Movies, movies, movies....
Apr. 30th, 2007 10:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dangermousieI’ve realized that of the movies I’ve seen in the theater this year, comparatively not that many (1/3) have been in English. This is not out of some form of snobbery because I just go see what interests me, but it is bizarre. Of course, in part this is because Last King of Scotland, The Queen etc. was showing, I was swamped. Hmm.
Here is the list of the movies I’ve seen in theater so far, in order from most fave to least. I have to note though that I thoroughly enjoyed every movie I’ve seen in a theater so far, with the possible exception of ‘The Namesake’ which is a rarity for me.
Lives of Others (Germany): This one went on my Top 10 movies, period, list. The story is about 1984 East Germany, where a Stasi officer is set to spy on a supposedly loyal playwright and his actress-girlfriend. I did a write-up on it which is a bit more coherent.
The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Ireland): A deceptively laid back look (it starts quietly and grabs and doesn’t let go) on the political and revolutionary struggles in early 1920s Ireland, following two brothers who join the IRA but whose views diverge after the peace traty is signed. Did a write-up which goes into more detail.
Eklavya (India): A quasi Shakesperean tale of family, revenge, love and greed set in a backward crumbling ‘kingdom’ of a small rural town. Awesome. Yup, had a write-up.
The Painted Veil (U.S.): I did a write-up on it here: A quietly emotional movie about a couple rediscoveing each other in the middle of a cholera epidemic in China. Write-up.
Curse of the Golden Flower (China): Yup, once again, ‘Shakesperean’ comes to mind. This story of a poisonous court of a monstrous emperor, his equally ruthless empress and the three Princes (the tormented eldest one, the striving to be loyal middle one and the youngest one who is a cypher) will make your eyes pop and well…it’s the opposite of feel good but it’s amazing. Write-up.
Salaam-e-Ishq (India). If Hollywood still knew how to make romantic movies, it would still weep with envy at this awesome take on six very separate couples whose lives intertwine. Guaranteed to make you feel better. Write-up.
Guru (India): Clever, well-acted biopic of a fictional (but closely based on a real person) businessman, mainly notable for the great great performances by everyone, including real life newlyweds Abhishek and Aishwarya Bachchan, portraying the main characters. Write-up.
Breach (U.S.): Clever and angsty and complicated, about Hansen and a young agent who brought him in, this is really not about mechanics of spying but about corrosion of the soul (yeah, sounds highfaluting). Write-up.
Namaste London (India): Mmm, chick flick. Yup, even by Bolly standards. It’s funny and sweet though and what more can you ask for. Katrina Kaif and Akshay Kumar sparkle as an ill-assorted couple. She is a Londoner, he is from Punjab. She marries him to get the family marriage proposals off her back so she could get together with her hunky boss, but he falls for her for real. Will he win her heart? Are you kidding? Lots of fun will be had in the process. Write-up.
The Host (South Korea): I don’t normally like horror movies, but this off-kilter, cynical, funny take on a monster exiting the Han river and taking the youngest of a dysfunctional family which must band together to save her, is awesome.
300 (U.S.): What a silly silly movie. Totally ahistorical and simplistic. But what bloody (literally) good fun. I existed with my adrenalin pumping, after seeing so many ripped men kill so many many things. Write-up.
Waitress (U.S.) This story of a newly pregnant waitress is cute enough I suppose, but it has three things I dislike: instant transformative love of baby, sisterhood, and adultery (her husband is awful but his wife isn't).
The Namesake (U.S.): The only ‘blah’ one on my list. Immigrant family comes to US. Nothing interesting happens, blah blah, two hours of my life down the drain.
But this lop-sidedness shall be remedied as I am planning to see Spiderman 3 this weekend. So excited. Spiderman 2 is my favorite superhero movie ever (it would have been Batman Begins but Katie Holmes was atrocious).
Abd speaking of movies I am planning to see. Tomorrow, I plan to see the Dutch movie Black Book.
Black Book follows the story of a fictional Resistance fighter, Rachel Stein. Rachel is a Jewish woman in the Nazi-oppupied Holland who loses her whole family when they are betrayed trying to flee. Masquerading as a Gentile Ellis de Vries, she becomes a spy for the Dutch Reistance. On a personal mission to avenge her family's merciless murder, she becomes involved - at first duplicitously, then for real - with bigwig Ludwig who's that rarest of characters: a sympathetic Nazi. This shake-up of the usual war-movie rules also applies to the good guys, some of whom are as corrupt as the enemy.
