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.

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.