dreaming of mars
Dec. 1st, 2010 03:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mustinvestigateSomehow, I managed to grow up in an era and neighborhood where every family I knew had an entire wall of generic VHS tapes, lovingly labelled as films taped off HBO and Skinamax (usually containing a running order like: “Night of the Living Dead – Beethoven 2 – Robocop – The Care Bears Movie” because You Use Whatever Goddamn Tape Is In The VCR At The Time No Exceptions), and still never see Total Recall. I tried to read the Piers Anthony novelization, but as I recall the first or second page consisted of a sex scene in which the protagonist’s wife’s breasts were described as “big, but not cow-like as so many big breasts are,” and even at 13 I knew to just give up there.
(My other formative memory of Piers Anthony was of literally throwing A Spell For Chameleon out a window…then having to go retrieve it because it was a library book.)
Anyway, I was in the mood for something funny, and that DVD leaped out at me. The husband questioned my rationality, but – Paul Verhoeven? Arnold Schwarzenegger? 80s action-scifi? It had to be a laugh riot.
And I was right. For something that had the reputation for being a morally dangerous barf-inducing gore-fest among the home-permed set…it is goddamned adorable. And fails science forever, a lot, but who cares when there’s such lovingly disgusting model work?
It views like a precocious 14-year-olds Philip K Dick fanfic – a few moments that are genuinely PKD world-bendy (like the whole sequence where Schwarzenegger is wearing a large woman suit, which malfunctions, comes off in the coolest way possible – and then reforms and continues to talk! And then explodes! Whee!) balanced out with many many many “this could like totally be all in my head, or just like watching a movie, whoa!” lines. And there’s whores, of course, but good whores who would totally have sex with you but not anyone else!
It was, in fact, far less misogynistic than I expected, which was kind of a letdown. There’s no “Everybody got AIDS and shit!” The romantic interest could even be argued to have a rudimentary personality and demure hints of independent motivation…even if the female antagonist ends up a rare case of villain-motivating girlfriend-in-freezer.
What is this, really – cyberpunk for dummies? No, it’s the perfect action-movie equivalent of Synecdoche, New York.
…and the husband’s never going to forgive me for that comparison.
(My other formative memory of Piers Anthony was of literally throwing A Spell For Chameleon out a window…then having to go retrieve it because it was a library book.)
Anyway, I was in the mood for something funny, and that DVD leaped out at me. The husband questioned my rationality, but – Paul Verhoeven? Arnold Schwarzenegger? 80s action-scifi? It had to be a laugh riot.
And I was right. For something that had the reputation for being a morally dangerous barf-inducing gore-fest among the home-permed set…it is goddamned adorable. And fails science forever, a lot, but who cares when there’s such lovingly disgusting model work?
It views like a precocious 14-year-olds Philip K Dick fanfic – a few moments that are genuinely PKD world-bendy (like the whole sequence where Schwarzenegger is wearing a large woman suit, which malfunctions, comes off in the coolest way possible – and then reforms and continues to talk! And then explodes! Whee!) balanced out with many many many “this could like totally be all in my head, or just like watching a movie, whoa!” lines. And there’s whores, of course, but good whores who would totally have sex with you but not anyone else!
It was, in fact, far less misogynistic than I expected, which was kind of a letdown. There’s no “Everybody got AIDS and shit!” The romantic interest could even be argued to have a rudimentary personality and demure hints of independent motivation…even if the female antagonist ends up a rare case of villain-motivating girlfriend-in-freezer.
What is this, really – cyberpunk for dummies? No, it’s the perfect action-movie equivalent of Synecdoche, New York.
…and the husband’s never going to forgive me for that comparison.
