Even though, if I had to put money on it, I would bet that []Quoting Dukefrukem (view post)No, the movie doesn't take its tone too seriously; that doesn't mean that its treatment of the premise isn't serious, and the comic relief of "Consider that a divorce" doesn't cancel out the constant exposition dumps and double crosses that you have to pay close attention to in order to follow the plot, along with the overall ambiguity and thematic depth it contains as a whole. That's what makes it a clever movie; you can choose to look it as just another Arnie actioner on a surface level, where the only point is to be entertained by the constant automatic weaponry and shattering panes of sugar glass, but doing so would be dismissive of the intelligence underneath all that, and having a sense of humor doesn't automatically turn it into Snakes On A Plane; to bring another Verhoeven movie into the mix, that would be like saying Robocop has nothing to say about Capitalism because its fake commercials are so goofy. The humor in both movies is the sugar coating on the (red) pill to help them be fun and smart at the same time.Quoting Irish (view post)
Anyway, Arnie's screen presence is the reason why the film was able to sell the possibility of Quaid's delusion, because he was played by the biggest Action hero (and just one of the biggest stars period) of that era, and yet he's still claiming that [] I don't care how big a star the guy is, if he's making arguments like that, then there's something seriously fishy about his general mindset.
As for your first point about my assertions, that depends entirely on the specifics of the particular movie. I mean, if it was impossible to enjoy a movie featuring false narratives, then obviously no one would like Shutter Island []
As for the second one...
-What does that mean, depends "too much" on the use of technically? As in, my point would work better if it somehow depended on that word less? It's a binary choice, since the term is either 100% present in that sentence, or completely absent; there are no shades of grey in-between those two.
-But it does apply here, since Total Recall is obviously a fictional story (along with a ton of other movies in that "narrow" context), and it even applies to true-life movies as well, because, regardless of what real basis a historical movie may have, they still feature actors pretending to do things and be other people just as much as any other work of fiction does (so, even though Abraham Lincoln was a real person, Daniel Day-Lewis pretending to be him is still just as false as Arnie playing Quaid).
-No it doesn't, because whether a movie effectively wields suspension of disbelief in its specific context is a seperate issue from the artificial nature of cinematic storytelling, which is what I'm talking about.