Movies that have our favorite movies in them

I watched a lovely little indie film shot in Sri Lanka last night, called Ben and Suzanne, a Reunion in 4 Parts. 

Why this movie? It showed up in a list of new additions on Kanopy, and I liked what both this poster and the title itself promised about its content. So for the first time in a very long time, I watched a movie I knew nothing about, that wasn't a new release on one of the streamers. (Plus, as I've written previously, the end of the month is the perfect time to use up your Kanopy credits because you can't take them with you.)

So glad I did. What a good movie.

One of my favorite things about Ben and Suzanne was its specificity. The title characters are an American couple in a long-distance relationship, because she has taken a job in Sri Lanka and they don't want to break up. She works for an NGO that gives small loans to female-run businesses, which is usually a fulfilling calling, except when she has to go try to collect on the loans, which is what she's doing now. In fact, she did not expect to be doing it because she thought the ten days over Christmas and New Year's were going to be a proper vacation for her and her partner, who is visiting from parts unspecified in the U.S., only her boss had other ideas. He's Indian by heritage and can understand a little Tamal, which might help in collecting the debts, which he reluctantly agrees to do even though this was supposed to be a holiday. As is usually the case with long-distance relationships, each new time together is a mini referendum on the relationship, because things have changed in the intervening time and you have to suss each other out to see if the other one is still committed. And of course there are awkwardnesses over physical intimacy and differing needs, plus the usual logistical nightmares involved in any trip through a third world country. Ben and Suzanne are played excellently by Sathya Sridharan and Anastasia Olowin.

But you know my favorite specific thing about this movie?

There is a running plot point about Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, my #55 on Flickchart.

How unexpected was that?

Ben and Suzanne spoilers to follow. 

Early in the film, Ben asks Suzanne what the insect threat is like here, and whether we're talking Starship Trooper level. Just that single name drop would have been fun enough, but not worthy of a blog post. 

But Suzanne says she hasn't seen it, and Ben responds with incredulity -- especially since he thought they watched it together that time in that hotel in Maine. (Another great bit of specificity in the script.) That's one of the other things that happens during these "reunions," where it becomes clear that something has gone out of synch and that the two don't remember the same things about the relationship, almost as though one is gaslighting the other -- and it's usually a portent of worse things to come, which it is here.

So Ben goes on a quest to find Starship Troopers in rural Sri Lanka, and he actually succeeds on the first attempt, which they both find to be a bit of a miracle. They don't actually have a DVD player, though I don't think this is mentioned at the time.

Lo and behold, a few days later it's Christmas, and Suzanne has acquired a DVD player as a gift to Ben. He's chuffed, to use the Australian term. They're finally going to get to watch Starship Troopers.

Only there's a region mismatch. The DVD is region 1 while the DVD player would be (checks internet) region 5. They both luxuriate in exquisite but funny disappointment.

You'd think that would be it for Starship Troopers in the story, but of course you wouldn't actually, because if you are familiar with even the basic elements of screenwriting -- especially romcom screenwriting, which this broadly is -- you know the final callback is still coming.

So a few days and an apparent breakup later, the two are staying in separate rooms at their final destination on the trip, and Ben notices that Starship Troopers is playing on TV that night. Perhaps unusual New Year's Eve programming, but not the craziest you've ever seen. He goes over to her hotel room to tell her, but she's not there. Back in his own room, he faints.

Later when the movie is actually starting, she's had the TV on in the background, and hears it announced. Even though she's mad at Ben, that resolve is already crumbling and of course she gets a delighted look on her face -- and it helps that she's broken a choice to go dry, having gotten silly on wine. (Don't worry, she's not an alcoholic, she was just going dry for unspecified reasons.) She's interested enough to leave the movie on but not to contact Ben about it. 

When it ends and she's loved it, she goes to find Ben, only to learn he had to be taken to the hospital. (He had terrible food poisoning a few days earlier, and this might be part of that.) That's when she (drunkenly) rushes to the hospital, kind of the equivalent of the rushing through the airport scene at the end of most romcoms. (This movie will have its airport scene, but it has a decidedly different flavor, which is just one of this film's strengths.)

When they're reunited and Ben is, in fact, okay -- which we the viewers didn't know until this point either -- Suzanne gushes that she saw and loved the movie, and they go through about a minute's worth of rapid-fire sharing of the movie's best parts, not to mention a sophisticated overall take by Suzanne on the larger movie and what it's doing. And when I say a minute, I mean a minute -- not the 15 seconds that would have been enough. They get it -- Starship Troopers is awesome both on the macro level of its themes and the micro level of its gore and action scenes. They've finally reconnected, even if it might be for the last time. 

I'm just sitting here watching this with a big dopey grin on my face.

