Hi, friends!
I hope your day went well and that the work morons weren’t particularly moronic.
Is there a movie or tv show or book that has a scene that hits completely differently upon a later rewatch?
I was watching Legally Blonde on tv yesterday and there’s the scene where SoCal girl Elle Woods shows up amazingly unprepared for her first day of Harvard law school and gets told to leave the class and not return until she’s prepared for classes.
Of course younger me was all OMG how could she have been so stupid to not know better??? And of course it’s played up to stress how unacademic she is.
But older me? Watching that scene yesterday all I could think of was what else would she expect? She’s got a college degree in fashion design from some imaginary California state school, but also she mentions earlier in the movie that she has the higher GPA of her sorority and she gets a high enough score on the LSATs to qualify for admission to Harvard Law. Unless you have the kind of classes where you know you have to get the syllabus before class starts and begin course work before classes even start, how would you know? That’s a failure of Elle Woods’s academic advisor at her undergrad school to not prepare here. Also it came out in 2001, not exactly the era of professors heavily using online learning for communication.
I LOVED “Legally Blonde.” I’ve watched it at least a dozen times. The women, even her arch-nemesis, emerge victorious, and the men are put in their place.
Agreed! It’s one I watch and rewatch and rewatch, it’s so well done.
That same thing happened in The Paper Chase, which opened with the main character getting reamed out by John Houseman’s imperial Professor Kingsfield, who is upheld in the movie as a sort of demigod.
I thought it was funny that Houseman later repeated essentially the same role as a deadly autocrat in Rollerball.
I despise that approach. The whole idea that it’s the fault of the great unwashed for not digging out and finding the nugget of truth in the giant swamp of information and misinformation is a mix of laziness and control by people in power. There are always shortcuts for people on the inside and barriers for the ones on the outside.
Which is why Rollerball, as cheesy as it is, is fun at the end when James Caan beats the system.
I enjoyed the movie (not the remake which didn’t make any fucking sense.)
John-a-thon! John-a-thon!
I wasn’t surprised the motherfuckers kept changing the rules of the game just to fuck with the guy because they didn’t want him to upset their system.
Houseman as a driver’s ed teacher…
Extend your ahhrm out of the window, now extend your middle fingah, very good, well done.
One on One also had a similar subplot.  I didn’t understand when I first saw it as a kid how much money influenced college sports but now that some college athletes are paid 6 figure salaries out in the open it has finally come full circle.
I’m sure there are endless movies that I saw years ago and that I would be annoyed or horrified by now. One recent example is Hocus Pocus. We decided to rewatch it because they were releasing the sequel and … well, neither one is very good.
Yeah watching Hocus Pocus as an adult after not really giving a shit as a kid, I was like there’s 2 siblings the witches are after and they need virgin sacrifices. One of those siblings is a young adult with a potential girlfriend… just sayin they could have reduced the potential victims with a few minutes of time with the brother and his love interest.
Yeah, I saw it once long ago, and when we rewatched it, we were saying, “This is a cult classic?” It’s … pretty stupid overall.
Yeah I have a few friends who fricking love that movie as adults still and I’m like welp don’t get it but as long as I’m not stuck watching it, eh oh well.
I gotta admit I hated the 1997 movie Starship Troopers because I wanted to see the movie of a book I had loved but not an all too real parody.
In the aftermath of the Iraqinam War 2003-2012, I saw the movie again.
There were things I missed from watching with rolled eyes and a semi-closed mind.
Heinlein had a lot of wrong in his military and society of Starship Troopers which Paul Verhoven hated. One thing they kept keying in on was “service means citizenship” which does make some sense, but who says the military is more saintly than regular citizens? Or nurses? Or federal bureaucrats? The same people who profit off the military and sending people off to war.
I found that the world Heinlein created was too fucking idealistic and can not work in real life. The reason why Western militaries in particular have long logistical tails and a huge ass to teeth ratio (support troops vs fighters) is because of the sophistication of said logistical networks and weapons systems. You can’t have a pure fighting organization with no logistical tail then you get the Imperial Japanese system which 1) lost the war and 2) let a lot of troops die due to starvation (or the Nazi Germany system which didn’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t provide winter gear to troops going to Russia!)
Their version of the news wasn’t any better than the bullshit of Faux Newz.
“I find the idea of intelligent bugs OFFENSIVE!”
I grew to have some grudging respect for Paul Verhoven and his version of Starship Troopers.
Still don’t like Dougie Howser SS Colonel, but well… /shrugs/
…I was sort of on the fence…at least until I read a few more of his & learned enough about the man to be less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt…because as a thought experiment…make the right to have a say on how society says things should go contingent on being willing to put your ass on the line for said society…sure…you’ve got yourself an interesting premise there…could probably develop that & see where it takes you & maybe learn a few things along the way about how things don’t work the way we tend to assume in the manner of a classic greek tragedy…& there might be some bona fide philosophical discussion in there dialectic-style that could be worth the price of admission
…but as an actually-this-would-be-better-than-the-way-we-do-it suggestion…I’d expect a sophomore to be embarrassed at trying to get something like that taken seriously
…stranger in a strange land was sort of similar that way for me?
