Our Adult Book Groups are a mix of in person, hybrid, and virtual programs. Please see our September titles and dates below. The online groups are being held via Zoom. We are requiring registration for the book groups in order to send out the Zoom meeting information, if applicable. Click on the date below to register. Information on our adult book groups can also be found on our website: https://bit.ly/chescolibs-bookgroups.
Registration is required for all book groups. Registration will close at least 2 hours prior to the scheduled start time of the book group. A Zoom link will be emailed to registrants 2 hours before the book group starts. Make sure to check the email address you registered with to receive the link. You do not need a Zoom account to attend the virtual book group.
These programs support the PA Forward Civic and Social Literacy Initiative.
As in many other fields, from politics to race to women’s rights and culture in general, the 1960s was a boiling cauldron. So it was with movies, often then given the more prestigious appellation, the cinema. The movies discussed below are those that transformed film, some in a minor, others in a major way.
In the sixties, film was taken more seriously by more people, especially coming of age baby boomers. The cinema was deemed worthy of deep examination. There was subtext. More and more books appeared on the shelves. Some were surveys (A Pictorial History of the Talkies), others star biographies (Citadel Press’s Films of… series, including Bogart, Dietrich, Garbo, Marx Bros.), still others academic investigations of film going back to the cinema’s origins (The Parade’s Gone By,Film: An Anthology).
Some sixties transformative films:
The Magnificent Seven (1960). How was this transformative? It paved the way for other movies in which a select team, expert in various combative skills, formed to tackle a specific problem. (See the blog post for April, 2022: “Single Mission Team Players.”) The Guns of Navarone (1961), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and more recently, Inception (2010) carried on this tradition. It is a phenomenon, not a genre, as it crosses boundaries.
Psycho (1960). Director Alfred Hitchcock, the “Master of Suspense,” took a more violent and edgy tack with this tale of a mother-fixated motel owner with distinctly misogynistic intentions. Hitchcock used his Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV crew, filmed in black and white, and gave his leading lady (Janet Leigh) short shrift. Soon imitations of lesser quality appeared, e.g., Homicidal, Blood Feast. In mid-decade slightly bigger budgets were given to what would one day be called “slasher” movies. These featured up-and-comers as well as older stars (Joan Crawford in Strait-Jacket and Berserk!, Olivia De Havilland and Bette Davis in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte).
The Pit and the Pendulum (1961). Novelist Stephen King hit the nail on the head when in Danse Macabre he wrote that this was the first time a filmmaker (director Roger Corman) showed his audience true visual horror: a coffin, opened to reveal the female corpse within, buried alive as evidenced by her contorted face and hands petrified into claws, seeking to get out. Graphic horror was on the rise, never to cease.
West Side Story (1961). This was a movie for people who didn’t or didn’t think they liked musicals, especially teenage boys. It began with a bang: aerial shots over New York City that dropped closer and closer to street level and the crummy tenements wherein rival delinquent gangs, the Sharks (Puerto Ricans) and Jets (white teens), vied for control of the mean streets. When they started dancing, it was not seen as sissified.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962). The “thinking person’s epic” was director David Lean’s biography of T. E. Lawrence, who helped Arabs gain independence from the Turkish Ottoman Empire during World War I. Desert vistas never before filmed astounded audiences, Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif became stars, the film won Academy Awards. It remains a pinnacle of filmmaking.
Cleopatra (1963). Often denigrated and mistakenly deemed a financial flop, this version of the Egyptian queen’s rise and fall has an incomparable Alex North music score, more visual sweep than previous iterations, such as the 1934 Cecil B. DeMille version starring Claudette Colbert; the set-bound, George Bernard Shaw play-based Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) with Vivien Leigh; and the cheapjack 1953 Serpent of the Nile with Rhonda Fleming and…Raymond Burr as Antony! In reality, the 1963 version’s chief flaw is a dearth of battle action—and they had 3+ hours in which to do it. The making of it was an epic story in itself. The first director was fired, the first male cast dropped, filming switched providentially from England to Italy. Test photos of Joan Collins suggest she would have been well cast. In The Cleopatra Papers, publicists Jack Brodsky and Nathan Weiss concluded that a spectacle like this would not, could not, be made ever again.