It has excellent reviews and was in fact shortlisted for best foreign picture Oscar (it made it into the final 9 but not the final 5) but I’ve been hesitating for ages mainly because of the director. Veerhoven, the director of Showgirls, directing a movie about World War II? Dutch Resistance? Jews and Nazis? Ummmm…Visions of disaster danced in my head. And then also one of the main characters is a Gestapo guy who is not completely bad. OK. Seriously. As someone who is both Jewish and from Ukraine (when I was growing up, kids still played Partisans and Nazis), the very thought of Gestapo evokes anger. And fear. And a fair deal of hate. So I wasn’t sure I was up for it. I like my couples star-crossed but not when it’s because one half is a willing participant in a genocide to wipe the race of the other out of existence.
But apparently Veerhoven used to be a really acclaimed director before the Showgirls debacle (I remember when Showgirls came out I was in high school (am dating myself :D) and I lived in a very small conservative Southern town so no theater was going to be showing it. A bunch of guys from school piled in a van and drove to the nearest big city to watch it. LOL), and the reviews were uniformly excellent, and it turned out that the Nazi was played by Sebastian Koch who I just law and loved in The Lives of Others. And I do love Erich Maria Remarque’s awesome novel A Time to Live and a Time to Die about a German WWII solider home on leave. Though Gestapo is not the army whereto you get drafted and Veerhoven not Remarque. I really should do a post on Remarque. He is my favorite author. Three Comrades, about three WWI veterans in the falling apart Berlin of the early 30s, and the narrator Robert’s soul-saving, doomed love affair with the fragile mysterious Patrice (one of Remarque’s irresistable women) is my favorite book ever. I am going to do a post on it actually because once I start I’ll never stop. And I am madly in love with Arch of Triumph, the narrator of which is a Resistance fighter tortured by the Nazis and now a refugee in Paris before the war, who is tracking his torturer with intent to kill. In Remarque’s world, you find happiness only to lose it, but you are better for having had something than nothing at all. His heroes are wounded but strong and so are his women, and the world is bleak with some individual sparks of goodness (There are marvelous movie versions of Arch of Triumph (1948) and A time to live and a time to die (cheesily rechristened A time to love and a time to die, made sometime in the 50s) but the movie version of Three Comrades makes me want to kill something. And I wish there were movie versions of his other books. Interestingly, he was married to Paulette Goddard, Charlie Chaplin’s ex. She had great taste in men ;) Anyway, that is a hell of a digression.
Back to Black Book. So I'll risk it and will go to watch it.
This review makes me at least hopeful.
Movie review: 'Black Book'
By Michael Wilmington
Tribune movie critic
Paul Verhoeven's "Black Book" is a wildly imaginative portrayal of the Dutch Resistance in 1944 and 1945 and of an improbable but intense love affair between a Jewish spy (Carice van Houten) and a German Gestapo chief (Sebastian Koch). The movie scrambles our responses and covers so much ground, with such zest, that its two and a half hours race past like a firestorm.
The biggest production in Dutch film history, it's an epic with a great cast. But it also has the ribald, unfettered style that marked Verhoeven's earlier Dutch films--including "Turkish Delight," named in a 1999 poll as the best Dutch movie of the 20th Century--before he went to Hollywood and specialized in sci-fi and fancy trash ("RoboCop" and "Showgirls"). I like some of Verhoeven's American movies, but the Dutch pictures are better and, in "Black Book," he's reunited with his most frequent, congenial scriptwriter, Gerard Soeteman, with a bigger budget, richer technology and a deeper cast than they had back in the days of "Turkish Delight." The result is so good that it suggests Verhoeven should keep splitting his time between Hollywood and Holland.
"Black Book" recounts the adventures, recalled years later in flashback in a kibbutz, of a (fictitious) popular Jewish singer, Rachel Stein (van Houten), who fought and spied in the underground and had a love affair, under the alias Ellis de Vries, with the handsome, morally troubled Gestapo commander Ludwig Muentze (Koch).
