Starship Troopers: Bonus Disc

That's right, this is not Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven's adaptation of the Heinlein novel, in which Space Fascists fight giant insects, but the DVD extra features. The main featurette consists of interviews with the screenwriter, director, and some of the cast and special effects people, many of whom express suprise that the press didn't get their wacky Nazi war movie as the tongue-in-cheek romp they intended. Anyway, it made a lot of money and no one is shedding any tears over it. The disc also contains some promotional shorts (forgettable), some 'Know Your Enemy' clips about the making of the giant bugs, and some before-and-after special effects sequences. The Know Your Enemy stuff is kind of interesting - I found it neat to learn where the CGI ended and puppeteers began. Also it left me wondering where the giant Brain Bug puppet ended up. It's the size of an RV, they might have put a hot plate in it or something. The before-and-after clips were not quite so cool - basically it's picture in picture so you can see people screaming in from or a green screen while CGI bugs rip their legs off in the finished version. Kinda gory taken all at once. Also in the "before" clips you can see and hear Paul Verhoeven jumping at the actors and yelling to make them react to the nonexistent bugs and asteroids and so forth. This is strangely charming.



So...yeah. Apparently you can get just the special features from Netflix now.

Fay Grim



Hal Hartley refers to this film as the "Empire Strikes Back" to Henry Fool's "Star Wars." (Episode IV, pedants.) It's apt - Fay Grim is much more complicated and action-filled and covers a lot more space. And Fay gets a bionic hand at the end. Okay, no, but she does get the most awesome outfit for clambering over the roofs of Paris since Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep.

Okay, believe some of his lies.

In my last entry, I forgot to mention how comical and even slapstick this series is - Henry and Fay don't get to hold onto much dignity. In this one Fay starts off still beleaguered and overwhelmed - her brother is in prison for obstruction of justice, her son with Henry, who disappeared from their lives seven years ago, is getting into trouble at school, and hey, Jeff Goldblum has suddenly appeared to to tell her that Henry is dead and that she has to go to France to negotiate for the return of part of Henry's Confession. See, Henry Fool was a bombastic criminal but he wasn't entirely a liar. He was wrapped up in a tangle of international criminal and terrorist networks, and his notebooks hold not a terrible, self-indulgent 'novel of ideas' but are a coded memoir embarrassing to several nations. And they are scattered, in eight parts, with numerous spies hunting them, because a single Maguffin is no challenge.



Jeff Goldblum is great at rattling off complicated Hal Hartleyisms. Fantastic dialogue. Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) is great in the opposite direction, saying as few words as possible, timed perfectly. I'm not usually this conscious of the directorness of films, but Hartley is very present in the way everyone moves and stands. It makes the comic timings work better somehow. If there's a weakness it's that the spy plot threads come together neatly and abruptly, and I feel like I missed something in there.



Back to the story! Fay agrees to fly off to France in a fabulous coat to fetch the notebooks, and rather quickly transforms into a saint of chaos, dodging bullets and treating the wounded on every side. Surrounded by spies and thieves and misunderstood flight attendants, she becomes the one clear thread of sanity and strength. You have to have seen Henry Fool to appreciate the enormity of this growth. Her exhausted 'okay' to each ridiculous new twist becomes a benediction. Parker Posey can sigh 'okay' and shake her head, and convey so much. It hurts me. Fay starts the film off saying she doesn't want to see Henry again, wishes she'd never met him. She becomes very canny in leveraging her power over everyone who wants the Confessions, but she gets in too deep, and starts caring about them all, and somehow this comes back around to Henry, who is always just out of reach. In the end all she wants is to rejoin him in some safe place, and forget their old lives. It almost works out. She gets in too deep. She tries to save too many people.



The end was devastating. I think I will have to write another entry for it, behind a spoiler cut, if anyone wants to talk about it.