Blow-Up (1966). David Hemmings’ photographer may have caught a murder on film but by gosh he can’t prove it. The Italian maestro Michelangelo Antonioni directed this, his first English-language film, to mostly critical praise, and though it was condemned by the Legion of Decency, MGM released it through a subsidiary. Like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, the commercial and critical success of Blow-Up helped topple the hoary old Production Code in 1968.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). It would be two years before the Motion Picture Association of America would institute a new rating system: G, M, R, X. So this adult film had disclaimers on its poster: “Suitable Only for Adults” and “Important Exception: No One Under 18 Will Be Admitted Unless Accompanied by His Parent.” The film would net Elizabeth Taylor a 2nd Academy Award. Her characterization of the foul-mouthed professor’s wife Martha was a far cry from Cleopatra.
The Graduate (1967). Like Who’s Afraid, this comedy-drama was a precursor to the barrier-breaking films that would appear in 1968 after institution of the new MPAA rating code. A generation of college students latched onto it, feeling a kinship with Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman in a star-making role) having no idea what to do with his life and finding himself seduced by an older woman with a daughter to whom he takes a shine.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Master director of Paths of Glory, Lolita and Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick turned his sights on the past and potential future of humankind. Many wondered what it meant and did not perceive Kubrick and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s view that modern and future technology is a mixed blessing. (Think the now iconic HAL 9000, the mission’s computer gone insane.) Critical opinion was all over the map, but 2001 became a cause to celebrate for youth and after a slow start vied with the distinctly old-fashioned Funny Girl as the year’s top grosser. Indicative of the consternation it caused among critics and “anybody over 30,” 2001 was not nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award.
Bullitt (1968). A standard but compelling detective story hearkening back to postwar police procedurals like The Naked City and T-Men is highlighted by Bullitt’s (Steve McQueen) pursuit through San Francisco of a car carrying two hitmen. It remains the auto chase against which all others—and there have been many—are measured.
The Wild Bunch (1969). After the bloodbath that was 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde and the introduction of the MPAA code in 1968, director Sam Peckinpah created a new high in cinematic violence. In 1913, aging outlaws played by William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates are initially unaware that they are a dying breed held together by a faulty code of honor among thieves. They have no hesitation in killing civilians when they rob banks or blow away army guards on a train carrying weapons they sell to a Mexican warlord. By the end, however, they intuit that their day is over and resign themselves to their grim fate. They’ll take many with them.
Midnight Cowboy (1969). The new rating code instituted in 1968 was still feeling its way, and Midnight Cowboy was given the X-rating as much for subject matter (a young Texas stud aims to make his fortune as a prostitute in New York and bonds with the tubercular con-man “Ratso” played by Dustin Hoffman) as for nudity or foul language. Years later clearer heads changed it to the more applicable R.
Easy Rider (1969). Dennis Hopper directed and co-starred with Peter Fonda in this unexpected biker hit and gave Jack Nicholson such a juicy part that he was immediately propelled into a star role and an Academy Award nomination for 1970’s Five Easy Pieces. Like The Graduate, Easy Rider decried a perceived loss of American innocence. Its success led studios to attempt to duplicate Rider’s grosses by funding any number of similarly negative “youth” productions such as The Strawberry Statement and The Last Movie that even at the time were seen by many as naïve or self-aggrandizing. (Peter Fonda had starred in another biker movie of note prior to Easy Rider: 1966’s The Wild Angels, whose claim to true significance is negated when Nancy Sinatra views Bruce Dern’s body and announces, “He’s wasted.” The first notable biker movie was 1953’s The Wild One with Marlon Brando.)