It's as if "Casablanca's" romance were between Ingrid Bergman and Conrad Veidt. That narrative daring kicks up almost immediately in the flashback: Rachel loses her safe house in a German air raid and makes her way to another "safe harbor," only to see her family slaughtered.
Hooking up with the Resistance again, she joins leaders Hans Akkermans (Thom Hoffman) and Gerben Kuipers (Derek de Lint). Because of her obvious charms, she's sent into the Gestapo lion's den to dazzle Muentze and other Nazis, including depraved sadist Gunther Franken (Waldemar Kobus) and unbending fascist General Kautner (Christian Berkel). And the dizzying sequence of battles and betrayals continues.
Movies about the World War II resistance movements tend to be heroic-adventurous, like the John Frankenheimer-Burt Lancaster "The Train," or grim and tragic, like Jean-Pierre Melville's "Army of Shadows." Verhoeven pitches himself somewhere in between.
Throughout, "Black Book" mixes the sophistication of a solidly researched historical drama with loony genre thriller excesses. But it's also shot through with an intriguing moral relativism. In the movie--which takes it title from the little black book in which all the Resistance secrets may be revealed--there are sympathetic people, liars and monsters on both sides.
Back in the 1970s, before his Hollywood exodus, Verhoeven had developed a top-notch local Dutch company of actors and technicians, including Rutger Hauer, Jeroen Krabbe and cinematographer Jan de Bont. Some of them are back here (including scenarist Soeteman). But, even though he's working with largely new people, Verhoeven seems even more assured now than the brash young swashbuckler who made 1977's "Soldier of Orange."
That assurance sparks up his cast. Sebastian Koch, the spied-on writer in "The Lives of Others," is a terrific romantic leading man, but he's also alive to the ambiguities of Muentze's character. Halina Reijn is a lusty hooker sidekick, de Lint a poignant old radical, and Kobus makes one of the most despicable villains imaginable. (His Franken is hair-raising from first sight, treading arrogantly through corpses after the riverboat massacre of the group that includes Rachel's parents.)
Van Houten is a major star in her country right now, a sort of Dutch Cate Blanchett, and one wonders when American films will start tapping her talents, as they did Verhoeven's. But when they do, one hopes she'll keep returning to her homeland. "Black Book" shows how good a top European filmmaker with heavy Hollywood credentials can be, back on his turf. The more "Black Books" Verhoeven has in him, the better.
Here is the list of the movies I’ve seen in theater so far, in order from most fave to least. I have to note though that I thoroughly enjoyed every movie I’ve seen in a theater so far, with the possible exception of ‘The Namesake’ which is a rarity for me.
Lives of Others (Germany): This one went on my Top 10 movies, period, list. The story is about 1984 East Germany, where a Stasi officer is set to spy on a supposedly loyal playwright and his actress-girlfriend. I did a write-up on it which is a bit more coherent.
The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Ireland): A deceptively laid back look (it starts quietly and grabs and doesn’t let go) on the political and revolutionary struggles in early 1920s Ireland, following two brothers who join the IRA but whose views diverge after the peace traty is signed. Did a write-up which goes into more detail.
Eklavya (India): A quasi Shakesperean tale of family, revenge, love and greed set in a backward crumbling ‘kingdom’ of a small rural town. Awesome. Yup, had a write-up.
The Painted Veil (U.S.): I did a write-up on it here: A quietly emotional movie about a couple rediscoveing each other in the middle of a cholera epidemic in China. Write-up.
Curse of the Golden Flower (China): Yup, once again, ‘Shakesperean’ comes to mind. This story of a poisonous court of a monstrous emperor, his equally ruthless empress and the three Princes (the tormented eldest one, the striving to be loyal middle one and the youngest one who is a cypher) will make your eyes pop and well…it’s the opposite of feel good but it’s amazing. Write-up.
Salaam-e-Ishq (India). If Hollywood still knew how to make romantic movies, it would still weep with envy at this awesome take on six very separate couples whose lives intertwine. Guaranteed to make you feel better. Write-up.
Guru (India): Clever, well-acted biopic of a fictional (but closely based on a real person) businessman, mainly notable for the great great performances by everyone, including real life newlyweds Abhishek and Aishwarya Bachchan, portraying the main characters. Write-up.
