(The following was written whilst whacked out of my gourd on the strongest drug in the world, withdrawal sickness, coupled to flu-like symptoms and twelveteen shots of knockoff brand Robotussin while trapped at brother Fred's house for Xmas. He lives in sunny Phoenix, AZ. Compared to NYC, my home, Phoenix is an armed camp. It swims in a deep unconscious trance born of desert wind chill, plentitude, and cordite. I was gonna scuttle this whole review as it's nonsensical and strange, but I wanted something to run next to my AMY (2015) review, to get that film's buzzkill taste out, I need something like HEAD after AMY'S LOST WEEKEND. So take the following for what it is, a deeply whacked Xmas poem, riddled with diseased insect sci-fi poetic film references, enigmatic but revealingly pretentious typos, and a profound realization borne from watching NAKED LUNCH and STARSHIP TROOPERS off Fred's savvy Tivo on Xmas at three AM (after SCROOGED)
As Bill Murray so egocentrically says "I get it now" Three films! Three ghosts. Three AM - Three 3s.
Consider the randomness: One film is about a bitter TV network executive who has a religious experience after disgruntled employees (maybe) put LSD into his Xmas gin; the next film is a monstrous (latex pre-CGI) 'realization' of the insect hallucinations that accompany both hashish highs and opiate withdrawal, i.e. the 'Kafka high' rabbit hole, wherein one's typewriter takes on insect features and moans when you press its throbbing keys. The third film (with early, excellent CGI) finds giant insect aliens learning our secrets through drinking our brains like milkshakes (instead of vice versa, as in LUNCH). The sim of the three's moral: Beware your own response to the big bug you squash, for you squash yourself next, with a giant arachnid claw! 1/27/16
-- If yrt terllin; me that there's a difference, a fundamd,emta;a diffferemce. netwntwwme starsjip stroppp[ers amd Naked lunch, er lust, yr a lawyer and and I;m tellin hyou so
Put it another way - if there IS a difference between STARSHIT TROOPERS AND NAKED LUST then it exists only in the minds of MINOLTA, a Japanese company (dey bore dat into me, their Asian drill proboscis jingle).
Think about that, Mr. Farewell to Manzinar, Mr. Smarty pants peacenick vzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzn Revenge comes dripping wildly in the shifty stick of the teenage kamikaze diver via bedroom high scores or USS Bismark Iwo Jima body counts.
DIS MY DAY AFTER XMAS SPECIAL:
STARSHIP TROOPERS NOTES: MILLIONTH VIEWING WHILE ROBOTRIPPING ALSO ON TEA WITHDRAWAL AND SERIOUS DTS, ENOUGH TO MAKE MURRAY'S SCROOGE LOSE HIS FRICKIN' HaIR AND CONSIDER AN EYE IN THE TEAM CUP A DRINKABLE ANOMALY BUT NOTHING TO GET HUNG ABOUT--
Would you like to know more?
There's no correct answer, for we're going to, KNOW MORE, that is, regardless.
NO more Regardless:
the whole terrifying endurance test of full-awareness is coming.
We shall inexorably, like a keel-hauled eyeball, KNOW MORE.
The conveyor belt of fascist indoctrination magnetized to our chains-
as snug as if we were pinned to the tunnel floor by an arachnoid claw,
awaiting the slow gurgling arrival of a brain bug on the 3D screen.
God or parents or Ford
convinced us of the space-time continuum's permanence.
Its row of inky black arachnid eyes behold us in the patterns within our urine-froth,
"I" first noticed 'em while gazing deeply into the froth of my piss at a party house toilet bowl
and then later in the beer from the keg, and the foam from a highball.
The NO MORE Know More LITE button (the hand that heals) snooze NOT TO SPILL BLOOD
hit again ("Kiki come and see the parrots with me") LAW no more; he slurps your soul's slug white glop from the gurgling straws pushed down into your sleeping head; the sound of your own animal snore crashing like waves of liquid lead, along Poe's obsidian shore, my little lovey glovey...
O'er the Grampian Hills beyond beyond, Harryhausen stops time to move another dinosaur a quarter of a fraction of a 16th of an inch --by these measures the past creeps along through jungle kliegs.