This film combines the stories and life of infamous Japanese Author Yukio Mishima into an absolutely stunning film, directed by Paul Schrader. Has some of my favorite production design, and is my all-time favorite film soundtrack.
A haunting, experimental, memoir about an abusive relationship, read by the author. It’s an important read that I can’t recommend enough, especially for those in the LGBTQIA+ community.
The author of The Fault in Our Stars, Green offers an amusing and insightful take on various elements of our time, what is currently termed the Anthropocene, and ranks each on a 5-star scale. Topics include smallpox and pandemics, Canada geese, Indianapolis, typewriter keyboards, oddball roadside attractions, extinct Hawaiian birds, and Nathan’s hotdog eating contest. It sounds like therapy for Green, who admits to a lifetime of despair as well as hope.
To be read alongside Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.
Paul Verhoeven’s satirical masterpiece about a future war between Earth’s military forces and a planet full of giant alien bugs! This movie is unlike anything I have ever seen; simultaneously existing as extremely high-brow and low-brow entertainment. Starship Troopers manages to be a big, loud, sci-fi action blockbuster, full of explosions, guns, and gore, while also serving as a scathing commentary on the military industrial complex and media propaganda. It is truly a film you can enjoy as either mindless fun or as a deeply cerebral experience. (See this month’s blog post for a deep dive on the context of this film’s history!)
Insane, Colorful, Action-Packed, and Hilarious!!! This game is a feast for the eyes; offering a wild, open-world ride that will entertain everyone from the lifelong gamer to the relative newbie. Traverse the cartoonish metropolis of Sunset City and fight off swarms of mutant zombies while grinding on telephone wires, leaping off skyscrapers, and firing an array of the weirdest assortment of weapons ever assembled in a video game!
Cary Grant is great in this film adaption of the humorous play. He stops by to visit his sweet, elderly aunts and discovers that they poison men and then put them in the cellar. Other people (including police) dropping by leads to humorous situations as Grant tries to figure out what to do.
Adjoa Andoh does a great job narrating this near-future SciFi novella. A child in Ghana becomes known as the adopted daughter of death due to her ability to kill. She goes on a journey for a mysterious seed after the death of everyone in her village.
Keep an eye out for Spotify logos on our books. Scan the QR codes in select books in our collection, marked with Spotify spine labels, for playlists created for each book. For a full list of the books included, visit our website or click here.
I say this with zero sense of irony or hyperbole: Starship Troopers is a masterpiece of cinema, unlike anything that has ever been put to film.
Right now you might be thinking “Really? The movie where Earth sends a space military to kill a bunch of giant bugs? Isn’t that just a dumb action movie?” If so, you wouldn’t be alone. At the time of its release in November of 1997, audiences and critics alike immediately dismissed the film as just that; a poorly acted, over-the-top, mindless gore-fest. But don’t just take my word for it; here are some of the scathing reviews that Starship Troopers received when it was released…
“Cheerfully lobotomized” – LA Times.
“Exactly like Star Wars – if you subtract a good story, sympathetic characters, intelligence, wit and moral purpose” – Washington Post.
“crazed, lurid spectacle”… “raunchiness tailor-made for teen-age boys.”- Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“a nonstop splatter-fest so devoid of taste and logic that it makes even the most brainless summer blockbuster look intelligent.”-Jeff Vice, the Deseret News
“one-dimensional,” a trivial nothing “pitched at 11-year-old science-fiction fans.” -Roger Ebert.
While I hate to admit it, I heaped my own similar criticisms at the film when it first came out. I was about twelve years old when I first saw Starship Troopers (which, in retrospect, was way too young). My dad had rented it from our local video store and, like most audiences, we were expecting a fun, sci/fi action romp; a Star Wars for this generation. I remember my excitement for it; the movie I had in my head that the previews had promised. I was fully prepared for a serious movie about tough, cool, space soldiers; the grunts fighting on the front lines of a futuristic war against hordes of giant alien bugs. I imagined it was going to be like James Cameron’s hit sequel Aliens, but with the space marines as the focus of the whole movie. When you get a sense of those expectations, it may be easy to understand why watching StarshipTroopers for the first time was bound to be a confusing and disappointing experience.