…still…did stumble over joe haldeman & the forever war books while I was poking around heinlein’s neck of the woods so I can’t say I entirely regret it?
The Forever War is argueably the better book because Haldeman saw combat as a combat engineer in Vietnam and based a lot of it on his own combat experience as opposed to Heinlein who was in the Navy but was invalidated out due to tuberculosis almost a decade before WW2.
It’s not to say that a non veteran can’t write a good war novel, but Haldeman captured the details that Heinlein glossed over in Starship Troopers. Although to be fair, Haldeman wrote an adult story for adults while Heinlein wrote a sort of adult story for teens.
Still traumatized by Stranger in A Strange Land and Friday and the rest of Heinlein’s full on Libertarian writing phase.
…I’d certainly say that side of haldeman came through on the page
…but one reason I have a soft spot for those books is the guy didn’t go the route everyone else did about how to handwave your way past the part where you were talking about inter-stellar warfare…that distances beyond comprehension were involved…which makes most authors immediately invent something to contract the thing to a scale where the characters can get about protagonist-ing & show up at the crux of anything important whenever it gets to that bit of the plot
…instead he thought about how that might work if you couldn’t do that & the people who decided what version of “good enough” was good to go when they needed it yesterday…were military minds…& it is…while in some senses pivotal…sort of not really the focus of the books so much as something that’s salted through them…& it is brutal…& only gets more brutal the more you think about it…to the point where once you agree to serve in that specific sense…who really are you any more…& why are you even doing it…all the things people traditionally use as answers to those questions are ashes-to-ashes by the time you get to your first front line
…there were times when I thought that one conceit might arguably be more eloquent than the novels, I was that taken with it at the time?
Time dilation is still a big deal. It messed with the main characters of the novel and made homecomings emotionally traumatic.
In my slog of a book, I use a lot of that to explain why my main character is still much younger than his planetside counterparts and family.
I adored Heinlein as a kid. Then I grew up.
That’s so interesting because having never read any Heinlein, I assumed they ramped up his jerking off to militarism for Starship Troopers since usually movies have to pummel viewers with things that books can do more subtly. I didn’t realize the director was being critical of it to an extent.
When you read that book as a teen, did you feel like physically you could have been in a military? I guess also for me is an awareness at a young age that I’m good at lots of things and my body does all that I need it to, but absofuckinglutely no chance could this body ever manage in the military. Not even the Coast Guard! So for me watching Starship Troopers as a teen girl when it came out, I remember being like ope ok got it I would immediately not have a chance for full rights in this world, it can get fucked and is clearly referencing why apartheid etc are bad.
…if I’ve gauged the threading right that question wasn’t directed at me…but…in as much as the school I was at when I read that sort of thing was very much the sort of school that sends a lot of kids off to the forces…& indeed has a lot of kids whose parents are in them…& I wasn’t particularly below average on the fitness tests we didn’t get to skip…& couldn’t entirely avoid at least one year of having to join in with the dress-up-&-play-soldiers thing before getting to claim I had other sanctioned things to be doing with that time
…never harbored any particular delusions that I’d be a good fit…but imagining enlisting…or choosing to if that was what made the difference to being able to vote…or, hell, just attend university…not a big stretch at the time…strictly hypothetically, mind
…so…I don’t know if it exactly helps at all…but I was more than ready for verhoeven’s version of “it can get fucked” when the movie came out…I felt like the target audience, even…& the first time I saw it I couldn’t believe they’d let him get away with it & heinlein hadn’t sued…he might have been dead by then…not sure what else could explain it…more likely he did…& I just never heard about that part?
Heinlein died sometime in the 80s. I just assume his heirs wanted that $$$ and didn’t care much how the movie came out.
More wife (who died in 03). Heinlein didn’t have any kids.
It was supposed to be a parody Verhoven style, but the way Sony marketed it… it was taken seriously which caused me no end of grief. Originally the movie was supposed to be more like Aliens, but he introduced the idea of a war like fascist society as parody (Verhoven endured WW2 as a teen and was a marine in the Netherlands version of the Marine Corps.) All the militarism was amped up to 11 by Verhoven who hated the novel (to be similar in tone to his movie RoboCop) but the parody/satire was lost in the all too serious action.
At the time, I read it I thought I could (I was 13), but to be honest I wasn’t in any good shape. No muscles and my physical endurance was shit.