Breach (U.S.): Clever and angsty and complicated, about Hansen and a young agent who brought him in, this is really not about mechanics of spying but about corrosion of the soul (yeah, sounds highfaluting). Write-up.
Namaste London (India): Mmm, chick flick. Yup, even by Bolly standards. It’s funny and sweet though and what more can you ask for. Katrina Kaif and Akshay Kumar sparkle as an ill-assorted couple. She is a Londoner, he is from Punjab. She marries him to get the family marriage proposals off her back so she could get together with her hunky boss, but he falls for her for real. Will he win her heart? Are you kidding? Lots of fun will be had in the process. Write-up.
The Host (South Korea): I don’t normally like horror movies, but this off-kilter, cynical, funny take on a monster exiting the Han river and taking the youngest of a dysfunctional family which must band together to save her, is awesome.
300 (U.S.): What a silly silly movie. Totally ahistorical and simplistic. But what bloody (literally) good fun. I existed with my adrenalin pumping, after seeing so many ripped men kill so many many things. Write-up.
Waitress (U.S.) This story of a newly pregnant waitress is cute enough I suppose, but it has three things I dislike: instant transformative love of baby, sisterhood, and adultery (her husband is awful but his wife isn't).
The Namesake (U.S.): The only ‘blah’ one on my list. Immigrant family comes to US. Nothing interesting happens, blah blah, two hours of my life down the drain.
But this lop-sidedness shall be remedied as I am planning to see Spiderman 3 this weekend. So excited. Spiderman 2 is my favorite superhero movie ever (it would have been Batman Begins but Katie Holmes was atrocious).
Abd speaking of movies I am planning to see. Tomorrow, I plan to see the Dutch movie Black Book.
Black Book follows the story of a fictional Resistance fighter, Rachel Stein. Rachel is a Jewish woman in the Nazi-oppupied Holland who loses her whole family when they are betrayed trying to flee. Masquerading as a Gentile Ellis de Vries, she becomes a spy for the Dutch Reistance. On a personal mission to avenge her family's merciless murder, she becomes involved - at first duplicitously, then for real - with bigwig Ludwig who's that rarest of characters: a sympathetic Nazi. This shake-up of the usual war-movie rules also applies to the good guys, some of whom are as corrupt as the enemy.
It has excellent reviews and was in fact shortlisted for best foreign picture Oscar (it made it into the final 9 but not the final 5) but I’ve been hesitating for ages mainly because of the director. Veerhoven, the director of Showgirls, directing a movie about World War II? Dutch Resistance? Jews and Nazis? Ummmm…Visions of disaster danced in my head. And then also one of the main characters is a Gestapo guy who is not completely bad. OK. Seriously. As someone who is both Jewish and from Ukraine (when I was growing up, kids still played Partisans and Nazis), the very thought of Gestapo evokes anger. And fear. And a fair deal of hate. So I wasn’t sure I was up for it. I like my couples star-crossed but not when it’s because one half is a willing participant in a genocide to wipe the race of the other out of existence.
But apparently Veerhoven used to be a really acclaimed director before the Showgirls debacle (I remember when Showgirls came out I was in high school (am dating myself :D) and I lived in a very small conservative Southern town so no theater was going to be showing it. A bunch of guys from school piled in a van and drove to the nearest big city to watch it. LOL), and the reviews were uniformly excellent, and it turned out that the Nazi was played by Sebastian Koch who I just law and loved in The Lives of Others. And I do love Erich Maria Remarque’s awesome novel A Time to Live and a Time to Die about a German WWII solider home on leave. Though Gestapo is not the army whereto you get drafted and Veerhoven not Remarque. I really should do a post on Remarque. He is my favorite author. Three Comrades, about three WWI veterans in the falling apart Berlin of the early 30s, and the narrator Robert’s soul-saving, doomed love affair with the fragile mysterious Patrice (one of Remarque’s irresistable women) is my favorite book ever. I am going to do a post on it actually because once I start I’ll never stop. And I am madly in love with Arch of Triumph, the narrator of which is a Resistance fighter tortured by the Nazis and now a refugee in Paris before the war, who is tracking his torturer with intent to kill. In Remarque’s world, you find happiness only to lose it, but you are better for having had something than nothing at all. His heroes are wounded but strong and so are his women, and the world is bleak with some individual sparks of goodness (There are marvelous movie versions of Arch of Triumph (1948) and A time to live and a time to die (cheesily rechristened A time to love and a time to die, made sometime in the 50s) but the movie version of Three Comrades makes me want to kill something. And I wish there were movie versions of his other books. Interestingly, he was married to Paulette Goddard, Charlie Chaplin’s ex. She had great taste in men ;) Anyway, that is a hell of a digression.
