tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494160638739613756.post2452308203371434862..comments2024-03-28T02:30:08.913-04:00Comments on Not Just Movies: Black BookJakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09078001374402400232noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494160638739613756.post-2270902278127766122018-12-22T03:26:09.189-05:002018-12-22T03:26:09.189-05:00As a woman, i found the black book which may be ha...As a woman, i found the black book which may be hailed as'clever' by some, but which for me, remains an inglorious Ode to Verhoeven's own perverse loss of morals, through which he establishes the platform to gratify in technicolour, his own sexual immaturity with unbridled, erotic exploitation of the female body successfully debasing womanhood and all that is feminine, as though his audiences would amorally condone the total abscence of Godliness, albeit against a plot of unrivalled barbarity..surely, used here, as a ruse to stage his own perversions, as had many film directors before him.<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494160638739613756.post-7250425819545237342011-01-15T20:38:46.277-05:002011-01-15T20:38:46.277-05:00I can't tell if you're responding more to ...I can't tell if you're responding more to Rosenbaum or me. He was certainly the person I was thinking of when I mentioned how weird I find the comparisons, although I do stand by my assertion that the film does act as a response to Spielberg's two WWII-set dramas, even if I don't think they require a response. I don't think the shower scene is exploitative either, though that's something for my upcoming post on the film. I think Rosenbaum's track record on any film that so much as pairs WWII and Jews is so spotty than I'm actually amazed he loved this, especially since he made that absurd proclamation that Inglourious Basterds was akin to Holocaust denial.Jakehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09078001374402400232noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494160638739613756.post-38937810801988538852011-01-15T19:16:24.482-05:002011-01-15T19:16:24.482-05:00A good movie with a theme of "gray areas"...A good movie with a theme of "gray areas" that I think is fascinating only up to a point. Back when Ed published his Toerific piece in 2009, it inspired a lively comments section--I wasn't able to participate because I didn't see the movie until well over a year later, but overall I agree with what Bill Ryan had been saying: <i>Black Book</i>'s attempt to address the gray areas in WWII isn't entirely successful, and part of the reason is because the Muntze character isn't a gray character at all but, as Bill described him, a "white". Unlike the other characters surrounding him in the movie, Muntze is seen as a character capable mostly of good deeds--the "good Nazi", if you will. I'm not trying to knock Verhoeven's attempt to bring humanity out of the Third Reich (if anything, I bow to it), but obviously Muntze could only have gotten to such a high position of power if he had been involved in mass murders and genocide. Verhoeven doesn't bother to reveal any details about that, though, probably because he recognizes that to do so would put the audience's sympathy for the character at risk.<br /><br />I've also always been confused as to why people like to contrast <i>Black Book</i> with <i>Schindler's List</i>. For one thing, <i>Black Book</i> isn't even a Holocaust movie. It's a genre piece. It's a sex/action thriller that just so happens to be more complex than several of its trashier counterparts, even if the actual wingspan of its complexity is up for debate. It's about as much of a Holocaust movie as <i>Inglourious Basterds</i> was: both films are about Jewish women who plan vengeance against the Third Reich after watching their families get wiped out by Nazis, but neither film ever ventures into the concentration camps nor the death camps--nor should they, since they're not, after all, Holocaust movies.<br /><br />Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in his <i>Black Book</i> review about how he believes Verhoeven's movie "puts <i>Schindler's List</i> to shame", but of course Rosenbaum can say that: <i>Black Book</i> doesn't show us any atrocities that happened <i>within</i> the Holocaust but, rather, outside of it. And given Rosenbaum's history of complaining about movies that DO show Holocaust atrocities (<i>Schindler's List, The Pianist, The Grey Zone</i>) and his constant insistence that Holocaust portrayal shouldn't go beyond the sheer documentatary styles of <i>Shoah</i> and <i>Night and Fog</i>, well, it's no wonder he's more comfortable sitting through <i>Black Book</i> than he is sitting through <i>Schindler's List</i>.