I wasn’t able to get into “fighting” trim till I was 29 when I ran 15-20 miles a week and spent 5-7 hours a week in the gym lifting weights. I was still in pretty good shape till I was 38. No six pack (4 pack), but I was ripped and an “ape”. I wasn’t massive, but folks were surprised with my body shape I could run like a none too slow wind. My eyes would be the problem.
Heinlein did state that Federal service could also be done via civilian or non military means, but that was tossed out the window to foster Verhoven’s fascism parody.
Also agree about Doogie Howser, SS general with psychic powers.
I never understood how his character has psychic powers but all the other people in the story are just normies. Maybe that was just in the movie and not the book?
The novel Carl (Dougie Howser) of the SS was actually just a science geek classmate/good friend of Juan Rico and later died in a bug attack on Pluto (off stage.) Not the SS Colonel he was.
The psychic powers was actually an unamed character who could “map” a bug town underground using his mind in the book. They decided to make Carl that character as well as make him Juan Rico’s sort of commander.
Also the main character was supposed to be Filipino! not Aryan uberman, Casper Van Dien.
Ah okay that makes more sense. Thanks!
I watched Starship Troopers when I was a tween and loved it. Mostly for the sci-fi stuff. Sci-fi/fantasy puppetry was/is my jam. I had no idea it was based on a book. It was cool to me at the time because there were (2) women in the military. But omg I cringed so hard when the one who was coded as not the pretty one was happy to die because “It’s alright because I got to have you.” As in she got to fuck the hot dude one time and it meant way more to her than it did to him. Even as a twelve year old, I knew that was pathetic.
And the only other part that I remember now is laughing at the psychic dude declaring “It’s afraid!”.
The dialogue in the movie was terrible and laughable. At least in Robocop, it was memorable.
I wrote a review on a some obscure SF blog:
“Imagine if a bunch of lilliputian clowns in hockey gear grabbed you, tied you up and dragged your naked ass out of your lair and into the sun then some creep who looked like Doogie Howser SS Oberstfurher shoved his hand up your ass… you’d be afraid too.”
Also, Denise Richards as a hotshot space pilot was too much. Not that I think women shouldn’t be pilots but she was laughably unbelieveable as a Nuclear Physcist in the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough and similarly unbelievable as a helmperson/captain of a starship.
And her shooting like a US Navy SEAL with a big gaping hole in her shoulder was mindblowingly stupid. I have hurt my shoulder once (and I would have screamed endlessly if they told me to shoot a gun.) All the adrenaline in the world wouldn’t have stopped me from screaming.
Like I wrote earlier. Paul Verhoven wanted to make it a satire, but it just missed by a 1/2 mile.
The Graduate is one. I saw it in college and it had a reputation as a semi-iconic counterculture movie. I was a bit puzzled but didn’t question that Ben was the hero.
I saw it again a good while later, and realized Ben was toxic. The fact that his suburban upbringing was cheesy didn’t justify who he had become.
You know, I’ve never seen that movie. I have no interest in it.
It’s a weird, weird movie. I think it gives a good insight into the mindset of American elites in the late 60s if you know enough about that period to decode it. Otherwise it’s as confusing as a Fellini movie is to someone like me who doesn’t understand Italian culture circa 1956.
My day was spent at the car dealer.
My EV power cut out at high speed last week so I was worried that it was the inverter (a 3-5K repair!) The best case would have been the 12V battery which I would have happily replaced.
Turns out that it’s the damn powerpack battery. The car is 7+ years old so it is supposed to last another 3 -5 years. Still under warranty so let’s see what Nissan decides. If they’re cheap motherfuckers or maybe I get lucky and get the latest Leaf power pack which ups my range 50% (240km).
Maybe you’ll get lucky. There was an article on theautopian.com where a writer bought a cheap used BMW EMV with a bum battery and found a wrinkle in his state’s law that required BMW to replace it a low or zero cost.
By coincidence, they just ran a followup. Of course you don’t live in California, so it probably isn’t relevant.
https://www.theautopian.com/i-bought-the-cheapest-bmw-i3-in-american-one-year-ago-heres-what-its-been-like-since-it-got-a-free-new-battery/
…I was going to answer…but while I was typing that reply to @manchucandidate I thought of too many examples & now I can’t pick one…or just few enough not to still be going overboard…but…without watching it again to be sure…& as a representative needle in a haystack of options…I imagine bernard bresslaw’s turn as “fan choy” in one of our dinosaurs is missing probably wouldn’t get green lit these days…& certainly wouldn’t land the way it did when I were a nipper?
Honestly? Warner Brothers cartoons. There is so much adult humor in those things.
I graduated HS in 2001. I only met my school counselor ONCE. And considering I was an honors class kid with a 4.5 GPA, you’d think they would be prepping me for college admissions, or signing me up for extra curriculars year after year. Nope. I didn’t even know where their office was until senior year. For as much as they pushed GO TO COLLEGE on an entire generation, they didn’t actually prepare us for college at all.