Back to Black Book. So I'll risk it and will go to watch it.
This review makes me at least hopeful.
Movie review: 'Black Book'
By Michael Wilmington
Tribune movie critic
Paul Verhoeven's "Black Book" is a wildly imaginative portrayal of the Dutch Resistance in 1944 and 1945 and of an improbable but intense love affair between a Jewish spy (Carice van Houten) and a German Gestapo chief (Sebastian Koch). The movie scrambles our responses and covers so much ground, with such zest, that its two and a half hours race past like a firestorm.
The biggest production in Dutch film history, it's an epic with a great cast. But it also has the ribald, unfettered style that marked Verhoeven's earlier Dutch films--including "Turkish Delight," named in a 1999 poll as the best Dutch movie of the 20th Century--before he went to Hollywood and specialized in sci-fi and fancy trash ("RoboCop" and "Showgirls"). I like some of Verhoeven's American movies, but the Dutch pictures are better and, in "Black Book," he's reunited with his most frequent, congenial scriptwriter, Gerard Soeteman, with a bigger budget, richer technology and a deeper cast than they had back in the days of "Turkish Delight." The result is so good that it suggests Verhoeven should keep splitting his time between Hollywood and Holland.
"Black Book" recounts the adventures, recalled years later in flashback in a kibbutz, of a (fictitious) popular Jewish singer, Rachel Stein (van Houten), who fought and spied in the underground and had a love affair, under the alias Ellis de Vries, with the handsome, morally troubled Gestapo commander Ludwig Muentze (Koch).
It's as if "Casablanca's" romance were between Ingrid Bergman and Conrad Veidt. That narrative daring kicks up almost immediately in the flashback: Rachel loses her safe house in a German air raid and makes her way to another "safe harbor," only to see her family slaughtered.
Hooking up with the Resistance again, she joins leaders Hans Akkermans (Thom Hoffman) and Gerben Kuipers (Derek de Lint). Because of her obvious charms, she's sent into the Gestapo lion's den to dazzle Muentze and other Nazis, including depraved sadist Gunther Franken (Waldemar Kobus) and unbending fascist General Kautner (Christian Berkel). And the dizzying sequence of battles and betrayals continues.
Movies about the World War II resistance movements tend to be heroic-adventurous, like the John Frankenheimer-Burt Lancaster "The Train," or grim and tragic, like Jean-Pierre Melville's "Army of Shadows." Verhoeven pitches himself somewhere in between.
Throughout, "Black Book" mixes the sophistication of a solidly researched historical drama with loony genre thriller excesses. But it's also shot through with an intriguing moral relativism. In the movie--which takes it title from the little black book in which all the Resistance secrets may be revealed--there are sympathetic people, liars and monsters on both sides.
Back in the 1970s, before his Hollywood exodus, Verhoeven had developed a top-notch local Dutch company of actors and technicians, including Rutger Hauer, Jeroen Krabbe and cinematographer Jan de Bont. Some of them are back here (including scenarist Soeteman). But, even though he's working with largely new people, Verhoeven seems even more assured now than the brash young swashbuckler who made 1977's "Soldier of Orange."
That assurance sparks up his cast. Sebastian Koch, the spied-on writer in "The Lives of Others," is a terrific romantic leading man, but he's also alive to the ambiguities of Muentze's character. Halina Reijn is a lusty hooker sidekick, de Lint a poignant old radical, and Kobus makes one of the most despicable villains imaginable. (His Franken is hair-raising from first sight, treading arrogantly through corpses after the riverboat massacre of the group that includes Rachel's parents.)
Van Houten is a major star in her country right now, a sort of Dutch Cate Blanchett, and one wonders when American films will start tapping her talents, as they did Verhoeven's. But when they do, one hopes she'll keep returning to her homeland. "Black Book" shows how good a top European filmmaker with heavy Hollywood credentials can be, back on his turf. The more "Black Books" Verhoeven has in him, the better.