<br /><br />And is it fair to charge that the shower scene in <i>Schindler's List</i> is a scene designed for the audience, or that the ending of <i>Schindler's List</i> is supposed to be uplifting? The shower scene is in the movie because it's true to history: when Schindler's women were accidentally shipped off to Auschwitz, in reality they were there for three weeks--which means that they had to have taken <i>several</i> showers during that duration, each time expecting to be gassed. Spielberg simply makes their fears palpable for people who don't know what that's like. The ending of <i>Schindler's List</i> also comments about how there are fewer than 4,000 Jews left alive in Poland today, and the final shot--of Liam Neeson standing at Schindler's grave out in the distance, amongst the graves of other dead Holocaust victims, while the dedication to them appears on the screen before the fadeout--is as eloquent a statement by any filmmaker that the Holocaust will be following the world to this day.Adam Zanziehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14524618281515322239noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494160638739613756.post-59842076293043752392011-01-12T22:36:32.695-05:002011-01-12T22:36:32.695-05:00I've never actually seen his early Dutch films...I've never actually seen his early Dutch films. I was so flummoxed over how I felt about his American films that I kind of moved on to other directors. Maybe once I knock over one or two of the retrospectives I've got going on now I might go through his work, though I've also got some more classic directors planned too. I'm really good at coming up with all these ways of evaluating people for the first time or reevaluating those I might have underestimated but damned if that list doesn't always seem to grow. I would very much like to see his early work before he started working with scripts I feel he probably disagreed with on some level or at least saw completely differently than those who wrote them.<br /><br />And I really, really wanted to mention the scene with the gun, but everywhere I tried to fit it in it came out either as a too-short or too-long aside. I burst out laughing, first because of the audacity of showing an erection like that in anything other than a Z-grade virgin teen comedy and then laughing harder when Verhoeven pulls the bait-and-switch. But even then, as you say, there are deeper feelings at play.<br /><br />I'm so glad I finally got around to this. The first review I read of it was the one I linked in the main piece but when Doniphon (who sadly deleted his article along with the rest of his blog) named it one of the 15 best of the decade I took notice but held off reading it until I could see it. Shame I don't have the chance now.Jakehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09078001374402400232noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494160638739613756.post-91293113381714318762011-01-12T22:25:06.363-05:002011-01-12T22:25:06.363-05:00there's a sexiness to the image certainly (lik...<i>there's a sexiness to the image certainly (like I said, it's never used in the outright despairing way of some directors) but that there's such a swirl of feelings around it</i><br /><br />That's pretty much what I was getting at: that sex is complicated for Verhoeven, and often includes an element of sexiness and fun, not just the darker undertones. I always love that scene where Müntze is holding a pistol under the covers, pointing it at Ellis, but at first she thinks he's getting an erection (and so do we). The scene goes from playful to threatening and then to surprisingly tender as the lovers reconcile, but the element of danger remains, intimately tied in with the sexiness and the warmer emotions.<br /><br />I should say, also, that I wasn't really thinking of stuff like <i>Showgirls</i> or <i>Basic Instinct</i>, but more his Dutch period, films like <i>Turkish Delight</i> or <i>Keetje Tippel</i>, where sex is presented with this whole complex range of feelings. Verhoeven, I think, worked in pretty different ways in his American period as compared to his Dutch period. <i>Showgirls</i> and <i>Starship Troopers</i>, especially, are films where the deeper substance is almost diametrically opposed to the surfaces of the films. As a result, in those films, and also in <i>Basic Instinct</i>, he kind of wallows in the unerotic and the ugly, shoves it in the audience's face. That makes them stand apart from the comparatively nuanced portrait of sexuality in his Dutch works and in <i>Black Book</i>, which is in many ways more like the Dutch films than the Hollywood ones. Like you say in your piece, <i>Black Book</i> represents Verhoeven taking the lessons he learned in Hollywood and bringing them back to his home country, assimilating them into the aesthetic and themes of his original Dutch period.Ed Howardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18014222247676090467noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494160638739613756.post-61172484373579201592011-01-12T21:36:26.671-05:002011-01-12T21:36:26.671-05:00Ed: I admit that it's been a looooong time sin...Ed: I admit that it's been a looooong time since I've seen a Verhoeven film that wasn't RoboCop, so