(and once again, says weather on the one--we have cool conditions)
Cool as the keeper
of the LAW
hung from a tree,
STARSHIP
TRIPPERS
KNOW MORE:
The best thing about Verhoeven's ingenious and endlessly re-watchable masterpiece is the idea of an all-branches-of-military-service DNA imprint manual for fascist military mobilization. In America we didn't really get these until WW2. America's devout isolationism reflected greatly in all sorts of bitter anti-war tracts instead (such as the forgotten man pilots of John Monk Saunders). TROOPERS propaganda boilerplate goes only as far back as the early 40s and easily seeable semi-docs like GUNG HO, or B-17 STORY OF A FLYING FORTRESS with the end of high school and the end of other various key moments in life shared by the representatives of labor (lion, roughneck), intelligence (scarecrow, gestapo), and passion/drive or heart (tin man, flight school) and the way all of the Earth has been homogenized into a tract that could be at home as a Japanese anime, a Nazi recruitment film, an Army or National Guard recruitment film, or an anti-war satire of any genre or age. Verhoeven's sense of irony is very Dutch and very abstract, coming from an--'ow you say eet?--"occupied" country? With nothing but windmills and spies, yes? Its borders easily tromped across, like an unarmed neighbor's lawn, to get around the La Linea Maginot.
But this could also even be a boilerplate movie for and about bugs, not human soldiers--"we're in it for the species, people." We've been at war with those suckers since the dawn of time. Only when we're finally ready to start eating them in force will we have a ticker's tape of a chance. Children, I was on the front line in the war against the Japanese... beetle, that is, in the 70s and if it wasn't for DDT they might have won. I'd get a dollar per jar, all captured and dumped into soapy water, until the jar turned dark yellow and the squirming stopped. Quite a lucrative occupation for an eight year-old during a major PA infestation. Would you like to know more about the slight itchy pain when they dug onto my childhood palms, the difficulty in getting them to let go? Did I learn a hint of masochism even then? I lay at night with a ten year-old's imagination conjuring turning the cute blonde girl Susan Salter in my class into an Amazon queen of the school and me her slave, crouching naked at her feet in chains. Weird but true... I had my queen, and I her submissive consort, fit to die after mating if I ever found out what mating entailed.
My red state brother and his gun-crazy family and friends--as well as my liberal bleeding heart pinko east coast komrades--all agree on one thing, STARSHIP gets better with each viewing. No matter how many times you see it. Be it a satire or a genuine (as Heinlein apparently meant it) call towards dissolving of borders in favor of one global and eugenically fine-tuned communal military spirit, blessed with a conveniently abstracted enemy in an insect of the sort that may not be as evil as the higher ups paint (for a NWO hangs together by its extra-terrestrial foe, as Reagan said), at least if there's any ENDER'S GAME sequels, which I doubt. (its box office losses transcend comprehension: $100 Million Dead!)
And the Song WE'RE IN THE MONEY.
I saw this time, in my delirium, a literal interpretation that made me giddy: Ginger Rogers and company as sprites, bugs, if you will, within the money, moving with the tick-tock military march rhythm, like a click-clock salvia divinorum dragon teeth zipper revolution through the space-time continuum thread counts. Literal gold diggers burrowing into the gold of coins themselves, literally little will-o-the-wispy mites 'in the money.' Little Midsummer Night golden sprites behind-inside every coin, the way the green fairy could be singing "I'm in the absinthe."
Where did the phrase 'in the money' come from and what are the similes? In the cool of the evening' - 'in clover' - 'in love'? It's not 'in the love' though, so more like some bumper crop that stays singular all through, like we're in the market or get in the game, I caught some fish. (You don't say "I caught Japanese beetle; get in game, we're in money... etc.)
I know I said this, but life is still but Death's brief yawn, arachnid eyes in the urine froth, the chasm of blank urinal stare from which infant to elder crawling towards bathroom like flogged Christ doth breathe but brief; we in our robes like Lebowski, like Peter, Paul, and Prokofiev on his week off, but shadows that for awhile--while the byang root tea arrived on time--were comported almost like the barbarity that passes for civilized, but when the tea stopped due to mail mix-ups, we still had to fulfill the void, because that of yawning Xmas mail irregularities chasm of need, that King Kong Emperor Jones clanging on his hollow huffalumpagus skin drum, chanting madly to the bloodstream like an anguished and unassailed suitor, begging for alms and change and unchanging except to intensify like a slow building amp feedback squall with no volume limit and no off switch.
