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Black Book (2006)
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Synopsis
At the end
of WWII, a beautiful Jewish woman joins the Resistance and infiltrates German
high command.
Movie review
From Time Out Chicago
It’s got a great cast, dynamite production values, sumptuous cinematography, relentless action and a name director, but at the end of the day this latest from the director of Showgirls is really just a deluxe version of tits-and-swastikas trash like Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS and its uptown cousin, The Night Porter. Or perhaps it’s worse: Whereas as Ilsa was straight-up fetish-bait, the equally cartoonish Black Book comes wrapped around the pseudoprofound philosophical point that the Nazis were really no worse than the rest of humanity, given that (as Verhoeven recently explained to an interviewer) “the whole universe is full of violence, isn’t it?” (Eichmann wasn’t so much following orders as he was just going with the cosmic flow, see?)The fabulously well-constructed and undeniably talented van Houten stars as a Jewish cabaret singer who joins the Resistance after seeing her family slaughtered and robbed by Germans. Her subsequent adventures entail dyeing her pubes blond; seducing and falling in love with a handsome, sensitive Gestapo officer (Koch, the playwright in The Lives of Others); being molested and framed as a collaborator by an ugly, insensitive Gestapo officer (Kobus); and having several hundred gallons of human poo slopped on her from a substantial height. It’s probably worth noting that she’s shirtless during a good deal of this, as is her smoking-hot party-girl buddy from the steno pool at Gestapo headquarters (Reijn).
Author: Cliff Doerksen
Time Out Chicago Issue 111: April 12–18, 2007
User reviews of this film
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- Josh said...
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Posted on Mar 21 2008 09:41
The Time Out Chicago review does Black Book a huge injustice and the reviewer can't seem to look beyond the nudity. Actually they seem obsessed by it which is a shame because Black Book is a well plotted, well acted thriller.
No doubt if it were had more violence and less nudity it would have been given a good rating by the reviewer. Fortunately European cinema isn't as sexually repressed as America seems to be. It's funny that they compare it with Isla, She Wolf Of The SS when that film would be much more closer to the 'torture porn' cinema that seems to be all the rage in the US. - Report as inappropriate
Cast & crew
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Cast: Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Halina Reijn, Thom Hoffman, Christian Berkel, Waldermar Kobus, Michiel Huisman, Derek De Lint, Dolf De Vries, Diana Dobbelman full cast
Duration: 146 mins
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