Othello

Romancing the Stone holds the opportunistic trump card in that the whole shoddiness of the plot simply comes from the fact that it's deliberately a "romance/adventure novel for women", which was also written by a waitress (the writers listed here are just post-production rewrites, the actual screenwriter Diane Thomas died two years after the film was released and thus this was her only script). The problem is, Michael Douglas handles one role perfectly, that of a corrupt city bastard; and yet he doesn't quite work in everything else. The classic post-colonial romance about how a dangerous exotic country makes a romantic backdrop for two white people isn't such a problem in the end (at least if you're white and you just grew up on these stories), the problem is when I see this small-town boy brandishing a machete or shouting Travolta-like in a white jumpsuit and I'm supposed to feel like I belong in that environment. It's a shame, too, because of Kathleen Turner, who is top-notch here and she shoulders almost all the functional comedy.

"Used car salesman" has always been as much a pejorative term in the US as, say, realtor, auditor, or OVB employee would be here. And it's no wonder that an amoral comedy about a sleazy used car salesman found its time period somewhere along a dusty highway in the early 1980s. Used Cars is, in essence, a showcase of the amoral American hedonism of that decade arising from rapid economic growth and a deep breath after 2 uneasy decades in which the very essence of the American way of life had been called into question. The grime, sleaziness, and moral degradation here also seems so obvious as to suggest that it is not a deliberately set mirror. Used Cars is, imo, a pretty unflinching, if perhaps unintentional, satire of an era when you tossed trash over your shoulder, where telling the truth was a career liability, and some ethics were not permitted to stand in the way of capitalist ambition. If you accept it as such, you begin to marvel at how spineless the film is right up to the end, and how utterly unwilling it is to punish blatant character missteps at all.

I was going to label this film a calculated cashgrab targeting moms of the time who could reminisce about their younger years under Beatles posters at the movies, but then I read how it flopped. I Wanna Hold Your Hand has great scene choreography, pacing, and plenty of individual aspects worth highlighting (like the stunt performances by the female fans), but it's stretched too thin and foreshadows the problems I'll continue to have with Zemeckis and how he works with live actors as if they were animated characters. Incidentally, the ensemble cast here includes both the most beautiful (Susan Kendall Newman, Paul Newman's daughter) and the ugliest (Wendie Jo Sperber Bohdal) actresses of their time.

Brevity of information is basically the whole point of this concept, though I give credit to those who have a problem with it because they don't consider the 1960s to be a settled history with clear sides. The Sixties is essentially zeitgeist edits bravely cobbled together with hundreds of hours of material that attempt to provide context to the world-famous American events of the era. Virtually every two sentences spoken here would make a feature-length documentary of their own.

Easily the best written, best acted, and unfortunately the most visually memorable Verhoeven. The camera and editing have no face, the colors are washed out, it comes into focus automatically in motion, making it look like a fakin contemporary Dardenni, which please don’t mistake for praise. There's also an end to Verhoeven's cramming as much information as possible into a single shot, and it may be a bit of the reason why the film's other components are otherwise almost brilliant. Isabelle Huppert plays flawlessly and distinctively one of the best written characters I've perhaps ever seen. She's familiar as a mother, employee, lover, and sadistic acquaintance, yet she's utterly unpredictable in every scene. Verhoeven doesn't usually like to let actors improvise (after things got out of hand in Flesh+Blood), but Huppert reportedly adapted the role quite a bit because she didn't know what to do with the character. Her performance, then, is the pure essence of when three strong and experienced characters blend into one actor to create something as elusive yet real as the protagonist here. The best male-bashing film far and wide, which as a rule the current "strong women (TM) creators" of Twitter can't even come close to. The ambiguous Verhoeven, not giving us easy answers (if any), will be sorely missed in the binary age.

The comparison may be silly, but I just think Verhoeven would like it. I mean, how a director who practically fled the Netherlands for creative reasons to the US, where he successfully and happily created until he started feeling the production limits again there, returned with great aplomb to his homeland, where everyone patted him on the back and put together a grand fresco about the uneasy and ambivalent mood of collaboration. Black Book's (excessive to my tastes) formal purity is a reference to film canons, which of course makes it far more subversive. In doing so, as if on purpose, those comfort-ripping scenes about dyeing privates, blown-out brains, little SS dicks, or shit cauldrons do little to disguise the fact that the film is almost lacking a purely noble character. For example, the protagonist herself becomes an ace up the Resistance's sleeve just because of her background and her desire for vengeance over the death of her family, otherwise she would have happily spent the war by the pond. These aren't themes that Verhoeven is tackling for the first time; in fact, he's spent his entire life talking about nothing but the inherent corruption of human character, and anyone who's seen at least one of his earlier Dutch films will be virtually unsurprised by anything here. Even though Black Book is a clumsier film than we’re used to from this director (the occasionally palpable staginess, the visible artificial lighting, the amusing single-line roles of the female resistance fighters), it still preserves the director's reputation as an entertainer who can work as well with the drama of the film as the drama of the individual scenes, making it virtually impossible to get bored or drop out of the film.

