The Black Book; Stepbrothers; The Cell

Recently, I wrote about Paul Verhoeven and the need to possibly re-evaluate my views on his work. I haven’t rented Showgirls yet but we did see The Black Book, Verhoeven’s most recent film from 2006. The Black Book is, as with most Verhoeven movies, an exercise in extremes. It encompasses the best and the worst of Verhoeven’s impluses towards pulpy melodrama and excess.

The Black Book is a cartoon, basically. It reminded me of war comics, though of a particulary trashy sort. Though the characters suffer some awful and horrific things, I wasn’t as moved as I would have been had they been any semblance of a human being, a real person, and not the cartoony symbols that they were. But that’s focusing on the wrong things, really. Paul Verhoeven is not into subtley, veracity, or any kind of restraint. He is not into “real.” It would be as if I expected Sgt. Rock or Superman comics to thoughtfully and conscientiously portray a war. That isn’t to say comics can’t do this. Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus is the best and most obvious example.

I guess, however, that I’d expected more; perhaps that’s where I went wrong. Never expect anything from Verhoeven but extreme and explicit trash! I might have liked it more, then. But I got higher expectations since this was a return to his home country, his first film in Dutch since The 4th Man, which was an intriguing, stylish thriller, and a lot of fun. I had hoped it would be more like that! It wasn’t. It was more like Total Recall and Showgirls at once, with lots of tits and violent bloodshed and a vat of shit dumped on our heroine for good measure. Gross!

But in spite of these crass moments - some would say, because of them - The Black Book never bores. It races along its twisty, turny way at breakneck speed, tragedy after tragedy occuring with nary a pause for reflection, so that it feels like the characters are not psychologically affected by any of it. That’s how I felt, too: mostly unaffected by all the suffering. It’s just entertainment! But, well, did I already mention that the film is set during the Holocaust? It seems maybe too irreverent to speak of The Holocaust in terms of trashy entertainment. Just a thought.

So in the end, do I still feel that Verhoeven needs re-evaluation? He’s managed to convince me that his films aren’t necessarily worth writing off, but I’m not sure that I like them all that much.

And here’s a brief run-down on some of the other movies we’ve seen recently.

Stepbrothers. A horrible movie. Joe is the Will Ferrell fan; I think he’s great on SNL, but not really much else. Anchorman was pretty good, and my four-year-old son loves Elf. Usually, Ferrell often provides the only really funny bits in each of his movies, and two or three funny bits per movie, at best. Some, like Old School, have only one (I’m streeeeaking, I’m streeeeeeeaking!). Stepbrothers sucked all the way through, but got worse and worse to the end, plus oddly and inappropriately violent for a comedy. I don’t even know why we watched the whole thing. Really, run away from it as fast as you can.

The Cell. This was kind of like playing catch-up with movies I’d meant to see and had put off. But after seeing Tarsem Singh’s more recent and absolutely lovely The Fall, we wanted to right that oversight. Again, the art direction and cinematography are both breath-taking and surreal. But the plot was completely unoriginal, very Silence of the Lambs, right down to the last-minute race against time to save the latest victim, and so, the film failed overall to impress me much, beyond the visuals. But in the realm of the visual, Tarsem (as he’s now known as) does a great job with his highly inventive and imaginative settings.

Dear Zachary

Joe saw the trailer for Dear Zachary and immediately wanted to see it. He says that I saw the trailer with him, but I swear, I have zero memory of it. Has he mis-remembered, or am I really getting that senile? In any case, we finished watching it last night; it was at once horrifying, gripping, and overwhelmingly sad.

