I used to have Total Recall only rated 4-stars but after watching it last night I realized the error of my ways. This is a 5-star movie.

This fucking movie, this movie right here, has some insane re-watchability. In the 4 years Richard and I have been together we've watched it at least 3 times and somehow, that doesn't seem like it's enough. I used to watch it pretty regularly in the U.S. as well, it was on TV often and Total Recall is not a movie you just flip past while channel surfing. You land on it, you say "FUCK YES, SEE YOU AT THE PARTY, RICHTER" and you watch it. It's just, culturally, what Americans do.

Total Recall…

Catching Up with the Past (2017)

One thing I really, really like about Total Recall is that Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a dissatisfied, good-natured, generally befuddled workaday man who is at the mercy of strange machinations and is struggling to catch up with the circumstances of his own life.

In general, you can keep your alpha males and your strong, silent types. There are exceptions, of course, but I've never had much use for John Waynes with their moral clarity and unflappable resolve. What's interesting about that? I want to see emotionally and/or psychologically tortured people thrown for a loop by crisis.

Typically, that's not the kind of performance you think of when you think about Arnold Schwarzenegger, but fortunately filmmakers…

To deliver a philosophical puzzler in a blockbuster is a tricky enough needle to thread when we're talking about a more self-serious blockbuster like The Matrix or Inception. To do the same in an insanely fun Arnold sci-fi action romp is a genuine triumph. This film nails the Inception spinning top structure 20 years earlier with almost infinitely more fun and flourish.

In accomplishing such a feat, it is a quintessential Paul Verhoeven film. It is difficult to imagine any other director pulling this movie off**. It is so very Verhoeven to make a movie that works perfectly well on an overt action level while still delivering the goods on a philosophical conceit. Anybody that knows anything about my film…

This week we are counting down our five favorite dystopian movies. My #5 pick: Total Recall (1990), directed by Paul Verhoeven.
Nobody combines sleazy and smart quite as well as Verhoeven. So many dystopian stories are either oppressively gritty and dark or they are sterile and tidy (in a 1984 kind of way). Verhoeven's future dystopias (especially this and Robocop) are more garish and loud. They're exaggerated versions of our world, and that makes them even more repulsive than a lot of the more stark visions of the future. Verhoeven's Mars feels more like the Earth I know than a lot of dystopias, and that's a huge part of why it is so effective.
Total Recall can be enjoyed on…