839. Frame Rate: Total Recall (1990) (Feat. DJ Wooldridge)
Added 2025-03-07 14:00:15 +0000 UTC
Amidst the fog of 2025, three men recollect and review a film shot 35 years previous. DJ Wooldridge joins us to discuss the unique dystopia that is the classic Total Recall. Verhoeven, Schwarzenegger, and a tiny little krang take center for this one.
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Comments
To Michael’s point about “do you think it’s all a dream and does it cheapen it?” Yes it’s a dream, no it doesn’t cheapen it. Paul Verhoeven movies like to turn the lens on the audience and tell them that what they like is gross. Just like the criticism of *the viewer’s* bloodlust as they cheer on Nazis Starship Troopers and the murderous RoboCop, in Total Recall, an every man who is living the domestic dream and still wants a narcissistic drooling cave man fantasy. He wants to be a hero, to be with the archetypal madonna/whore (sleazy and demure), to be a super hero above reproach, to have every interaction be secretly *about* him. Also it’s the future guys, anyone can look like Arnold Schwarzenegger if they want to take the dystopian tech startup produced drug…but much like the Recall company as a cutting edge startup, do you trust Elon Musk selling it to you? And do really actually you want be crazy jacked like a muscle freak all the time? Is it just a narcissistic fantasy that wasn’t well conceived? 🧐 I also have my own podcast, High n’ Dry, where we covered this movie. Verhoeven is one of the best filmmakers ever imo. He’s always telling actors “give it more, make it absurd” like Denise Richards in ST, and he did the same with Arnold. It’s like he wants us to look in a funhouse mirror and realize that it’s just a mirror with purposeful exaggerations of your features to elicit something in you.
James Crosslin
2025-03-10 06:23:45 +0000 UTCIf anyone else has a hankering for old scifi after this check out librevox.org under genre Fantastic Fiction > Science Fiction. Lots of collections of the old scifi short stories
First Normality
2025-03-09 16:39:54 +0000 UTCYou know that Philip K. Dick died in 1982? I find conflicting sources on his opinion on Blade Runner (he seemed to have hated the screenplay but loved the production design), but that was the only adaption of his works during his lifetime, other than an episode of a British sci-fi series.
gromolko
2025-03-08 23:32:33 +0000 UTCOn the subject of future music, Arthur C. Clark wrote a short novel in 1961 called 'A Fall of Moondust', which takes place in the Space Future, and one line that made me chuckle was a passing reference in-universe to the #1 song of 1994, "Spacesuit Blues"
Aiden Abett
2025-03-07 22:12:55 +0000 UTCIf Last Action Hero hadn’t bombed there was a decent chance Arnold was going to play himself in a Hanz and Franz (SNL) musical.
Steve Snyder
2025-03-07 16:37:25 +0000 UTC