You might have thought from the title of this post that I was going to come up with a sort of listicle of other times movies I've loved have factored into the plots of other movies I might like or even love, but the truth is, I really just wanted to talk about this movie. I hope you'll see it, even though I've spoiled it. 

The practical snowman

While prepping my massive list of films I might watch while using my projector at the hotel last month, I noticed that Jack Frost was playing on Amazon. I'd always meant to see it, finding the concept of Michael Keaton reincarnated as a snowman odd to say the least. But I didn't watch it at the hotel because I figured it would be better to wait until it was, you know, actually Christmas season.

Saturday was the night, but when I rocked up to Amazon, I realized the Jack Frost on there was the horror Jack Frost from a year earlier. At the time I didn't realize, I suppose, that there were actually two different movies, though I have certainly seen their different posters at different times in my life. Anyway, if you asked me, I definitely would not have told you that I thought Michael Keaton starred in this movie, whose poster would have been the one I saw on Amazon:

So no Michael Keaton Jack Frost for me.

Except then I realized: "I'm an adult. I don't have to only watch movies I can stream for free. If I need to pay a couple bucks to watch the Michael Keaton Jack Frost, I will."

And sure enough, it was available for rental on iTunes for $2.99.

So the movie, which I marginally liked, was a disappointment in the following way: It wasn't worse. I really expected the idea of a magic harmonica that breathed life into a snowman, when it was wearing the clothes of a boy's deceased father, and that father was the one who started inhabiting the body of this snowman, to be a lot more ridiculous. Within the parameters of what sounds like a pretty absurd setup, it's a pretty conventionally heartwarming story.

I didn't actually know about the magical harmonica beforehand, and that might point to the only sort of absurd part of the movie. Before he dies in a car accident during a blizzard -- spoiler alert -- Keaton's title character is the leader of a kind of honky tonk band, where they wear unironic bowler hats. It's the kind of music Bruce Willis was into for a while there. And apparently it did not seem as ridiculous in 1998 as it undoubtedly was. (That music has its roots in something good, but transformed into a very poor facsimile thereof.)

It's because he's so focused on his music career that Keaton can't be there for things like his son's big hockey game. You get the idea.

In fact, on its own terms, the movie is probably not sufficiently good to earn my slight recommendation, but I'll tell you why I'm giving it:

I really enjoyed the look and feel of the snowman.

"Look and feel" is a term we often use in my regular line of work for the usibility of a piece of software -- its "look" and its "feel." When a new version of something is released, someone might say "The look and feel won't be changing."

But it's appropriate in this case as well because with the practical effects used here, something really does have a "feel."

At first I thought the snowman might be digital. Jack Frost was a year after Starship Troopers, which I continue to hold up as the shining example of a film that defies its time period in terms of visual effects. Twenty-three years later, those arachnids still look good. Titanic was 1997 also.

A digital snowman would be a piece of cake compared to those two movies. But Jack Frost also didn't have the budget of those two movies, so it hardly seems like they'd be at the front of the queue for the best in digital animation. 

I went so far as to google it, which of course revealed that the snowman was a creation of Jim Henson Creature Shop.

I love this for a couple reasons.

The first is that it really does excuse the mild affection I have for this movie, which is pretty out of sync with the film's 19% Rotten Tomatoes score. If you've got Jim Henson puppets in your movie, it means you are part of a smallish fraternity of films that share the DNA of Henson's more obviously wonderful creations. (Never mind that the execrable The Happytime Murders is also in that fraternity.)

The second is that it reminded me of something where I shouldn't have needed any reminding, especially since I rewatched Labyrinth during the aforementioned hotel trip with the projector. It reminded me that puppets can be capable of great expressiveness. 

This snowman was designed in such a way that the individual parts of his face can move independently of each other, and that the puppeteers have to learn how to make these movements. There are four puppeteers credited to this snowman, and since puppeteers don't usually get much credit, let's name them here. Bruce Lanoil and Denise Cheshire are credited as in-suit performers, while Denise Cheshire Pearlman is listed as "head operator" -- which either means she operates Jack's head, or she is the head of all the operators. Interestingly, Denise Cheshire and Denise Cheshire Pearlman appear to be two different people as evidenced by their separate IMDB pages, though surely there is a relationship. Allan Trautman is also credited as "additional puppeteer."

Whatever the combination of techniques and talents, they really make this snowman come alive -- alive in a way that a dead digital creation rarely comes alive, and certainly not in 1998. It's one thing to use a computer to create an arachnid whose face you can't see, who has no personality, and a sinking cruise ship. An actual creature with a soul wouldn't have been up to digital's abilities at the time.

