Quote of the Day

Interview Magazine got writer-director Ari Aster to sit down and chat with Babygirl writer-director and former actress Halina Reijn, which isn't a combo I would've thought of but apparently they're friends. That said exactly what I wanted to happen happened in the course of their conversation, which is Aster brought up Paul Verhoeven because Reijn acted in Verhoeven's masterpiece Black Book. Anyway both Aster and Reijn both say a lot of great things about Verhoeven but this quote from Ari seems especially important to me in the wake of Eddington, a movie a lot of people definitely misunderstood:

"[Verhoeven]’s always risking being misconstrued. He has this really impish, ironic sensibility where he genuinely loves the genres that he’s working in. So he’s making these films that function absolutely as just straight genre films, and then at the same time they’re incredibly politically subversive. Satire is harder and harder to come by because people don’t really have the nerve for it. They end up wanting to just explain themselves to make sure that they’re understood, which is not how satire should work. It should risk being misunderstood. There have been a lot of films of his that were not understood upon release, and that must have been painful for him. But he never learned the wrong lesson from that. If anything, he doubled down."

As I off-handedly admitted in my review of Eddington I had to go back the movie a second time before writing my review because I could tell it was going to be an entirely different movie a second time through, and sure enough the tone that was knocking me off balance the first time fell completely into place on view two. After the above quote Aster brings up the confused initial reception to Starship Troopers, and I think that's a perfect comparison for Eddington -- basically I think people are going to be embarassed in twenty years for not seeing Eddington's brilliance, and I'm glad I squeezed myself through to the right side of history!