Paul Verhoeven's "Black Book" or "Zwartboek," about the Dutch Resistance in WWII

should i go see this today?

y

yay!

What s1ocki said

it's at the quad which as i remember has a v. small screen

I saw this a couple of months ago, liked it pretty much as I was watching it (with the occasional WTF?!?) and then quickly forgot it...

Good on a big screen. If you're talking about the Quad in NYC...save yer $$.

The lead actress is really attractive, though. G'night!

i love paul verhoeven so much ^_^

wow this movie was awesome!

did this come out like 6 months ago in england or something? i really think it's amazing

the very last shot as it fades to black sent chills down my spine - i finally realized what year it is, in the "present", impossible not to think of her crying "will it never end??" some 12 years before.

the plotting to this movie is just so neat - there are so many of those classic "look, here's something from earlier in the movie that you'd forgotten all about" moments

SPOILER SPOILER

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i think my favorite jokey edit was after the failed rescue attempt and you see the two ladies desultorily putting the decorations back into boxes with looks on their faces like "well THAT party didn't go very well"

the last shot was amazing. such a perverse last shot to put in there, so verhoeven.

the one thing that drove me crazy about the plotting was how moustache-twiddlingly OBVIOUS the lawyer was about being the villain and how she didn't notice until the very end

yeah but it was enough of a decoy to draw your attention away from the more meaningful and unexpected villain (unexpected for me at least; someone like pete baran may have spotted it right away, especially given what the dude in question said to the surviving crew as they listened to what they thought was ellis' betrayal, (something like "given the choice of a bullet or collaboration, who here would be pure"?))

yeah, that is a good point about the decoy.

when she pulled out her locket to screw the lid of his casket down tighter i was like DANG THIS IS OPERA

this thread needs a spoiler warning because i for whatever reason have never been able to read moustache-twiddling as a bad guy giveaway

or the word "spoiler" written twice in capital letters, it seems

i skipped your comment!

well that's what you get, then.

it's a metaphorical moustache

I haven't heard anything about this - hope its comin to the Bay Area

It's already in Des Moines, somehow. I skipped the spoilers, should I go see this tonight?

y

do it

did you see it?

not to get all morbius over here, but i couldn't help noticing that the beginning of the 1944 section of the movie is basically the beginning of "the african queen":

* the heroine is living an ascetic life in a house not her own
* she meets a handsome stranger who rides in on a boat, a stick of tobacco clenched between his teeth
* the germans destroy everything and they flee together

this set-up is of course quickly pulverized

Watched this on dvd last night and enjoyed it enormously - for a fairly long film it just zips by, and the way it combines a pretty typical WWII thriller with Verhoeven's various kinks is highly entertaining. I also liked the way it felt like it could have been made any time in about the last 30 years, there was no attempt to be modish or fashionable at all, just a solid story with great leads and a decent plot.

Depite it being pretty far from his usual tack, I also felt like it was recognisably the work of the man who made Total Recall and Starship Troopers, if that makes any sense...

Bleh, still haven't seen it, probably this weekend. Damn friends sidetracking me from real goals.

the way it combines a pretty typical WWII thriller with Verhoeven's various kinks is highly entertaining

This is pretty much exactly what I'm still hoping for. There's one of those pictorial movie overview books on Verhoeven that really makes it clear that there's a thread running through all his movies that kind of connects them in attitude.

Carice van Houten should've gotten more credit for this perf.

I don't understand most of contenderizer's complaints on the Lives of Others digressiuon on BB, the familiar 'movieness' makes this work MOST of the time.

also, obv the work of a more advanced filmmaker than Soldier of Orange (his last Dutch Resistance film, which I also liked)

Liked Soldier of Orange, but haven't seen it in 20 years, so I don't know what I'd think of it now. As far as the familiarity of the story elements and cinematic language goes, I suspect my objections are more a matter of personal taste than of Veerhoeven's failure on any level.

like a really sexed-up version of 'army of shadows' w/more violence

improvements both

I keep calling him "Veerhoeven". His name is Verhoeven.

Van Houten was very appealing in this role. Don't know that the part required any more of her than that.

I'm watching it again tonight – more thoughts tomorrow.

you're "watching" "it" "again"? what does that mean?

Black Book!

you've seen it before so you're

A summary of my terribly fascinating gripes about Black Book (lifted from the Lives of Others thread):

Everything about Black Book is obvious, loud, foolish, and garish. The endless chain of absurd coincidences that passes for a plot gets tiring after a while, and the fact that we're clearly supposed to notice the absurdity doesn't help. There are some decent performances, but nothing that rings true, and nothing we haven't seen time and time again. It feels so dated and bloated and old. Take one old fuddy-duddy war movie, add a big dose of nihilist situational morality and top w/ bleached pubic hair.

When I talk about fuddy-duddyness, in part I'm complaining about it being a more-or-less straightforward WWII melodrama (the genre bores me to tears), but mostly I'm complaining about the level of formal imagination involved. The visual sensibility seems like the lazy product of other movies and television shows. Not in a good way, either.

Robocop (another Verhoeven flick) and Raiders of the Lost Ark are movies with a similar sort of formal imagination: everything on screen represents not the world as we know it, filterd through a personal cinematic language, but rather a set of familiar genre tropes as they've appeared in countless other films. Robocop and Raiders, however, actually address this indebtedness. Black Book just borrows stock ideas from the work of others.

The parade of things we've seen a million times is occasionally interrupted by the jaw-dropping crassness and nihilism that are Verhoeven's usual stock in trade, but it isn't enough to save the picture. Personally, I love the crassness and nihilism, but here they seemed watered-down, along with everything else.