And Jack really is tactile. That's a word that gets thrown around all the time in the debate between practical effects and digital effects, but there's a reason for it, as it perfectly expresses the three-dimensional physicality of a character on screen -- the kind we also see throughout Labyrinth. I suppose there isn't really a "debate" on which would be better, if the possiblity existed to use either technique for the same amount of money, and achieve the same result. Every filmmaker whould use practical effects if he or she could. But practical effects just aren't ... well, practical.

But I'm glad they still have a place in the movies, either because those movies were long enough ago that digital was not yet viable, or because some movies today will repudiate digital in order to create something with a more definitive physical presence.

And the truth is, when that tactile, practial snowman moved its stick eyebrows, its coal eyes or its cork nose, I felt the emotion behind it. 

And so yes, I did believe that a harmonica-playing Bruce Willis wannabe had, for a few magical weeks, returned to this earth in snow form. 

Super Troopers

I like to use holiday weekends to catch up on beloved favorites.

I don't know why, exactly. But something about not working on a Monday -- this time, to celebrate the birthday of the queen -- makes me want to dig back into the archives, usually from my own collection, to reacquaint myself with movies I love but maybe haven't seen in several years.

It was six years in the case of the movies I watched Saturday and Sunday nights, only one of which I want to talk about at length here. (And more than 20 years for the one I saw on Friday night, Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, which I saw twice in either 1993 or 1994 as part of a film class in college, doing a visual project on a freeze frame from the movie. Did you know the color red appears in every shot in the film?)

The two movies were supposed to make for a double feature on Saturday night, as they are both in the sci-fi genre featuring various degrees of technological speculation (small amounts in the first, large amounts in the second) -- they even both contain scenes of men watching video messages where women break up with them. But Airport ended up being our second half of Saturday's double feature (as discussed here) and the second movie got shifted to Sunday night.

The first movie was Moon, my #1 movie of 2009, which I love dearly but which did not inspire me with any fresh blog-worthy insights on this viewing.

The second one was Starship Troopers, my #4 movie of 1997, and I've got a whole host of subheadings about this movie if you're ready for them. Spoilers ahead, of course.

The effects still look great

One of my most regular talking points about Starship Troopers over the years is that the visual effects still look great, even as the movie is now celebrating its 20th anniversary. However, I hadn't actually seen the movie since New Year's Day of 2011 in order to be able to sure if my words still held water.

I'm glad to say they still do -- for the most part.

I wouldn't include that last qualifier except I think I saw a few moments (perhaps only because I was straining to see them) where the outline of the effects looked barely visible against the humans and real backdrops. Though really, only barely, and even mentioning it countermands my argument in ways I don't think are really fair.

Not only do these bugs still look terrific, but they have actual weight in the physical space, which has been a serious deficiency of our current digital era. There are plenty of examples throughout the movie, but my favorite example is the one when the troopers are trying to prevent the arachnids from getting inside the fallen base as they wait for a transport to evacuate them. They've already breached the perimeter on into the landing that runs the circumference of the wall, where the troopers had just been standing moments before in their desperate attempt to stave off the attack. One of the bugs falls to ground level inside the base in his death throes, and when he does, he scatters a bunch of large, heavy metal cylinders probably used to hold propane or something, like bowling pins. Not only does that profoundly emphasize that creature's presence in the real world, but it shows just how dangerous they are -- you might die just from being hit by something they dislodge when they fall. (Or merely by their body falling, as underscored earlier when an out-of-control winged bug smears Mashall Bell's body across the pavement. Did I tell you I once said hello to Marshall Bell in Los Angeles?)

Anyway, the apparent realism of the bugs was always what made this movie indelible to me, and I'm glad to say they still look good. (Much better than the cheaper version made for Starship Trooper 3: Marauder, which I still haven't seen but whose trailer appears on my Troopers BluRay.)

The gender politics are good

Although much is made of how Troopers is a parody of Nazi propaganda -- and indeed, that's one of the many things this movie is doing -- it's actually anything but fascist in terms of its social, ethnic and gender politics. (For the purposes of this subheading, I'm focusing primarily on the gender politics.)

The two main female characters, Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards) and Dizzy Flores (Dina Meyer), are both strong -- but different types of strong. Many action movies use "can kick your ass" as a metric for whether a female character is strong, and Dizzy does fit that description. But Carmen is mentally strong and incredibly agile, her high marks earning her a trip to cadet school, where she quickly becomes one of the fleet's best pilots. Her recklessness has a kind of precision to it. Not only does she clear the wall of the docking bay by mere meters when taking the starship out (for the very first time!) and not only is this narrow margin totally intentional, but she also later detects a gravitational pull that allows them to avoid being destroyed by an unseen asteroid. Reckless as she may be in a superficial sense, though, she's so committed to protocol that when her starship has been blown in half later on, she doesn't immediately rush for the escape pods -- she sends a mayday signal that the Roger Young is going down. In fact, she even says "I repeat," and begins to give the message again. Her commanding officer has to physically pull her away from the communications device.