Dear Zachary by Kurt Kuenne is “about the 2001 murder of his best friend, Dr. Andrew Bagby; Andrew was killed by his ex-girlfriend, who fled the United States for Canada, then discovered she was pregnant with Andrew's son, whom she named Zachary. Originally begun as a project for Zachary to learn about his father, the film follows Andrew's parents' battle to win custody of their grandson from the clutches of their son's murderer, and is an activist plea for reform to Canada's flawed bail system, which allowed Andrew's murderer to walk free while awaiting extradition and kill again.” (From IMDb)

It’s difficult to criticize a documentary like this, one that is passionate and has a bona fide cause to champion. Suffice it to say that the material did not need the overly-edited treatment that Kuenne gives it; horror movie tropes and comic talking heads seemed at times just inappropriate. Tiny gripes, really, in the grand scheme of things. This film is so honest and heartfelt, so gut-wrenching and infuriating, that it will stay with me for some time. See it, then write to your member of parliament about bail reform. What’s art for, if not to change the world?

Mister Lonely

Last week, on the day of Michael Jackson’s funeral, it seemed fitting to start watching Mister Lonely, a film starring Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson impersonator. He meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator, played by Samantha Morton, who convinces him to come to a commune where her husband “lives as” Charlie Chaplin, her daughter as Shirley Temple, and others as The Pope, The Queen, Buckwheat, Abe Lincoln, James Dean, Madonna, Red Riding Hood, Sammy Davis Jr. and the Three Stooges. A subplot stars Wernor Herzog as a pilot/priest who oversees flying nuns. How could this not be amazing? I loved Mister Lonely, loved its beautiful cinematic long sequences, its genuine and unsettling weirdness, its wonder and hope that slowly revealed its dark tragedy, its entrancing music by Jason Spaceman from Spiritualized. Released in 2007, Mister Lonely was Harmony Korine’s first film in eight years. It’s the kind of film that provokes strong reactions: you either love or hate it, as I hear is the case with his previous films, Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy (which I haven’t seen, though I do mean to). This film is, evidently, not as dark or disjointed as his others, and might even be called spiritual or uplifting if it weren’t for (maybe because of) its sadness. The perfect film in theme and mood to pay tribute to the real Michael Jackson in all his strange sadness as well. Diego Luna as Michael explains his obsession: “I don't know if you know what it is like to want to be someone else, to not want to look like you look, to hate your own face and to go completely unnoticed. I have always wanted to be someone else. I have never felt comfortable the way I am.” It makes perfect sense on so many levels.

Starship Troopers and a general reconsideration of Paul Verhoeven

I admit, I had pretty much dismissed Paul Verhoeven, widely known as a maker of trash. He wasn’t always considered as such, though. He’d had a long and successful career in his native Netherlands already when he went Hollywood. The movie that put Verhoeven on the map was Robocop, a pretty good movie that spawned not-so-good sequels, a tv series, videogames… it was followed by the mostly well-received Schwarzenegger vehicle Total Recall, and his most successful and controversial movie, Basic Instinct. Showgirls was widely panned, but not as much as Hollow Man, which almost killed his Hollywood career. Critics love to trash his work, myself included, seeing his fondness for overblown violence and smut as misogynistic, exploitative spectacle.

However, I was surprised to learn that many of his movies had gone on to find a cult following. Showgirls, for instance, has become a classic of Gay Camp. Then recently, I saw The Fourth Man, and was honestly surprised! As Verhoeven’s last movie made in Holland before he went to America, it was very stylishly edited, twisting and compelling. I was hooked! I could seen, then, that I had to re-evaluate my views of Verhoeven.

Joe wanted to see Starship Troopers, as friends had been telling him it was actually pretty good. When it first came out, there was a lot said about it being an ode to Nazism, which had been enough to turn me off of it. But of course, it’s more complex than that. We watched it last week, and it turned out to confound all my expectations, not a small feat indeed. I had thought it would be a straight-up, cheesy kind of space-action flick with totaliarian aesthetics, but it was actually rather Disney-esque in its “wholesome” and cartoony characters and sets (though not so Disney-esque in its gore and skin quota). It was overblown, overacted, and completely clichéd… and these were its good points! It was so very obviously all these things that it became something else, a blackly funny poke at action movie heroics and rabid patriotism. And interestingly, sexism has been eradicated, and the army is entirely co-ed, right down to the showers (Verhoeven's not one to miss an opportunity for wet, glistening flesh).