It's not watered-down when the "heroine" is covered in shit.

To complain about BB's obviousness, loudness, foolishness, and garishness is rather silly -- IT IS ALL THESE THINGS. There's one too many double-crosses, but in many ways this is a more subversive and better film than, say, Europa Europa. It reminded me of Celine in bits -- the nihilism that's inevitable when your options are zero. And it uses melodrama for Sirkian ends.

And Carice van Houten deserved more end-of-the-year awards nonsense.

Even though I'm not sure that it was that good, I really really enjoyed it. Van Houten was just right in the part--appealing and steely-eyed too. One too many Verhoeven sex-kink bits, but still, best thing he's done in years (as I hated Starship Troopers).

as I hated Starship Troopers

dead to me

liked this a lot though. very entertaining.

so freakin good!

It's kind of a shameless genre piece (the Nazi adventure movie) but any movie that can keep the pace & interest up for a 2-1/2 hr. plus running time is kind of notable for that if nothing else. It belongs in the same rank with other recent examples of superior genre work by "serious" directors, e.g., Spielberg's Munich and Scorsese's The Departed.

I totally loved this.

nate i think this is about 1,000,000,000 times better than those two you mentioned - in scope, high and lows of emotion, in just about every way - but yeah, it never felt long to me, i just wanted it to keep going and going - very rare

The swagger of the thing is what most impressed me. As Verhoeven piles up the outrages in the last third it actually becomes more heartbreaking.

I finally saw this. I enjoyed it.

See, I understand why people say they like 'Starship Troopers'. It's just that, in the end, all those arguments seem to boil down to 'But it's SUPPOSED to be bad--that's why it's good!"

you've been arguing with the wrong people

yeah i think ST is supposed to be good and it is good. (it's also supposed to be funny and it is really funny.)

This looks like a conversation not to continue.

I haven't superenjoyed Verhoeven's films after Robocop, but I really liked the Fourth Man, and I thought Turkish Delight and Spetters were *interesting*. Zwartboek was showing nearby a couple months ago and Verhoeven came out with it to do a Q&A, so I went to see it. I guess I wasn't expecting much, but I loved it.

I think there is some level of cinematic caricature used, as seems typical in Verhoeven's movies, but I thought it served sort of a cohesive statement. I didn't think the movie was highly derivative, but I'm not a huge fan of war movies. I definitely see the comparison to Europa Europa, especially in tone but I think there's a lot of differences between the two in statement and narrative.

Contenderizer, what specific parts did you feel like you had seen a million times?

It's good, and really has little in common with the great Munich.

I was mainly talking about the long (2-1/2 hr plus) running times, and the fact that they're both tightly-paced thrillers by acclaimed directors. I agree that Munich's better though.

god the last shot of this movie... i said it upthread but what a punch in the gut.

It's kind of a shameless genre piece (the Nazi adventure movie) but any movie that can keep the pace & interest up for a 2-1/2 hr. plus running time is kind of notable for that if nothing else. It belongs in the same rank with other recent examples of superior genre work by "serious" directors, e.g., Spielberg's Munich and Scorsese's The Departed.

-- o. nate, Thursday, July 10, 2008 2:45 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

you say it's a genre piece like that's a bad thing!

you say it's a genre piece like that's a bad thing!

Silly boy, didn't you know? Genres are for children's story books and for the underclass. Serious people only write about serious subjects.

And rank things.

This is on Channel 4 in an hour. Psyched.

is it worth watching?

is it a channel where there will be titties?

yeah, C4, they are known for putting extra titties in

Well worth watching - one of Verhoeven's best, and as gratuitously entertaining a "war" film as I've seen.

don't really understand why this is 2h40 on C4 and 2h15 on C4+1? Do they show fewer ads on C4+1? And isn't 2h15 less than the running time of the film?

love the crazy metacritic pullquotes: http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/blackbook

cool! cans, crisps, and a good film.

>And isn't 2h15 less than the running time of the film?

yeah, imdb lists as 145mins...weird. Surely the clocks aren't going back *again* already? Also weird to see that I stanned this film upthread back in '07.

waldemar kobus' performance in this = best screen nazi ever

if they've cut the titties i'm not going to be cool with that

lol this film was preceded by an inconvenient truth.

Watch this, it is great!

Inconvenient Truth and The Day the Earth was Cold with Donnie Glyenhal!

that film was ludicrous.

Best friend + I caught the last hour of this!! It was REALLY GOOD! Especially as we'd just sat through The Hottie And The Nottie in its magnificent entirety

this movie trumps soldier of orange imo, and soldier of orange is great

waiting for godot homage in the last scene of dialogue was genuinely inspired imo

loved this movie!

my favorite of its many perversities is that the fat grody nazi is of course the lovely pianist (and not the hot noble one)

also that the movie had been hinting the whole time that something shitty might happen to the redhead secretary character when the allies roll in, but nope, she just hops on a jeep and that's that.

...and that, if i recall, there's no discussion between 'ellis' and the officer as to what extent, if any, he's "really" a nazi? seemed like a huge script hole at the time but i wonder...

(weird coincidence: watched this closely after a few early eps of the 'story of film' doc and van houten has a more than passing resemblance to eleanor boardman)

two months ago i watched this with my parents and it made for a few mildly squirmy moments

there's no discussion between 'ellis' and the officer as to what extent, if any, he's "really" a nazi?

which officer you talkin about

the one she bones!