From the very opening of the film, my adolescent expectations of the movie I wanted were instantly disrupted. The movie didn’t begin with some cool action sequence, showing off how awesome this futuristic military was; nor did it begin with some scary attack from the alien monsters to set up the horror of the film. Instead, the movie opens with a futuristic military advertisement for the “mobile infantry”. The commercial speaks directly to the viewer through a booming, cartoonishly heroic voice accompanied by the corniest patriotic anthem ever composed. The narrator tells the audience to “Join Up Now” and register for the Federation’s mobile elite. The commercial’s imagery is comprised of bright, cheery visuals of happy soldiers smiling directly at the camera, proudly stating “I’m doing my part!” We see kids in a park interacting with the friendly soldiers, who allow the excited children to hold their guns as they teach them how to aim. We see a group of school children cheerfully stomping on cockroaches while their teacher gleefully applauds them. The commercial shows us that even this little bit of bug-stomping helps, as the voice and text exclaim “They’re Doing Their Part! Are You?”
A clip from the opening Military Advertisement sequence
The film had not even reached the 5-minute mark and the circuitry in my pre-teen brain was frying. What was I looking at? Why did this movie look like a cheap, after-school special or like an episode of 90210? Why was the tone so bright and campy? As the movie went on, I found myself increasingly confounded at what I was seeing on screen. The performances ranged from incredibly campy to incredibly wooden and the violence went so far with its gore that it was both extremely upsetting and laughably over-the-top. By the time the movie was finished I remember my dad and I agreeing that it had to be one of the worst movies we had ever seen. So I closed the book on Starship Troopers, concluding that it was one of the worst and most mind-boggling approaches to a movie I had ever witnessed.
Even at that time, one thing I couldn’t deny was that it was memorable; if only in the way of never forgetting which restaurant gave you food poisoning. It left a strange impact on me in a way that I could not comprehend at that time. I knew that there was something upsetting about it. The visuals painted such a sunny, sit-com level atmosphere violently juxtaposed by some of the most disturbing images of gore that my eyes had ever seen. The result was a clash that my 12 year old brain did not have the room to accept or process. So, like many others at the time, I rejected it as a dumb war movie for jocks. It would not be until I was in college that I found myself coming back and giving the movie another chance.
A fellow movie-buff friend of mine told me that Starship Troopers was one of his favorite films of all time. At first, I assumed he was joking but the more we talked, the more it was clear that I needed a serious reassessment of this film. I had already been hearing rumblings about the movie slowly gaining status as a beloved cult film. My assumptions were that people must be appreciating the film on a level of “so bad that it is actually entertaining”, but my friend assured me this was not the case. It only took my first re-watch for the movie to unfold and finally make sense to me. I wasn’t watching a movie that was failing in an effort to be a populist action film; I was watching a movie succeed as a scathing satire; a critique of fascism, and the American military industrial complex. I could see why it went over so many heads when it came out and why so many people did not understand what the film was doing. Starship Troopers is a rare film; one that is so committed to the overall narrative gimmick of its thesis, so unwilling to “break character” or give the audience a reassuring wink that it knows what it’s doing is silly, that it sacrifices people not getting the joke. While this move didn’t pay off in box office sales, it has certainly earned the film serious street cred among cine-files who champion its unwavering artistic integrity.