Contextually, I might suggest a comparison between Showgirls and Verhoeven's third Dutch film, Katie Tippel. Take how much it shares with it the whole concept of a young, beautiful, rebellious, and brash girl who breaks through to the highest ranks in a corrupt and unbreakably caste-ridden city, especially because of how readily she is able to abandon any ethical and moral values. I might also suggest the uncomfortable comparison that Katie Tippel is a film that was originally intended to provide an understanding of the rise of socialist movements in late 19th century Holland, whereas Showgirls tells essentially the same story only set in the present day, with not so much as a shadow of the development of socialist movements in sight, so the film doesn't actually offer a way out of the marasmus depicted. But I don't quite want to do that because it might come off as me defending Showgirls in some context. And at the same time, I think it's quite possibly Verhoeven's best film. The production design has incredible drive, the characters are almost constantly in motion, and yet the individual shots are very long. The one-shot scenes transitioning from dialogue to dancing or weaving between dozens of extras in backstage dressing rooms with millions of light and reflective sources are often far more elaborately choreographed than the chorus dances themselves, but they don't show it at all. During the dance scenes, the camera is almost static (except for Nomi’s breathtaking first performance, which is shot in a way familiar to anyone who has ever been on stage in front of a full house) yet becomes more dynamic with editing. At the same time, it has a minimum of shots purely for aesthetic effect, rather they convey several pieces of information at once. ___ I am aware of the discomfort that Showgirls must have caused in artistic and critical circles in its day, because it describes the entire world of show business as an unalterable patriarchal rape-cult jungle that cannot be conquered and in which you can only succeed by conforming to it. It must have been uncomfortably familiar to the emeritus cultural establishment of the time to watch everyone well-dressed at a party dancing to smooth jazz while a brutal gang rape takes place one floor up, with nowhere to turn. The most charmingly amoral scene in the film, then, is the one where the protagonist gains confidence through the recognition from her former pimp, an otherwise macho rapist who auditions his dancers based on whether they will suck his cock. ___ When you watch Showgirls, you see the formal qualities of the film (you can complain about the acting, but show me the good acting in any of Verhoeven's films with the honorable exceptions of Sharon Stone, Kurtwood Smith, and Jennifer Jason Leigh), you watch the panic that ensued after the film, and you are retroactively aware of how the showbiz backdrop worked in the 1990s. You realize that here Verhoeven and Eszterhas hit on certain public secrets with such emphasis that the discomfort America had to deal with in this film had to be reeled in. ____As for the acting, Berkley (for whom Showgirls practically ended an acting career that hadn't even begun yet) is not a bad actress, as can be seen in some crucial scenes, but her inexperience makes her unable to quite cope with Verhoeven's direction of his actors, where he gives the actors the required performances by performing them himself using exaggerated hand gestures. It compares very well to other acting performances in his films, especially from his Dutch period. What is of course unquestionable is what an excellent dancer she is, and once she’s supposed to express herself in that way the film picks up incredibly. Personally, I prefer dance movies with less skilled dancers more than dance movies where a snotty Nicole Kidman is stepping on her coattails pretending to be a posh prostitute. _____ Nowadays Showgirls is starting to get rehabilitated by the public and the critics, which only proves the unrivalled hypocrisy of Western pop culture, which is unable to contextualize actual works unless it starts analyzing them years after the film has become socially harmless, however much it has decimated the careers of most of those involved in the meantime.

An ego game, with its endless allusions, confusions, and blending of identities, would normally call for a far more subtle approach, but not so with Verhoeven and his naturalistic approach to all physicality combined with his resignation to human character (a value he commendably never stepped out of throughout his life). It's a bit of a miracle that it works and that it works this well. My guess is that the chameleon-like Sharon Stone and the wild jungles of 1990s San Francisco are mostly to blame.

I remembered Panos Cosmatos saying that his aesthetics came from finding videotapes as a boy in the late 1980s, when he would form his own idea of the stories contained in them from the images on the covers, which were ultimately far more normal than one would expect from these samples. I realized that this was about the fourth time I had actually seen Total Recall and it was only this time that I sort of somehow knew what it was actually about. Not that the plot is all that convoluted, but it is so consistently littered with spectacle and deviations from the usual boundaries of genre films that from a certain point on you can just stop watching it altogether. Verhoeven and Schwarzenegger make the most expensive movie in the world in the late 1990s, and this is how it turned out? Probably around the time the film moves to Mars, the papier-mâché sets are perhaps a little too much, while at the same time the whole miniaturesque corridor structure feels like an adventure built out of Legos by a kid who drinks a lot of sugary lemonade.

Historical postmodernism that may have set out to de-romanticize and de-mythicize the early modern period, but it did so with such a zeal that it simply exploited it. There's nothing wrong with that, except that sometimes it just stings a little when you see an uncompromising vision hiding behind the caricatures and haste, which are probably the fault of the excessive posturing. It's been a long time since I've been uncomfortable watching a film, but watching the lurid and overt sex scenes with a young Jennifer Jason Leigh, who still looks like a child and whose character in the script is actually supposed to be about 12 years old, makes you wary of whether anyone is looking over your shoulder as you watch the film. But apparently she was 22 when the film was made, so it's all good.