And speaking of that, Brenda Strong in that role is only one of several women we see in really senior roles. The new sky marshall -- in other words, one of the most powerful humans alive -- is not only a woman, she's also African. (I'm inferring she's African from her name more than her skin color -- it's Tehat Meru.) The high school teacher who teaches them alien biology is played by golden girl Rue McClanahan, and the Roughnecks corporal who gets her arm burned off by that giant ant-like creature is also a (black) woman. Even when Ibanez goes out flying for the first time, the other trainee pilot is also a woman, played by Amy Smart.

What is so miraculous about these gender politics -- which might logically figure to be retrograde if you considered only that the actors are alums of shows like Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place -- is how unobtrusive they are. No one even makes anything of how women are just as good or as tough as men -- it is just accepted as a given that they are. There may be nothing that underscores this concept more than that men and women shower together during basic training, as if it was nothing. In this strangely utopian future version of our world, the genders truly are equal.

In terms of ethnicity, you do have blacks in prominent roles throughout, though not among the main five or six characters unfortunately. But Seth Gilliam of The Wire and Walking Dead does play the role of hero at the end. And more than black-white politics, I'm interested in the fact that the world has truly become a blend in which ethnicity and country of origin have become a big melange. Some people complained about how the three main characters are from Buenos Aires yet they do not appear to be Latin American, ethnically. They do have Latin surnames, but otherwise they appear to just be white. A cynical person would (possibly correctly) attribute this to the impossibility of casting minorities in the lead of a film with a $105 million budget (and that's $105 million in 1997 dollars). (Not that the people they did cast were exactly household names.) I'd rather embrace the world this film gives us and attribute it to the ethnic diaspora pervading earth at the time, where anybody lives anywhere because there are no longer the strictly drawn prejudices we live with today.

The acting is not actually bad

One of the biggest knocks about this movie is that the actors are not good. When we say that -- and I do NOT include myself in that "we" -- we are basing it on their aforementioned soap opera origins.

But you know what? I defy you to find a truly false note in these performances.

I once thought that false note was the reactions, or lack of reactions, of the three leads to the fact that their home and everyone they know has just been wiped off the face of the map. Indeed, these reactions are, shall we say, muted. But I watched those scenes with special interest this time, and I don't find them to be as devoid of humanity as I once did. When Richards delivers the line about pretending it happened to somebody else, and the fact that she can't stop crying when she does think about it, I saw a legitimate pain behind her eyes, and it's a true method of coping that anyone who lost someone in 9/11 is probably familiar with. Starship Troopers is not about us watching people engulfed by grief, especially not if the intention is to make Carmen and Dizzy seem as strong as the film does. Richards also does a fantastic job acting out having an arachnid talon impaled through her shoulder, while Meyer's death scene is believably wild and panicky.

But what I was really noticing this time was the small choices made by Casper van Dien, who may have more of a reputation of limited range than any of the others. He has a dozen little moments that strike me as inordinately human. Like the way his expression changes, and he looks at his mom for confirmation, when his dad offers him a trip to The Outer Rings ("Zegema Beach!") rather than signing up for military service. Like his smile of realization of his own change of feelings toward Dizzy after she kisses the tank where he's convalescing (for three days!) from his arachnid leg injury. Like the subtle way he takes in the realization that he's going to get some when Richards whispers in his ear that her father isn't home. Even the moment of high humor when he calculates that 20 minutes is enough time to have sex with Dizzy before the fleet takes off. "We can do it," he says to her, then immediately starts shimmying out of his pants.

And all the rest

Like, every moment in all of the "Do you want to know more?" video segments that are interspersed throughout the narrative.

Like, the insanely gruesome violence, which gives as forthright a notion of the true violence of war as any film you are likely to see, and which continues to make me call this one of my all-time favorite war movies.

Like, the basic training sequences, which have a gee-whiz quality while also including some of that insanely gruesome violence.

Like, the fact that you can see Neil Patrick Harris' reflection in the bulbous eyeballs of the "brain bug" when he reads its mind at the end.

Like, the individual great lines of dialogue, such as my favorite ("We can ill afford another Klendathu!"), the most badass ("They don't look like much when you're scraping them off your boot.") and the most gloriously cheesy ("They sucked his brains out.").

This love fest could probably go on and on, but I'll spare you.

I'll just conclude by saying that I love this movie a little more each time I see it, and suggest that if you were one of those who originally thought you hated this movie, I advise you to see it again. It's chock full.