On the other hand, the satire doesn’t get more clever than this, and so it gets a little boring after a while. I got to dislike the characters more and more, and by the end of the film, had mostly contempt for them, and while this may be a desired effect, it wasn’t fun spending time with them. Or perhaps I’m reading the intent completely wrong, and I was actually supposed to like and identify with these characters! But that clearly didn’t work out either. So I wouldn’t call Starship Troopers a really good film, but it’s certainly not to be dismissed.

These last two movies have prompted me to reconsider Verhoeven completely. I’m not saying that I suddenly see Verhoeven’s films as “high art” (if the line dividing high and low even exists anymore). I do think, however, that his gung-ho approach to movie-making is more subversive than I previously gave him credit for. He takes clichés of sex and violence and amps them up to levels that are crassly titillating (ahem), then just absurd and funny. We’re planning to watch his new film, The Black Book, his first Dutch film since The Fourth Man. I also want to see Soldier of Orange from his earlier Dutch period, which comes highly recommended as one of the best Dutch films ever. And hey, I might actually even rent Showgirls again! I see now why it’s become a camp classic. Verhoeven is way more fun than any of the other action cheesemongers in Hollywood put together.

The Fall

I had never heard of The Fall. Joe had been reading good things about it, but since it had barely had a release, we thought, how good could it be? Well, we were stunned and amazed. It is simply one of the most imaginative, cinematic, beautiful and clever films that I’ve seen in quite some time! The story, set in the 1920s, is about a paralyzed and heartbroken Hollywood stuntman who weaves a magical tale of five mythical heroes (a fey and fancy Charles Darwin with a monkey companion among them) to a little girl with a broken arm (Catinca Untaru in one of the best, most natural performaces I have ever seen by a child). There are telling and clever little details that illustrate the interactive nature of storytelling. For instance, when the stuntman tells of an “Indian” who has a wigwam and a squaw, the girl, who is from Romania and unfamiliar with Hollywood Cowboys and Indians, imagines a beturbaned Indian from India. The imagery blends fantastic and surreal elements throughout, and is so stunning that I was convinced it had to be CGI, but evidently it is not. This is the kind of whimsical, extravagant metanarrative that’s right up my alley, though I can see how one either buys it completely or hates it completely. But for me, all the threads work beautifully together to weave a tale of wonder and imagination.

So how is it that The Fall is virtually unknown? It first premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006, but didn’t receive a (very limited) theatrical release in the States until 2008, and went straight to DVD in most other countries. Tarsem, whose first feature was The Cell with JLo, made the movie himself over four years and in 28 countries… that is, he financed it completely himself, outside of any studio help, so as to have complete creative control. Tarsem was hoping to get a rave review from Roger Ebert (who was a fan of The Cell) when the film premiered, but unfortunately, Ebert was ill that week, so was unable to attend. Even more unfortunately, the generally negative responses to the film at the TIFF gave it a bad rep, which it was unable to overcome, even though Ebert later gave it four stars. The film is a meta-fairy tale for adults, which made it hard to peg down and market, according to several acquisition executives. Tarsem’s reputation as a commercial and music video director worked against the film, as many saw it as thus having more style than substance. And the fact that it was self-financed gave the film a reputation as a "vanity project," unworthy of being studio-financed or distributed. What a picture this paints of how the film market works in abominable ways! How it quashes originality while bolstering mediocrity! How many other gems of movies remain unseen because of similar situations?

Fortunately, the film is slowly receiving some recognition. It’s drawn comparisons to Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, and the DVD comes as “presented by David Fincher and Spike Jonze,” which lends it their stamp of approval. It’s a shame that as a result of one poor reception at its premiere, it hasn’t had the chance to gather the audience it deserves. I say, go see it ASAP! Maybe it can gain a second life on DVD.