Paul Verhoeven's Paperboy

Paul Verhoeven's next project to actually get before cameras is to be an adaptation of Pete Dexter's The Paperboy. Set in and around Moat County Florida in the 1960s, the novel is a murder investigation/crusading journalist/serial killer mystery and Verhoeven seems like a great choice - or, more to the point, it seems like a great choice for Verhoeven. It has a whiff of The Mean Season about it, and that's not a bad thing.

About ten years ago Pedro Almodovar chewed the project over for a long while and, for some reason, never got the ball rolling.

We can expect The Paperboy to shoot early in 2008, while Verhoeven's "19th Century Basic Instinct", The Winter Queen and another Dutch production, an adaptation of Jan Siebelink's Kneeling on a Bed of Violets are apparently still on course, and likely to follow in the next couple of years.

In case you don't know Dexter, he also wrote the novel Paris Trout and also adapted it into a sadly forgotten Stephen Gyllenhaal film starring Dennis Hopper and Barbara Hershey.

Robocop Returns

Robocop is even better than you remember it, trust me. This one genuinely undervalued film. Same goes for Starship Troopers. Of all of Verhoeven's work, these are two most ridiculously underappreciated. Edward Neumeier's angry, hilarious scripts are a good part of the reason why they succeed so much - just indeed as Joe the Hungarian Bear's scripts were the central reason for Basic Instinct and Showgirls to turn out so dreadfully.

You'll get another chance for Robo reappraisal soon enough, it seems. Twentieth Century Fox seem to be working on a new DVD of the film, for the UK at least. No idea of the full spec so far but some features from previous releases - the 1987 featurettes, Phil Tippet providing commentary on storyboards - remain while others do not - MGM's Flesh and Steel documentary appears to be gone, for example.

The 'making-of' doc this time around is called Creating a Legend. It runs about twenty minutes and features Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Verhoeven and all the usual suspects.

I'm hoping there's more to this release to make it really worth the new purchase. As soon as I find out anymore, I'll let you know. A low price point and pristine transfer would be a good start, however.

Fascism And Hags

Premiere man Glenn Kenny has called 300 "the most overtly fascist Hollywood film thing to come out of the North American movie industry since, oh, I dunno, Robocop 2", all the whole speaking in defense of Erik Davis, who has been taking a beating for comparing the film to Showgirls.

I can believe it on both counts. The question remains, however, how well made a fascist thing is it exactly?

Black Book Review

Thankfully, this is another BNAT film that I saw completely cold. When Paul Verhoven’s name flashed across the screen, I groaned and whined “I hate Paul Verhoven.” Hollow Man still ranks as one of the most awful experiences I’ve ever had in a theatre, it’s as if the director was behind me yelling “Are you offended YET? How about if I kill a dog?!” I had no idea what Black Book was about, but I expected plenty of breasts, blood and outrageousness.

Well, there’s breasts and blood (it wouldn’t be Verhoven if he didn’t insist on giving you full-on nudity, would it?), but this is an incredibly restrained film. It is a thriller about a Dutch Jew caught up in the Dutch Resistance. Even though you meet a postwar Rachel Ellis at the beginning of the film, you constantly doubt whether or not she will survive. I don’t want to say anything more about the plot because you would hate me for it. The twists and turns of this movie do not let up and there is not one slow moment. There are some moments of true horror in this movie. Much of what happens to Ellis is straight out of a nightmare. This is not the sort of spy/resistance movie where you wish you could work in the underground, this is the kind of story where everything goes wrong and you’re very glad to be in a 21st century movie theatre.

Perhaps the most refreshing part of this movie is that it isn’t your typical WWII film. They tend to follow a very typical pattern, particularly if they have an eye out for the awards. Once and awhile you will get an Enigma or Charlotte Gray which will tap a more forgotten story of the war. Black Book joins that club. I would love to see more directors tackle WWII films like these, rather than making yet another Stephen Ambrose adaptation. There were many heroes of WWII and they didn’t all wear uniforms.