For those who have never seen the film, Starship Troopers is (VERY loosely) based on the Robert Heinlein novel of the same name, which was written in 1959. I say “very loosely” because, while the surface details of the plot are more or less the same, the tone and intent behind Heinlein’s book, is radically different from the film. The story of Starship Troopers (both the book and film) is set in the distant future; one where humans have mastered space travel and used it to begin colonizing other worlds outside of our galaxy. Along the way, humans came across “Klandathu”, a planet located on the opposite end of our galaxy, populated by giant, bug-like aliens. Even though these giant alien insects are extremely deadly, Earth has attempted to colonize the planet anyway, provoking the otherwise benign species to violently retaliate against them. Instead of respecting the arachnids’ home planet and cutting their losses, they present the bugs’ act of defense as an act of war and use their global government known only as “The Federation” to pump a steady stream of “anti-bug” propaganda into all forms of media. In doing so, the Federation enlists wave upon wave of young recruits into its interstellar war, all of them eager at the chance to slaughter this species completely out of existence. Primary among these young recruits is: Johnny Rico; a regular teenager from Buenos Aires who registers into the mobile infantry, against the wishes of his parents. The story follows Rico through the hardships of war, as he rises up through the ranks and becomes molded into a perfect soldier of the Federation.
Film historians may instantly notice the similarities between the plot structure of the movie and that of a notoriously well-known propaganda film called Triumph of the Will, which was made in 1935 as a recruitment tool for the Nazi party. This is no accident, but rather the whole lynch-pin of director Paul Verhoeven’s radical approach in adapting this pulp science fiction novel into a big-budget motion picture. Rather than making a straight forward adaptation of Heinlein’s story, Verhoeven, who regards the source material as “boring [and] really quite a bad book”, set out to turn Starship Trooper’s extremely jingoistic, pro-war novel on its head. While the book treats its message at face value as something cool and heroic, the film is fully aware that Heinlein’s story is a fascistic nightmare. The magic of the this choice is that, instead of attempting to “fix” these problematic elements of the book, it fully leans into them, giving the audience a full view of what Heinlein’s “perfect” facsist, authoritarian Earth would actually look like. The end result is a planet where humans have no democracy, citizenship is guaranteed only through military service, and for all the dazzling futuristic advancements they have made in technology and medicine, all it’s good for is killing bugs. The journey and eventual victory of these protagonists is therefore not meant as something for audiences to cheer, but rather, it is a cautionary tale of what America could become. Verhoeven states, “I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism . . . this was about American politics. As a European it seemed to me that certain aspects of US society could become fascistic: the refusal to limit the amount of arms; the number of executions in Texas [etc.] . . .” (Verhoeven, as cited in How we made starship troopers, 2018). Make no mistake, the “heroes” of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers are Nazis, through and through. In one of the film’s final and most chilling moments, a commanding psychic officer stands before the “Brain Bug”, the giant slug-like monarch of the arachnid species, which has been captured and dragged out of its cave by the mobile infantry. It lays there surrounded by legions of armed Federation soldiers, trembling while this psychic officer (played brilliantly by Neil Patrick Harris) reads its mind. After a moment of silence, Harris’s psychic officer turns to the hordes of infantry men and women and proudly exclaims “IT”S AFRAID!!!!” which is met with exuberance, laughter, and practically euphoric elation from our heroes. If the film’s message had been lost on you before, this moment should make it clear: these people derive joy from witnessing the fear and suffering of their enemies.
Viewing the film now, its almost mind-boggling to know that this message seemed to sail past most American audiences, especially considering the blatant visual cues the film gives us. Take a look at Neil Patrick Harris’ character below, whose uniform is clearly a direct inspiration of the Nazi uniforms worn by the S.S.
“I borrowed from the films of Leni Riefenstahl to show that these soldiers were like something out of Nazi propaganda. I even put one in an SS uniform. But no one noticed”(Verhoeven, as cited in How we made starship troopers, 2018)
Verhoeven is a fascinating artist who brings with him an extremely unique perspective to aspects of American culture. Primarily, Verhoeven is continually drawn to our relationship with authoritarians, media consumption, patriotism, violence and fascism as can be seen in his previous films such as Robocop and Total Recall. His continued interest in exploring these themes and subjects has a large part to do with his childhood. Verhoeven is Dutch, and was born and raised under Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in the 1940s. His formative years were shaped by the most horrific display of fascism the world had ever seen and it has served to inform much of the art that he makes. In particular, much of his pitch black satirical sense of humor, his cavalier attitude towards violent imagery, and his penchant for maximalism likely all stem from being born into a place that is under Nazi rule. In this sense, I believe that Starship Troopers is oddly the most personal of Paul Verhoeven’s films. It serves to be the culmination of many of his points of interest as well as being the most direct statement against fascists in his body of work to date.