Henry Fool

Once again I apologize for a long, paralytic pause in the Mystery DVD project. The Arranger set me the simple task of watching and responding to Hal Hartley's Fay Grim, and I have been crippled by its paradoxes. First I put off watching it, then I watched it, then I decided I needed to rewatch its prequel, Henry Fool, put off watching that, finally watched it and then Fay Grim again. And then I didn't know what to say. Hal Hartley's films are difficult for me, I think, because they present collections of fragile, unhappy people, sketch them out with great love and tenderness, and then set up terrible problems to threaten them. It's hard to make myself watch, but then I find the films delightful when I finally do. They are glued together with fabulous, absurd dialogue, and the actors pace around their sets and each other like tigers. Broken-down and encumbered, bleary-eyed from the bars but still very dangerous. Hartley moves people around very theatrically, and sometimes it's weird and distracting but usually it's awesome. He also composes much of the music in this series, and it's gorgeous.

Do not believe his lies.

In Henry Fool, the lives of a downtrodden little family in Queens is transformed by the arrival of Henry, who barges in determined to own every scene life tries to set him in. He talks like a bad, bad man on the run from a world not ready for his 'ideas,' which he has been setting down in school composition notebooks, his Confession. He inspires socially crippled garbageman Simon Grim to become a poet. He seduces Simon's mother and his sister Fay (Parker Posey). He's a satyr, a liar, a moocher and a bullshit artist of the first water. And I can never really figure how much of the chaos wrought in Henry Fool is actually Henry's doing, or if he just provides an obscene chorus of sorts. He does make Simon write. Things happen around him. But he's 99% crap and everyone learns this eventually. But they love him anyway, and in the end of the film, Simon and Fay help him flee to Europe ahead of a murder rap.



See Henry Fool for the second most quintessentially Parker Posey performance ever committed by a Parker Posey. The first is in Fay Grim, which I will grapple with in my next entry. Send dogs with brandy, and stout men with staves.

8 Mile

Eminem plays Jimmy Smith Jr., downtrodden Detroit resident and aspiring rapper. He and his friends are menaced and thwarted by rival hip-hop groups, poverty and their own not inconsiderable mistakes. Okay, the one really dumb guy who starts fights and shoots himself in the leg makes most of the mistakes. Anyway, they're kind of ineffectual in terms of making their dreams reality. After a series of hip-hop related humiliations and uncomfortable looking sex scenes, Jimmy, aka Bunny Rabbit, battles his rival in a public contest of rhyme. He wins. His group is thrilled. He might get the girl, I don't know. The end.



It's hard to critique this one and feel like I'm being fair. I didn't like it. I didn't believe in the conflict between the hero and the villain. I don't even totally get why there was one. But even if it had had a great conflict and clear motivations and more hot, less debasing sex scenes I still don't know if I would have enjoyed it. Rhymed insults and ritualized misogyny just aren't really my thing. Anyway, Eminem is a pretty clever rhyming guy and the acting was overall quite decent.

Beerfest: Unrated

Okay, this is the most offensive movie I've seen in a long time, but it's also hilarious. Disgusting, stupid and well-timed humor. Hey, check out the IMDB.com keywords!

Plot Keywords:

Breasts / Drinking / Binge Drinking / Contest / Germany

In that order! the internet is so helpful.



Two German-American brothers return to the old country to put their grandfather's ashes to rest at Oktoberfest. They discover that their heritage includes a secret drinking competition called Beerfest. The reigning German champions call their grandfather (Donald Sutherland) a thief and their great-grandmother (Cloris Leachman) a whore. Clearly the only way for them to regain their honor is to form an American beer-drinking team and win Beerfest. On the way they masturbate frogs, beergoggle disastrously, urinate on bystanders, challenge underage partygoers to "I Never," clone monkey hybrids and fistfight a woman. Really, it's wrong, very wrong, in basically every way. I'm still offended. Starting to feel guilty about being amused. SO FUNNY. Going to hell.



Most of the breasts are pretty early on in the film. Most of Cloris Leachman talking dirty is about two-thirds in. In case that helps.