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46 Issue 70 / 2014 FILM guestlist.net The first 20 minutes of the film involve Luukkainen making a lot of tough choices; trousers or duvet? He has already begun using his window-ledge as a fridge. The absence of such luxuries made him more appreciative of everything we take for granted – rarely has a man been so moved by the sight of a mattress. Therefore, it is unfortunate that the film doesn't dedicate more time to the early days of the experiment. Luukkainen flits over the difficulties of maintaining social contact without technology and the effects of the experiment on his work-life. Furthermore, one of the film's most defining features, the retrieving of an item a day, turns out to be its biggest flaw. Luukkainen retrieves more and more items to the point where the dilemma of choosing possessions quickly dissipates, and the experiment ossifies. What we are left with is a man whose experiment no longer has any serious impact on his way of life; he is now simply living a vaguely abstemious lifestyle.This begs the question, if 'stuff' doesn't make you happy and you don't actually need anything else, why keep going back to get more? The film doesn't present a satisfying answer to that question. However, where the film does succeed extremely well is in the subtler plot of monetary abnegation. It can be argued that is a much more important lesson than the limiting of belongings. By abstaining from spending money, Luukkainen stumbles upon a refreshing independence. When his dishwasher breaks down, he fixes it himself. It's a quietly powerful example of how easy it is to break away from being reliant upon others. 7/10 'My Stuff', ('Tavarataivas' in Finnish), explores a man's relationship with his belongings and how they affect his relationship with people. Put on as part of an exciting program by the brilliant Nordic Film Festival, the film was shown in the wonderful ArtHouse Crouch End cinema. Paul Verhoeven's 1997 romp is brilliantly brainless, yet therein lies its brains. Starship Troopers is a misunderstood beast, lambasted for its wooden acting, paper-thin dialogue, and over the top pyrotechnics. The natural assumption seems to be that if you're a director portraying a wilfully idiotic world filled with empty, meaningless destruction then you have to be a bit of an idiot yourself. Yet those same criticisms form the heart and soul of the picture's satirical bite, and demonstrate just how subversive the work truly is. Let's back up a minute. Set some time in the not-too-but-still-pretty distant future, Starship Troopers is the story of young Johnny Rico's journey from high school football prodigy to a grizzled veteran in Earth's war against sentient bugs from outer space. Based on Robert Heinlein's pseudo-fascistic 1959 novel of the same name, Verhoeven presents us with a society in which citizenship is only guaranteed through active military service. Throughout the course of his military career, Rico is forced to confront the deaths of his lover, mentor, family and friends, yet the film retains a tone of gleefully gung-ho optimism in the face of this desolation. The titular troopers are presented as farcically disposable in the most horrific of ways, yet that doesn't stop them charging fearlessly towards their grisly end. If the subject matter sounds like B-movie dross, it is all the more to his credit that director Paul Verhoeven is able to use the story as a vehicle for a critique of not only the original novel, but of Hollywood itself. Starship Troopers essentially holds a mirror up to action cinema's own vacuousness, whilst firmly and definitively reminding them that this is how it's really done. Formally, the director is able to engage with and exemplify the tropes of action cinema to such a disarming of fidelity that it can be hard to identify. Yet as recent remakes of his other films (RoboCop, Total Recall) have demonstrated, there is a level of thoughtfulness and nuance to Verhoeven's genre filmmaking that confounds those unable to recognise it. ESSENTIAL REWATCH: STARSHIP TROOPERS COULD YOU LIVE A YEAR WITHOUT YOUR THINGS? - 'MY STUFF' DOCUMENTARY REVIEW