Starship Troopers is a film constructed to be two things at once. On one level the film exists as a satirical statement on the worst aspects of American patriotism and the dangers of succumbing to a militaristic rule. At the same time the movie has to exist and succeed as the very thing which it is satirizing: a big, loud, patriotic action movie. It was by design that the film would be advertised in this way; to convince American audiences (such as myself), that this was going to be a movie about our military kicking butt all over the galaxy. This appeal to our nationalistic tendencies and hunger for mindless action was, more or less, a Trojan Horse for Verhoeven to sneak in the real movie that he wanted audiences to see. That “real movie” which he successfully made is perfectly framed within the opening and closing device of the futuristic propaganda film. Verhoeven makes it clear that the entire film the audience is watching is all a part of this military recruitment advertisement. Johnny Rico and his friends, whether they are supposed to be film actors in a fictionalized recruitment ad or real people whose story is being filmed documentary style, are nevertheless all propaganda devices. By the end, we are reminded that our protagonist’s journey is structured with one goal in mind: to get you to join up into the ranks of the mobile elite. The film’s closing montage practically presents itself like that of a commercial for a series of action figures or a new video game, where you, yes-YOU, could be a hero just like the brave men and women of the Federation’s mobile elite! Are you a grunt infantry man like the heroic leader Johnny Rico? Maybe you want to be the wild man of the bunch like Johnny’s best friend Ace! Or are you the cerebral type? If so, you can be just like Carl, the Federation’s Psychic officer in the Games and Theory division. Regardless of what you are good at, the Federation will easily find a place for you. Verhoeven deftly handles these commercial sequences with the understanding of exactly how propaganda works. After all, he saw it happening first hand when he was a child.
In Verhoeven’s hands, the propaganda of this film is engineered in the same way real propaganda films work; by simplifying everything down to its basest level of black and white, good versus evil. It is articulated to prey upon our lethargy, our need for a simple, easy answer or a target to point our frustrations toward. Everything on Earth in this movie is presented as a very clean, futuristic, utopian society, down to the fact that all of our young protagonists look like living Barbie and Ken dolls. This is not an exaggeration, but rather a purposeful choice Verhoeven makes to support his overall thesis. It is also possibly his most divisive and extreme choice at that, but one which I truly believe serves to add to the film. While most movies are cast with attractive movie stars, Verhoeven’s casting process of this film was one which purposely sought out Hollywood’s most conventionally pretty actors/models, most of whom had limited acting experience. It is a choice that has its roots in the history of propaganda films as well as the visual shorthand from our oldest forms of storytelling, where all the heroes are good-looking and the villainous characters are hideous.
