Paul Verhoeven Double Features This Weekend at The Aero

written by Bill Krohn for LAist

The American Cinematheque honors Dutch-born filmmaker Paul Verhoeven this weekend (Marc 2-4) with a slate of Verhoeven films from the Netherlands and from Hollywood, where he spent the 80s and the 90s making big-budget studio pictures like Total Recall, Robocop and Basic Instinct.

Although he's best known for the latter, Verhoeven was a renowned European filmmaker before he joined the Hollywood ranks, and this weekend is a good chance to catch up on that earlier phase of his career. The retrospective is appropriate now because Verhoeven returned to the Netherlands to make the film that will
conclude the series on Sunday night, Black Book (2007) which is being released by Sony Classics in April.

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His last Hollywood film to date was The Hollow Man (2000), an invisible man story starring Kevin Bacon that must have had Claude Raines spinning in his tomb, because the scientist played by Bacon does the things everyone would be tempted to do if they were invisible. After that Verhoeven told the press: "I've done four special effects films, and that's enough for any director. I want to get back to making films where the story is built on the characters."

Making the Black Book was a long-cherished project, enabling him to film a stylish Hitchcockean thriller about a Jewish singer, played by the beautiful Carice van Houten, who joins the Dutch underground and becomes involved with a Gestapo officer while seeking to avenge her parents' deaths.

Verhoeven plans to do more films like Black Book, although not necessarily in Dutch: European-style characters and stories presented with the big-budget flair of his Hollywood period, which was never just work for hire: Quentin Tarantino listed Verhoeven's X-rated blast at Hollywood-as-Las Vegas, Showgirls (1995), as a favorite guilty pleasure (a guilty pleasure for Quentin Tarantino?), while the great New Wave filmmaker Jacques Rivette is reportedly a fan of Starship Troopers (1997).

Friday's 7:30 double bill presents two Dutch features where Verhoeven's trademark sexual excesses are on display: The 4th Man is a precursor to Basic Instinct in which a bisexual man is caught in the spiderweb of a deadly female (Renee Soutendjik), while Turkish Delight is a libertine romp starring Verhoeven's frequent collaborator Rutger Hauer, which made a star of Danish actress Monique van den Ven.

Saturday's double bill showcases Verhoeven's dazzling skills as an action director with Robocop (1987), a satiric thriller about a cop (Peter Weller) whose destroyed body is implanted in a killing machine that makes him an unkillable force for law and order, and the film that gave the producer of Airplane!, Jon Davison, the idea of hiring a Dutch director to make a big-budget action film in the first place: Flesh + Blood (1985), a blood-and-guts medieval epic also starring Rutger Hauer.

Sunday's program concludes the tribute with the sneak preview of Black Book. All programs are at 7:30 at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica: 1328 Montana Avenue.