Not getting the cosmic joke makes the joke on you, and that's the whole joke--it is all there is, there's no actual joke beyond it being on you. So to feel hip, laugh your own laughter's mirthless rueful hollowness; as the flames consume Richard III and you become just another wAVE IN THE SEA-SKY CONTINUum (so you can at least avoid being seated next to him). The mark inside is the one mark you cannot beat, would you like to know more, you brain bug behemoth tottering towards me now in the guise of a pit-bull? How'd that song go?
Now, in the guise of the pit bull.
Tomorrow the guise of the floor where she lay.
Form of an avalanche,
Form of a water glass,
Form of a sailor stone-drunk every day.
Booze's bars closed down hard upon him
("kerPLUNK" was the sound they made)
and with a drowning howl did he comply
to the exit (hurrpy up plays- iTS's time)
and proceeded to haunt Davy Jones' Liquors (in LBI)
for it opened always to him.
Penny-eyed and seaweed wreathed, the early morning sunshine
on bottles glistening like DEEP morphine pearls in Nick Nolte's mits,
'til scraping enough off his barnacle billfold
bought him a pint pocket of air... just enough to get
up to a messy, sloppy speed...high
and how he breathed this song:
Now, in the guise of the lily
tomorrow the guise of the hay.
Form of a whiskey jar,
Form of an after bar,
Form of a drunk on the concrete, prostrate...
His saliva as thick as the oceans
to the tiny ass gremlins,
sprites in a sidewalk black chewing gum circle fairy ring
drown in the foamy surf of his drool.
And were there concrete pock-mark impressions on his cheeks when at last he rose?
Probably, man.
He can't feel it.
Even drunk he comes to know more
than we'd like to remember ourselves.
Click the 'like' button not the "to know more" button, click the snooze button, click it to yourself, Bill. and member dis
dose
Remember me, Cloris in DEADLY.
Cuz of course only the Spectral Relief Pitcher of Self Annihilation so terrifies our Babe Ruth ego he finally says: "Here Pee-Wee" (the nonegoic amorphous open-hearted self, the one vulnerable in its generosity, easily swindled by sad-eyed strait waif who keep the change tossed, and bring no fat goose to no Cratchett), "you go ahead and bat this once and I'll sit out the inning." Then, the mighty Pee-Wee lets fly and sends it out of the park, and the Pitcher vanishes! Freedom.
And if we've been a team dominated by its needy spotlight hog insecure star Babe Ruth ego all season, keeping Buddhist Pee-Wee on the bench permanently lest he either embarrass the team or outdo the star, then once Pee-Wee hits the homer, Babe Ruth comes running back to the field to take the credit for not taking credit. He needs to take that spotlight again and rant about how he "gets it now." He takes credit for not taking credit.
"I get it now," says Murray at the prolonged wearying climax of SCROOGED. In grand 80s Cruise-narcissist man-boy tradition (though, really, the same "it's all about how great I am now that I finally realize it's not all about me" shit goes on in CASABLANCA, and everyone looooves that) we're expected to weep with joy at seeing an egotistical prick pull his head out of his own ass with the same awe as seeing Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead, or De Mille part the Red Sea.
That ending has really dated badly but we used to LOVE it. In the time of the film, the Scrooge 80s it was the kind of thing people just didn't say. This was the era before Dr. Phil and Oprah, before children became the household tyrants, back when they were meant to be heard only in the basement until the haunted house was ready for the parents to be led through one at a time blindfolded, or failing that, to wait until the bridge game had wound down and they were drunk enough to be amused rather than annoyed by our prattle. This was a time when therapy was still a shameful secret and a kid had to commit suicide successfully before his parents would consider it.
