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.