if those people are serious because Bateman is also kind of a meme. Also, the book gets the point across better.
There’s communities that see axe-murdering a colleague as cool and justified, so I’m not sure if they misunderstood one movie or rather life itself.
Fight Club
There’s a theory that the main character actually is suffering from cancer and that the love interest is also a lens for him to confront who he really is.
Fascinating how that upends it all, but I am not sure I believe it.
There’s also a theory that Tyler Durden is created in response to The Narrator’s inability to form a real personal relationship with Marla.
There are a million Fight Club theories. My favourite is that the narrator is Calvin and Tyler is Hobbes.
There’s some unreliable narrator aspects to Fight Club (the narrator is mentally ill) so there’s some ambiguity with events, particularly the nature of Tyler Durden that are open to audience speculation. For example, was the soap salesman on the plane actually real, and The Narrator latched onto his image to create the Tyler Durden persona?
Better question: Who cares? Does that change the theme or message of the film overall?
I can speak from personal experience on this one: Taxi Driver (1976)
When I first watched it (admittedly I was only 13 or so at the time) I pretty much took it as a story about
spoiler
a socially-warped but well-meaning hero who stood up against the baddies and won, and saved the girl in the process.
Watching it a few years later, the true horror of it became clear to me, and the contemptible piece of shit Travis Bickle is was made obvious. I think I was just too young to get it, but I was also a huge De Niro fan and so, whatever his character was, I was ride or die with him.
Travis Bickle predicted incel mass shooters. People seem to think he was the cool antihero he thought himself to be, I often see his face in people’s profile pics and on cringy self-aggrandising quote memes. He was a disgusting pig of a man and the film is not a celebration of anything he did. On the contrary.
Travis Bickle is an antihero, technically, but antiheroes do good through evil means or for evil reasons. It’s hard to argue that Travis didn’t ultimately do something good. But it’s also clear that he could just as well have done something evil, like shoot up a pizza restaurant because of its supposed basement.
The only thing I know about the movie is that incels love it, and that alone is why I wont watch it.
V for Vendetta. Even the director missed the point of an anarchist revolution story.
My theory about V (in the graphic novel) is that
spoiler
V and Evie are the same person. Evie is a trans woman who was imprisoned in cell five for being “undesirable”, like the lesbian woman in the cell next to her. The chapter where Evie is “tortured” by V is actually her V persona making Evie face the fact that this actually happened to her. The bad guys say “you’re the man from cell five” because they are bigots who refuse to accept her as female.
Sexual liberation and autonomy is a big part of V for Vendetta. I’m probably wrong about my theory but I just think it fits the rest of the message of the graphic novel.
I really love that theory. I don’t believe it’s true but I think it’s awesome nevertheless.
Iirc in early drafts V was a trans woman forced to detransition by norsefire.
I like your theory but won’t headcanon it myself.
Tap for spoiler
Because as I see it one of the major points was that V is too broken to do anything but destroy the oppressive regime and take revenge, and in doing so became a Moses figure, meant to lead people to the promised land that they can’t enter. V is fundamentally tragic, the human being capable of filling both roles died in the camp. And so what we see of V is someone who shows the good in their heart by shaping Evie, who has also been damaged, but is capable of healing. V could have just as easily not bothered attempting to rebuild, unable to care since everyone worth saving was killed fighting, but Evie was worth saving and if Evie was worth saving then there might be those who deserve a better world Evie could build.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s did not paint Holly Golightly as a character to aspire to, yet generations of young women have emulated her since.
THANK YOU! She abandoned her kitty in the rain. Fuck that bitch
Pan’s Labyrynth … its not a Fairy tale.