I'm going on memory for his sex scenes. But what always struck me about Showgirls was how outsized yet unerotic the sex was, how much the absurdity of its staging painted a more garish picture than if he'd, say, not gone with that dolphin flailing that was Berkley's sex scene. But I need to see both that and Basic Instinct again because I'm still very much on the fence on how well the intended satire works (I still think Verhoeven and Ezterhas had completely conflicting views on what they wanted from those movies). But I feel that there's always a sleazy element underneath Verhoeven's sex: I mean, van Houten is just gorgeous and she plays Ellis seductively, but there's always this underlying hint of either exploitation or foreboding underneath it all. I could never really settle into the heat of the moment as it were; there's a sexiness to the image certainly (like I said, it's never used in the outright despairing way of some directors) but that there's such a swirl of feelings around it that it's hard not to get pulled out and think of context and how the moment might affect later happenings. It's actually a brilliant way of shooting sex, and incredibly unique. He indulges in the sultriness while never letting us just check out and get mental images for, um, later use.<br /><br />As for the ending, that's an interesting take, and one I think can work alongside what I got out of it. It's certainly within Verhoeven's power to conjure up multiple moods across a wide emotional and intellectual range at once (which makes me want to return to his American period all the more quickly), and your take would flesh out the tone of the beginning, which paints Israel in a more cynical light as the result of Western nations simply looking for an outlet for all the people who (understandably) did not wish to return to the places that had nearly killed them and had killed so many of their loved ones, as well as a place to serve as an ally for commercial and political interests. The ending mingles that with a more human tone for those who actually live there and do see it as a hard-won land of their own, and even that is under attack. Feeding back into your point, it then follows that even the drastic steps taken to find some respite for Jews are temporary. Haunting to think about.<br /><br />Thanks for the input, Ed. I appreciate it.Jakehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09078001374402400232noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494160638739613756.post-81125299339369671042011-01-12T21:09:47.350-05:002011-01-12T21:09:47.350-05:00Great piece, Jake, I'm so happy to see such an...Great piece, Jake, I'm so happy to see such an enthusiastic appreciation — and one that so thoroughly *gets it* — of this great film. It's a real favorite of mine and a film I've written and thought about a lot. It's a deeply powerful and complex film but also a remarkably entertaining one. I've always loved that Verhoeven doesn't look down on the entertainment factor, that he isn't condescending about the thrills and action and suspense that he does so well here. You do a great job of probing this film's intricacies.<br /><br />I do have a few small disagreements. One is that I certainly don't think Verhoeven views sex as "self-annihilating." He's very candid about sexual manipulation and exploitation, sure, but Verhoeven also just loves sexuality, and treats it as a major part of life that needs to be represented in the cinema: in its uglier aspects as well as in its moments of playfulness and fun. Verhoeven's sex scenes often <i>are</i> sexy, and Ellis is a very sexy heroine, a woman who's very in touch with her sexuality, who uses it as a tool for a cause but who also obviously just enjoys sex, who enjoys being a woman. I think viewing Verhoeven as only focusing on the negative aspects of sex is missing out on the full richness of this character and of Verhoeven's worldview in general.<br /><br />I also see the ending a little differently. I think what you say about the state of constant siege afflicting the Jews makes sense, and is definitely part of it. But I also see a bit of irony in that ending, a bit of darkness, a suggestion that Ellis, seeking peace and security, has simply placed herself in the center of a different war, a different volatile situation. It's not just sympathy for the Israelis, but maybe also a subtle questioning of whether such fragile security is really wise or desirable. <br /><br />Anyway, this is definitely a thoughtful and rewarding film, one that I've returned to many times. I always find myself entertained, I always love every minute of it as it leaps through its perfectly paced action scenes and melodramatic reversals and twists. And I also always get so much out of it. Verhoeven, in making this film that's so thoroughly steeped in Hollywood imagery and grandeur, has infused the clichés with a deep, abiding humanity.Ed Howardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18014222247676090467noreply@blogger.com