Starship Troopers: Satire Can Be Bad, Too

Time to settle this BS once and for all

(Tristar)

I have struggled for years now, off and on, to write the definitive apologia for the 1989 film Road House. My chief obstacle is not that doing so would be a waste of time — I’m very much aware that it is, and made peace with that some time ago— but that I am unable to precisely define what it is about the movie that works. At first glance, very little does.

The acting is wretched. There is not a single line, plot point, or dramatic beat that makes any sense, let alone that is recognizable as human behavior. The clash of dude-culture signifiers and throbbing female-gaze homoeroticism borders on emotionally confusing. Patrick Swayze’s character has a philosophy PhD but he never quotes a single philosopher. It is an attempted retelling of a small-town sexual predator’s vigilante murder that somehow arrived on a kung fu movie set among bouncers in Missouri.

The entire running time of “Call Me By Your Name” is roughly 20% as gay as this scene (MGM)

However, as Roger Ebert said at the time, “This is not a good movie. But viewed in the right frame of mind, it is not a boring one, either.” Sure, it isn’t particularly realistic that a warlord maintains total control of a Midwestern town by…