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Paul Verhoeven is probably best known as the man who brought us the Sharon Stone leg-crossing boxshot. The importance of this fact cannot be overestimated. After all, that little half-second of "Basic Instincts" became a permanent part of the American cultural psyche, giving rise to at least half a dozen "Saturday Night Live" skits and even bringing out the low brow side of bible-thumping PBS movie critic Michael Medved (who was later canned). And if you're an incoherent moron like Verhoeven, this is about the most you can expect to get out of a career in Hollywood. Nevertheless, the scrappy Dutchman continues to make movies that are as unentertaining as they are mindless. Not that this should surprise anyone. What is surprising is the way a few people insist on taking Verhoeven's movies seriously as cutting satire of American Excess (no doubt Douglas Rushkopf is a big fan). What these people seem to forget, however, is that even a well broken-in Nerf whiffle bat would be sharp enough to cut through a slab of butter as soft and squishy as the bogeyman of American Excess. Come to think of it, I'd rather watch someone cut through a room-sized slab of butter with a Nerf bat than watch a Verhoeven flick (keep in mind that the person doing the cutting would not be naked). Thus, I think we can all agree that there is only one real reason to watch Verhoeven's latest,  | | god damn this film sucks! |
"Starship Troopers"--the opportunity to watch expertly rendered giant insects from space gobble up dim humans in hypergore fashion. That's it . . . nothing else. Some folks might tell you that the cast of semi-nobody TV stars is full of smoking babes, but watching them act is a lot like watching the Spice Girls with the sound on--the minuses outweigh the pluses by a large margin. I guess it is fun to watch them get eaten, but that simply reconfirms my original point. On hand to lend "Starship Troopers" the obligatory 90s recent-history kitsch/nostalgia factor are Doogie Howser and Rue McClanahan, who if memory serves was the slutty Golden Girl. Big deal. To be fair, I suppose this is a movie that deaf people might get a kick out of. In somewhat less annoying and non-bigscreen news, kiosk combers may be pleasantly surprised to find that Quentin Tarantino's anticipated follow-up to "Pulp Fiction," "Jackie Brown" (which premiered just a few days ago in the United States), has been available here in Moscow in dubbed and pirated form on video for about a month already. With this flick Mr. T has his own very big shoes to fill, and it's probably safe to say that most people either are expecting to be blown away by the latest from "the best new director to appear in more than a decade" ("Rolling Stone") or are waiting to take critical potshots at a disappointment of a film that will reveal "the 90s most overhyped and overexposed figure" ("Movie Monthly") to be simply an "overrated loudmouth whose only talent is for self promotion" ("Screen View"). Not surprisingly, "Jackie Brown" will probably disappoint people on both sides of the fence. It lacks the visceral intensity and seamless combination of the appalling and the hilarious that made both "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction" complete blasts to watch. The one element that does remain is the inane lowlife dialogue, but the pace is more subdued and the laughs are fewer and farther between. Anyone who enjoyed those first two movies will miss the adrenaline rush, but the slower pace here also seems more in keeping with the underlying subject matter--a meditation on aging and deterioration hiding just beneath the surface of a crime drama and Mr. T's usual examination of the extremes of human  | | Yo, we're in a Tarantino flick! |
avarice. Of course, this will provide those who are out to crucify Quentin with plenty of opportunity to label him pretentious and overblown. Still, even though it seems rather ludicrous for someone Tarantino's age to be attempting what Eastwood did with "Unforgiven," it would be difficult to accuse "Jackie Brown" of being pretentious (at least the parts having to do with aging). There is a genuine depth to the way the audience's understanding of the characters is developed. By the end of the movie, it is painfully clear that Robert De Niro's decrepit, bong-toking bank robber and almost everyone else involved, in fact, are powerless individuals struggling to cling to the roles that make it possible for them to survive. As in "Fargo" (albeit much less effectively), several of the characters themselves become ticking bombs of desperation that will inevitably self destruct, taking other hopeless lives along with them. On the flipside, there are certainly things with which to be annoyed, particularly if that's your goal at the outset. Tarantino's trademark pop-culture references are pursued less avidly, but the near fetish that is made of blaxploitation superheroine Pam Grier in the lead role can be unsettling. The idea of making a 90s womyn version of "Shaft" but with a plot that makes sense in terms of itself and believable characters is an admirable one, but in making an intelligent blaxploitation flick Tarantino also lost a great deal of the cool. The musical selections must take a large share of the blame for this. A few of the songs, the Bobby Womack number in particular, do what the title song from "Shaft" did in that movie's opening scenes. Yet countless others are noticeably lacking in energy. Not that this will keep the movie soundtrack from being a platinum seller, especially given the undeniable importance of soundtrack marketing in today's Hollywood. A trickier question is whether "Jackie Brown" will do for Pam Grier (and perhaps fellow 70s relic Robert Forster, who is stellar here as a reluctant bail bondsman) what "Pulp Fiction" did for John Travolta. As people who drink too much and think too little like to say, "only time will tell."
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