In the 80s we considered that Leo Buscaglia love trip strictly 70s naïveté. Scrape 'em off, Claire--that was the 80s rallying cry. Arnold Schwarzenegger was our spiritual leader in so many ways, steam roller paving the Hollywood political trail blazed by the mighty Paul Ronald Reagan Bunyan (though everyone knew her as Nancy), in a backwards Terminator motion, icing the Sarah Connor pro-drug 60s-70s with the kind of "NO" bumper stickers that Lennon worked so hard to flank with a "K" and a "W" in YELLOW SUBMARINE. In vain, John - in vain, and in vein, and chest.
Consider the randomness: One film is about a bitter TV network executive who has a religious experience after disgruntled employees (maybe) put LSD into his Xmas gin; the next film is a monstrous (latex pre-CGI) 'realization' of the insect hallucinations that accompany both hashish highs and opiate withdrawal, i.e. the 'Kafka high' rabbit hole, wherein one's typewriter takes on insect features and moans when you press its throbbing keys. The third film (with early, excellent CGI) finds giant insect aliens learning our secrets through drinking our brains like milkshakes (instead of vice versa, as in LUNCH). The sim of the three's moral: Beware your own response to the big bug you squash, for you squash yourself next, with a giant arachnid claw! 1/27/16
-- If yrt terllin; me that there's a difference, a fundamd,emta;a diffferemce. netwntwwme starsjip stroppp[ers amd Naked lunch, er lust, yr a lawyer and and I;m tellin hyou so
Put it another way - if there IS a difference between STARSHIT TROOPERS AND NAKED LUST then it exists only in the minds of MINOLTA, a Japanese company (dey bore dat into me, their Asian drill proboscis jingle).
Think about that, Mr. Farewell to Manzinar, Mr. Smarty pants peacenick vzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzn Revenge comes dripping wildly in the shifty stick of the teenage kamikaze diver via bedroom high scores or USS Bismark Iwo Jima body counts.
DIS MY DAY AFTER XMAS SPECIAL:
 |
| Return of the Insectoid Meta-gaze, i.e. the projector watches you watch its projection with its 3-color projector eyes from top: WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953), THE VISITOR (1973), STARSHIP TROOPERS (eyes as projector beams), SCROOGED ("no eye in team" - just in the glass) |
There's no correct answer, for we're going to, KNOW MORE, that is, regardless.
 |
| Starship Troopers - 1997 |
 |
| This post - present |
the whole terrifying endurance test of full-awareness is coming.
We shall inexorably, like a keel-hauled eyeball, KNOW MORE.
The conveyor belt of fascist indoctrination magnetized to our chains-
as snug as if we were pinned to the tunnel floor by an arachnoid claw,
awaiting the slow gurgling arrival of a brain bug on the 3D screen.
God or parents or Ford
convinced us of the space-time continuum's permanence.
Its row of inky black arachnid eyes behold us in the patterns within our urine-froth,
"I" first noticed 'em while gazing deeply into the froth of my piss at a party house toilet bowl
and then later in the beer from the keg, and the foam from a highball.
Those bug eyes kept showing up, unblinking and drunkenly unafraid
and forgotten, filed away under layers of alcohol and potty training,
now returns with a probe to suck our brains dry as a keg and we
screaming all the while on the human conveyor belt: stop stop!
At least hit pause!
The bathroom pulls me from the bladder forth, the magnet of water to water, eye to eye
kNOw MORE!
Pause
Or PULSE
The "like to know more" button is hit again and again, purse-taken, Stalling,
for the brain bug WOULD like to know how to SWAT God.
It may be a bug bit it knows just where to go for that knowledge,
knows just what fleshy tendril to hit the button with, to slurp the brain slushy cup
down to the ice--rattling in its spinal column tumbler
'til clatter shatter and scatter down to the plinth.
Jig again jiggedy Jigga JF Sebastian's Methuselah Syndrome alone
should warrant God's head be, by Batty, smartly swatted.
Life is but Death's slow yawn.
and forgotten, filed away under layers of alcohol and potty training,
now returns with a probe to suck our brains dry as a keg and we
screaming all the while on the human conveyor belt: stop stop!
At least hit pause!
The bathroom pulls me from the bladder forth, the magnet of water to water, eye to eye
kNOw MORE!
Pause
Or PULSE
 |
| From top: NAKED LUNCH, STARSHIP, ENDER'S GAME |
for the brain bug WOULD like to know how to SWAT God.