Most of the cast had previously acted on day time soap operas or prime-time teen romances like Beverly Hills 90210, such as two of its leads: Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards. Verhoeven chose this film’s crop of actors with the main vision that he needed actors who would have the look of people chosen for a propaganda film, and as is the case with most propaganda films, the looks would come first and would be the most important aspect. This tradition among propaganda films would typically lead to very wooden, stilted performances. Verhoeven knew that, while a potentially self-sabotaging choice for his own movie, it was an important ingredient for recreating the aesthetic of the propaganda film. His choice in casting went so far as to not even telling his actors they were making a satire because he needed his characters to believe in everything they were doing. These characters were not savvy to anything other than the world-view they had long been indoctrinated into. The end result of this choice lead to an ensemble of very limited actors, very much out of their depth, giving very campy performances, but this too is a critical component for the constructed reality of Verhoeven’s movie. He was recreating the aesthetic of these films and he recognized the performances as an extension of that aesthetic. While these choices would prove to be quite damning to the film’s immediate success in 1997, they would eventually help to preserve the film as one of the most uncompromising and bold approaches to a mainstream blockbuster film. It is very much worth noting that, since its release, Starship Troopers has had one of the greatest critical turnarounds in film history, with film fans from all over discovering it as a movie that was way ahead of its time which people are just now finally catching up to. Don’t just take my word for it, look at some of these recent reviews by critics that completely re-evaluate the film as high art…
“One of the most merciless satires of its time, Paul Verhoeven’s gung-ho, bug-squashing Reich-fest confused critics and audiences when it hit theaters in 1997; from the gruesome effects and rousing battle scenes to the insidiously quotable script (“Would you like to know more?”) and darkly stirring score, it’s just too damn well-made for its own good.”- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, (2017) The AV Club
“… a ruthlessly funny and keenly self-aware sendup of right-wing militarism…[that] critiques the military–industrial complex, the jingoism of American foreign policy, and a culture that privileges reactionary violence over sensitivity and reason.”- Calum Marsh, The Atlantic
“The sci-fi satire arrived too early, and we’re hearing what it said 23 years too late.” – Joshua Rivera, The Verge
I won’t deny that a large part of my unbridled love for Starship Troopers comes from the odd journey I, and many others, have had with it over the years. I mean, how many films can you recall that began as the worst movie you had ever seen only to end up becoming one of your favorite movies 25 years later? On a broader level, I think a major reason why I love Starship Troopers so much is that, for me, it was the movie that completely upended my pre-existing notions of what movies were supposed to be. It challenged my way of thinking in many ways. It taught me the value of curiosity, of digging deeper into analysis before merely writing something off as “bad”. Most of all, my relationship to Starship Troopers taught me that changing my mind was not something to be embarrassed about, but to be embraced!
Ironically, for a movie about characters that treat the world with a simplistic black and white outlook,perhaps we have been too binary in our thinking on the films we consume. Sites like Rotten Tomatoes literally quantify a piece of art down to a percentage, awarding it either a “fresh” or “rotten” score. This site, along with social media sites such as twitter have given audiences much more of a voice and it has truly effected the film industry. Much like an algorithm, the film industry has attempted to cater to the audience’s tastes and demands. In recent years we have witnessed fan campaigns successfully force studio’s hands in releasing specific cuts of movies as well as completely reanimate a character for the entirety of a film that was already finished (Sonic the Hedgehog). While you may be glad that our blue furry friend finally resembled his video game counterpart, I cannot see this development as anything but extremely harmful to filmmaking. If I have learned anything from my humbling experience with Starship Troopers, it’s that I don’t always know what I want in a film. I may think that I do, but that very idea can change when presented with something new. In today’s “fan-driven” landscape, there is no way anything as daring, original, or as weird as Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers would ever make it into theatres, let alone at the scale and budget that it was made with. The current studio approach, which seeks to cater to fan-service or create an algorithm for “quality control”, may succeed in fewer films that turn out to be bombs at the box office, but it also sets very rigid parameters on the level of creativity, ingenuity and originality that a film can have. In conclusion, I believe that I would rather have a ton of movies being made that I see and I end up hating passionately, then very well-made movies that make me feel nothing at all. Starship Troopers instilled in me the belief that any film that garners a strong response from you, positive or negative, is one that is worthy of a reappraisal, a deeper investigation, a second chance. Who knows? Maybe the worst movie you ever saw is one re-watch away from becoming an all-time favorite.
(EXTON, PA) – Recognizing the frustrations in access to mental health care and the lack of information about what resources were available, Pennsylvania State Representative Kristine Howard began holding the Mental Health Fair in 2021. She noticed the urgent need for mental health resources and education, which had only been exacerbated by the pandemic. Many people were turning to her office for help finding care for their loved ones, and it was a natural decision to hold a Mental Health Fair to help inform the public about what resources were available.
