Word: verhoeven
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...Some recipients have been happy to get in on the joke. Showgirls director Paul Verhoeven appeared in person to accept the award for Worst Picture of 1995. ("He sat through the entire ceremony," Wilson says, "and then got up at the end and said, 'Obviously my film has entertained you, but not in the way I intended it to.'") In 2005, Oscar-Winner Halle Berry made headlines with an overemotional parody of her Academy Awards acceptance speech while taking home the Worst Actress award for Catwoman...
...Dutch resistance in WWII. Call me a prude, but when a pretty Jewish girl is steeling herself to seduce an SS commandant, I don’t need to see her give a quickie to a fellow resistance member after waxing her pubic hair. The private parts Verhoeven willingly parades around onscreen belong to Carice van Houten, who plays Rachel Steinn, alias Ellis de Vries, a dazzling on-the-lam Jew recruited to spy for the resistance. An able temptress and a contemplative soul, she adopts a dour disposition as willingly as she strips for her assigned Nazi boytoy Ludwig...
...hard to take a guy like that seriously and already some critics are calling Black Book "vulgar," mainly, it seems to me, because it so radically subverts genre anticipations. Or, possibly, because it more than fulfills their deeply suspicious expectations of a Verhoeven movie. I think they're wrong. I think they're so transfixed by the movie's reckless pace and its often dim view of the human behavior that they ignore the grim and sobering message it imparts...
...innocence even after the war, when she is accused of collaboration and is first brutally degraded by the Dutch, then almost murdered by a collaborator who is the last person we suspect of leading a double wartime life. The Saturnalia of liberation is more shocking, more bitterly ironic, to Verhoeven than the grim reaping of wartime and he does not blink at showing them. They are, in fact, the most shocking and subversive and hard to accept of all his images. We didn't want to see people we've always thought of as heroes in an anti-heroic light...
...That's not a thought movies especially like to entertain. And its not one we expect to hear from Paul Verhoeven, who was drummed out of Hollywood for committing the town's only unforgivable sin: making controversial, high profile movies whose box office performances were not worth their trouble. In such circumstances it's simple to read Black Book as a possibly desperate attempt at a comeback, a retreat to his native land and to the sort of material with which he first established his international reputation, Soldier of Orange, his 1977 resistance drama of a much more conventional kind...