It may be a bug bit it knows just where to go for that knowledge,
knows just what fleshy tendril to hit the button with, to slurp the brain slushy cup
down to the ice--rattling in its spinal column tumbler
'til clatter shatter and scatter down to the plinth.
Jig again jiggedy Jigga JF Sebastian's Methuselah Syndrome alone
should warrant God's head be, by Batty, smartly swatted.
 |
| Naked Lunch |
Life is but Death's slow yawn.
Once it ends, he regains composure, his breath; betwixt the columns he flits,
like some gay brain donor; fancy free flitter, hitter of the snooze button again and
a LITE to NO MORE
again snooze button
NO MORE!!
LAW button
NO snooze MORE butTON, (is the hand that makes) WOULD YOU LIKE TO...please, NO MORE!!!
like some gay brain donor; fancy free flitter, hitter of the snooze button again and
a LITE to NO MORE
again snooze button
NO MORE!!
LAW button
NO snooze MORE butTON, (is the hand that makes) WOULD YOU LIKE TO...please, NO MORE!!!
 |
| Starship Troopers |
hit again ("Kiki come and see the parrots with me") LAW no more; he slurps your soul's slug white glop from the gurgling straws pushed down into your sleeping head; the sound of your own animal snore crashing like waves of liquid lead, along Poe's obsidian shore, my little lovey glovey...
 |
| Vot ISS da LAW? |
(and once again, says weather on the one--we have cool conditions)
of the LAW
hung from a tree,
his beard glued for hours; a flag to--from its prideful fascist twisting--flee.
Weimar lock-stock to Hollywood's larder, Breen's censors barreling belief in their lust to even here swastika snip the decadent (Jewish) shadows from their UFA art.
STARSHIP
TRIPPERS
KNOW MORE:
The best thing about Verhoeven's ingenious and endlessly re-watchable masterpiece is the idea of an all-branches-of-military-service DNA imprint manual for fascist military mobilization. In America we didn't really get these until WW2. America's devout isolationism reflected greatly in all sorts of bitter anti-war tracts instead (such as the forgotten man pilots of John Monk Saunders). TROOPERS propaganda boilerplate goes only as far back as the early 40s and easily seeable semi-docs like GUNG HO, or B-17 STORY OF A FLYING FORTRESS with the end of high school and the end of other various key moments in life shared by the representatives of labor (lion, roughneck), intelligence (scarecrow, gestapo), and passion/drive or heart (tin man, flight school) and the way all of the Earth has been homogenized into a tract that could be at home as a Japanese anime, a Nazi recruitment film, an Army or National Guard recruitment film, or an anti-war satire of any genre or age. Verhoeven's sense of irony is very Dutch and very abstract, coming from an--'ow you say eet?--"occupied" country? With nothing but windmills and spies, yes? Its borders easily tromped across, like an unarmed neighbor's lawn, to get around the La Linea Maginot.
 |
| this is your typewriter on drugs |
 |
| Denise Richards, nailed to the cross of her passive viewing position - STARSHIP TROOPERS |
 |
| The little tiny bugs inside your money |
Next up in the Xmas Viewing Cycle: GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933
And the Song WE'RE IN THE MONEY.
I saw this time, in my delirium, a literal interpretation that made me giddy: Ginger Rogers and company as sprites, bugs, if you will, within the money, moving with the tick-tock military march rhythm, like a click-clock salvia divinorum dragon teeth zipper revolution through the space-time continuum thread counts. Literal gold diggers burrowing into the gold of coins themselves, literally little will-o-the-wispy mites 'in the money.' Little Midsummer Night golden sprites behind-inside every coin, the way the green fairy could be singing "I'm in the absinthe."
Where did the phrase 'in the money' come from and what are the similes? In the cool of the evening' - 'in clover' - 'in love'? It's not 'in the love' though, so more like some bumper crop that stays singular all through, like we're in the market or get in the game, I caught some fish. (You don't say "I caught Japanese beetle; get in game, we're in money... etc.)
 |
| a money sprite oscillates her 12 legs lures to hypnotize unwary prey |
Not getting the cosmic joke makes the joke on you, and that's the whole joke--it is all there is, there's no actual joke beyond it being on you. So to feel hip, laugh your own laughter's mirthless rueful hollowness; as the flames consume Richard III and you become just another wAVE IN THE SEA-SKY CONTINUum (so you can at least avoid being seated next to him). The mark inside is the one mark you cannot beat, would you like to know more, you brain bug behemoth tottering towards me now in the guise of a pit-bull? How'd that song go?