This year, Representative Howard and the Chester County Library will co-host a Mental Health Fair on Thursday, September 8 from 3 -5 p.m. in the library’s Struble Room. Visitors can connect with resources from several local agencies and listen to local experts talk about the current condition of mental health in Chester County. Registration is not required.
Speakers at the fair will include:
Kristen de Marco, Executive Director of Gateway Horseworks
Colleen Drake, Assistant Director of Business Development at Belmont Behavioral Hospital
Gerry Gonzalez, Community Relations Representative at Child Guidance Resource Centers
Leslie Holt, Co-Founder, and CEO of A Child’s Light
Michael Ivers, EMS Operations Chief for Chester County Emergency Response
Kate Lannan, Community Services Director at A Haven
Katie McGrath, Director of Outreach, and Olivia Kennedy, Outreach Liaison, at Sanare Today
Deborah Willett, Program Coordinator of GRANDFamily Connections of ChesterCounty at Coatesville Center for Community Health
As an accessible community hub and advocate of circulating health literacy within the community, the Chester County Library is committed to helping connect the community with local mental health resources available to them. The Chester County Library is hoping to extend a lifeline to its neighbors and also demonstrate that they are an inclusive resource for all community needs. This event will give the community at large an opportunity to have open conversations without judgment and thereby also help reduce the stigma surrounding mental health. For more information please visit https://bit.ly/3zSgl0A or contact the Chester County Library Reference Desk at 610-344-5957.
Due to the easing of COVID restrictions, the Board of Trustees of the Chester County Library System/Chester County Library will now be hosting their monthly board meeting as a hybrid offering. If you have always wanted to attend a meeting but haven’t had the time, this is your opportunity. Please click on this link at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday August 16 to join the Chester County Library System Board Meeting virtually; or attend in person at the Coatesville Area Public Library, 501 E Lincoln Highway, Coatesville, PA 19320. The Chester County Library Board Meeting will immediately follow. Find the Chester County Library Board Packet here.
If you are a person with a disability and wish to attend this meeting and require an auxiliary aid, service, or other accommodation to observe or participate in the proceedings, please call Chester County Library’s Administration Office at 610-344-5600 or email lharshaw@ccls.org to discuss how we may best accommodate your needs.
Chalk our Walk! We’re calling all artists to help decorate the sidewalk around the Library to celebrate the reopening of our parking lot. Decorate a block yourself, or share one with family, friends, or your organization. We’ll provide the supplies, you just bring your imagination!
Come by any time between 6:00 and 7:30, but please register first so we can guarantee everyone a spot. Register here.
All drawings must be family-friendly–no offensive, graphic, or political illustrations and no foul language, please.
CHESTER SPRINGS― Join us via the Henrietta Hankin Branch Library on Thursday, August 11, at 1 p.m. for a virtual discussion of DRIFT, a documentary film about New Jersey’s Barnegat Bay. Prior to the discussion, registrants will have special access to the film beginning August 4. The discussion will be led by Avery Lentini, Executive Assistant and Policy Advocate with Save Barnegat Bay. The organization, whose mission is to restore and protect the Bay and its ecosystem, has become a strong and independent voice for the Bay throughout the watershed, including all of Ocean and part of Monmouth Counties.
DRIFT, produced in collaboration with Monmouth University Production Services and directed by Erin Fleming, tells the story of Barnegat Bay through the voices and eyes of people who cherish the Bay as a natural, recreational, and economic resource for the local community and all of New Jersey. The film allows the viewer to DRIFT through 50 years of complex issues through a series of short vignettes, using a variety of perspectives, viewpoints, and experiences. Located on the east coast of New Jersey in Ocean County, the Barnegat Bay runs from the town of Bay Head all the way down to Little Egg Harbor. It is 42 miles long and has an area of 64 square miles.
Register here for this special event. For additional information, please contact Barbara Vitelli, Reference Librarian at bvitelli@ccls.org.
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