[rescue] replacing an Ultra2

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2007 at 10:24:30AM +0100, Mike Meredith wrote:
> The difference is that Blade Runner is a *really* good film, and
> Starship Troopers is just mindless drivel. Enjoyable mindless drivel
> mind. Book? WhatB4s that ?

Noty really. Starship troopers (the one with the woman who later
played in a James Bond film as Christmas something, I think there
were two), was pretty darn good at duplicating the "feel" of the novel.

It did kind of stink, there was too much T&A for my kids to watch it, and
not enough to keep me interested. :-) (Just kidding).

But if you understood the U.S. in the 1950's and 1960's you could see
the world view it portrayed. Military service in exchange for citizenship,
public excutions (murder in the move, rape and murder in the book),
and propaganda films on TV and in the movies, and so on.

While people who are younger think that the 60's was all peace, love and
drugs, the rest of us were sitting up at night reading books on
converting our basements into fallout shelters.

When I went to high school showing up in open toed shoes or jeans got
you sent home (and your mommy had to come pick you up, even if they had
to take a day off from work), smoking on school grounds got you
suspended, and drugs would get you expelled.

I can't even tell you what happened to the  boy who was found to have a gun in
his locker, he was gone and never heard from again. 


> 
> > 	- I would redo Starship Troopers with about 25% of the action
> > of the disaster version, and put the heart and soul of Heinlein back
> > in it.  It would probably be about 6 hours long and no one would
> > 	  watch it, but dammit... it would be good.


I think it really did have the heart and soul of Heinlein, just a different
one that you see. Remember the kid who became a colonel in the intelligence
corps? That was he. He spent the second world war working on advanced
weapons at the Philly Naval yard, along with Asimov and many other people
who later became famous as scientists and sci-fi authors.


> > 	- I would make war movies that did *NOT* cover WWII and
> > Vietnam.  In particular I'd cover WWI, the Hundred Years War, and
> > focus on some of the important ancient battles.

Like the 300? 

Have you read Brideshead Revisited?   

"Hooper had no illusions about the Army - or rather no special illusions
dist inguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed
the universe . He had come to it reluctantly, under compulsion, after he
had made every feeble effort in his power to obtain deferment. 

He accepted it, he said, 'like the measles'. Hooper was no romantic. He
had not as a child ridden with Rupert's horse or sat among the camp
fires at Xanthusside; at the age when my eyes were dry to all save
poetry - that stoic, redskin interlude which our schools introduce
between the fast-flowing tears of the child and the man - Hooper had
wept often, but never for Henry's speech on St Crispin's day, nor for
the epitaph at Thermopylae.

The history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a
profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial
change. Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales,
and Marathon - these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and
a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and
lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years
with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to
Hooper."

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
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