Now, in the guise of the pit bull.
Tomorrow the guise of the floor where she lay.
Form of an avalanche,
Form of a water glass,
Form of a sailor stone-drunk every day.
Booze's bars closed down hard upon him
("kerPLUNK" was the sound they made)
and with a drowning howl did he comply
to the exit (hurrpy up plays- iTS's time)
and proceeded to haunt Davy Jones' Liquors (in LBI)
for it opened always to him.
Penny-eyed and seaweed wreathed, the early morning sunshine
on bottles glistening like DEEP morphine pearls in Nick Nolte's mits,
'til scraping enough off his barnacle billfold
bought him a pint pocket of air... just enough to get
up to a messy, sloppy speed...high
and how he breathed this song:
Now, in the guise of the lily
tomorrow the guise of the hay.
Form of a whiskey jar,
Form of an after bar,
Form of a drunk on the concrete, prostrate...
His saliva as thick as the oceans
to the tiny ass gremlins,
sprites in a sidewalk black chewing gum circle fairy ring
drown in the foamy surf of his drool.
And were there concrete pock-mark impressions on his cheeks when at last he rose?
Probably, man.He can't feel it.
Even drunk he comes to know more
than we'd like to remember ourselves.
Click the 'like' button not the "to know more" button, click the snooze button, click it to yourself, Bill. and member dis
dose
Remember me, Cloris in DEADLY.
Cuz of course only the Spectral Relief Pitcher of Self Annihilation so terrifies our Babe Ruth ego he finally says: "Here Pee-Wee" (the nonegoic amorphous open-hearted self, the one vulnerable in its generosity, easily swindled by sad-eyed strait waif who keep the change tossed, and bring no fat goose to no Cratchett), "you go ahead and bat this once and I'll sit out the inning." Then, the mighty Pee-Wee lets fly and sends it out of the park, and the Pitcher vanishes! Freedom.
And if we've been a team dominated by its needy spotlight hog insecure star Babe Ruth ego all season, keeping Buddhist Pee-Wee on the bench permanently lest he either embarrass the team or outdo the star, then once Pee-Wee hits the homer, Babe Ruth comes running back to the field to take the credit for not taking credit. He needs to take that spotlight again and rant about how he "gets it now." He takes credit for not taking credit.
 |
| He gets it now... no wait, now he gets it.... wait... |
That ending has really dated badly but we used to LOVE it. In the time of the film, the Scrooge 80s it was the kind of thing people just didn't say. This was the era before Dr. Phil and Oprah, before children became the household tyrants, back when they were meant to be heard only in the basement until the haunted house was ready for the parents to be led through one at a time blindfolded, or failing that, to wait until the bridge game had wound down and they were drunk enough to be amused rather than annoyed by our prattle. This was a time when therapy was still a shameful secret and a kid had to commit suicide successfully before his parents would consider it.
In the 80s we considered that Leo Buscaglia love trip strictly 70s naïveté. Scrape 'em off, Claire--that was the 80s rallying cry. Arnold Schwarzenegger was our spiritual leader in so many ways, steam roller paving the Hollywood political trail blazed by the mighty Paul Ronald Reagan Bunyan (though everyone knew her as Nancy), in a backwards Terminator motion, icing the Sarah Connor pro-drug 60s-70s with the kind of "NO" bumper stickers that Lennon worked so hard to flank with a "K" and a "W" in YELLOW SUBMARINE. In vain, John - in vain, and in vein, and chest.
AND THEN SOME BIOYS GOCME IN
AVHGDFYO THEIRY AS TSIFF AS AWHITSLE
ASTIFF ASA AWHISELT
WHITLSE
S
SWI]
WISLT]\\
WISTLE
AS STIFFASA WISSLE
sss
zzz
buzzzzzzz--ed
(12/26/15)
zz
End Transmission
