Flesh + Blood. The Dutch films of Paul Verhoeven: Turkish Delight, Soldier of Orange, Spetters, The Fourth Man
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, looking at high-brow and low-brow movies, indie, cult, foreign, festival, documentary, genre and mainstream films, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.
Paul Verhoeven. You’ve probably seen some of his Hollywood movies — Robocop, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers, Showgirls. He’s known for his shocking nudity, brutal sex and stylized violence. Popular movies, but unpopular with most critics. They saw him as a misogynist, a schlockmeister and a fascist. None of this is true. He’s actually a great director.
The critical tide seems to be turning. His films are now being revisited in a TIFF 
retrospective. This week, I’m looking at the less-well-known, but fantastic films he made in the Netherlands in the 1970’s and 80s before going to Hollywood.
In some ways Verhoeven’s early films were totally Hollywood. His men (Rutger Hauer, Jeroen Krabbe) are lantern-jawed and lusty; his women (Renee Soutendijk, Monique Van den Ven) are petite beauties… and as independent and blatantly sexual as the men. His movies are filled with full frontal nudity (both male and female) explicit sex, and brutal violence, often with a queer twist. And a constant undercurrent of anti-authoritarianism.
They explore the postwar world of the baby boom and its sexual revolution in the glory days between the pill and AIDS.
Turkish Delight (1973)
Erik (Rutger Hauer) is a sculptor in a small city. He has long blond hair and aviator sunglasses. He’s the kind of guy who takes whatever he wants – an old lady’s fur coat, a stranger’s ice cream cone. This applies to women as well – he’s a champion pick-up artist.
But he bristles at the old guard – the uptight shopkeepers and burgermeisters– and despises their hypocrisy. Erik’s sculpture of Lazarus (the biblical character who comes back to life), gets him in trouble – the town fathers don’t like the worms and maggots eating Lazarus’s flesh. But Erik revels in them.
Verhoeven also piles on the shocks. The decay and rot of old ideas are 
everywhere: clean, orderly Netherlands is shown as a country full of worms, feces, garbage and vomit. Old people have cancer and dementia; their sex is furtive and hidden. Erik wants sex to be free, open and everywhere.
So he heads off to Amsterdam, but is picked up by a beautiful young woman, Olga (Monique Van de Ven) on the way. Olga is voluptuous and impetuous; they leap into bed in bloodsoaked sexual abandon. But is their marriage a flash in the pan or everlasting love? Olga is the woman of Eric’s dreams… but she’s still young. She grows bored with him and the constant sex. Can he ever get her back?
Turkish Delight is a delightful sex comedy.
Soldier of Orange (1977)
Leiden University in 1938. War is looming, but the upper-class frat boys are more concerned with hazing, songs, tennis and drinking. They’re apolitical toffs who swear loyalty for life. Erik and Guus (Rutger Hauer and Jeroen Krabbe) become fast friends. But then, the Germans invade, Queen Willhemina flees to Britain, and the Netherlands is under Nazi occupation. Suddenly everything changes. Friends fight friends.
Some – like one student whose mother is German — drift toward Nazi collaboration; others join the Resistance. They send out furtive messages to London by wireless, but the Germans – riding on bicycles with detectors around their necks – uncover the operation. They arrest most of the conspirators and use them to unwittingly spread false rumours. Some remain loyal till death, other’s crack under torture and switch sides. A few dozen men escape, including Erik and Guus. They climb onto a Swiss ship and make it to London. There, in the name of the Queen, they operate air raids and launch undercover missions. Based on a true story, this epic is a fantastic, wartime look at the few and the brave.
Spetters (1980)
Three best friends in their twenties, one redhead, one dark and one blond. Rien, Eef and Hans (Hans van Tongeren, Toon Agterberg, Marten Spanjer) work together at a mechanic shop: Rien drives a dirt bike and Eef can take one apart and put it back together… blindfolded! They love to race and ride at local events and they all idolize the the champ — their hero Gerrit (Rutger Hauer).
They all end up crushing on the same carney Fientje (Renee Soutendijk) who runs a fry and croquette truck with her brother. Fientje is older and tougher than the boys. She has curly blonde hair but is no pushover – she’s ambitious. She’s quick with her pot of boiling oil against any guy trying to steal from the chip wagon. The 
three guys decide the best endowed will get to date her – but she has other ideas; she chooses the redhead Rien – the only one with a girlfriend. She gets him a sponsor and an expensive bike; she hopes her star will rise with his. (But will he make it as a champion?)
Next comes the dark-haired Eef, a farmers son with a homophobic streak: he bashes gays and steals their money. He uses the cash to buy one-way tickets to Canada for Fientje and himself so he can escape his abusive home… but is he sexually compatible with her?
The blond, Hans, is the third in line, with nothing to recommend him. He too wants to be the next champ but faces a cynical, exploitative world… can he win her heart?
Spetters is a great coming-of-age story about where fate takes one woman… and the three young men who want her.
The Fourth Man (1983)
A Psychological Thriller.
Gerard (Jeroen Krabbe) is a novelist in Amsterdam with a vivid imagination. He likes to “lie the truth”. He sees signs, symbols and omens everywhere: the number four, the virgin Mary, a detached eyeball. He’s Catholic – but more into the spooky gothic icons than the sinning and repenting. He’s also a red-blooded gay man. So when he spots a young guy at a newsstand near the train station he is in love. (Well, in lust). He chases him but misses the train.
Soon, he finds himself in a small town doing a book reading. Christine (Renee Soutendijk), a stunning blonde widow in a red dress, 1940s-style is filming him in super-8. They end up in bed, but he 
awakens from a bizarre castration nightmare involving Christine and a pair of scissors. (She owns a beauty salon called Sphinx.)
Going through her letters when she’s out of the room, Gerard discovers a photo of her boyfriend Herman (Thom Hoffman). It’s the same man he saw at the train station! So he fakes a psychic vision and convinces her to invite her macho and jealous lover to come stay with her. He aims to seduce Herman. But he discovers that 
Christine has a secret history of her own. Will this sexual triangle end in love… or death?
I recommend all four of these films. Turkish Delight, Soldier of Orange, Spetters and The Fourth Man are all part of Flesh + Blood, the Paul Verhoeven Retrospective at the TIFF Bell Lightbox now through April. Go to tiff.net for details.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Low Budget. Movies reviewed: Mourning Has Broken, 12 0’Clock Boys. PLUS the Great Digital and Super 8 Film Fests
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, looking at high-brow and low-brow movies, indie, cult, foreign, festival, documentary, genre and mainstream films, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.
You may have noticed: not everyone’s rich. A recent report estimated the world’s richest 85 people have more money than the poorest 3.5 billion people. That’s not even the 1%; just 85 people own as much as half the people in the world. After news like that, it doesn’t seem right to promote some $300 million Hollywood blockbuster. This week I’m looking at low-budget movies, cheap places to see them, and films about the have-nots.
Despite all the Cassandra-like predictions, Toronto still has rep cinemas. Places like the Royal, the Revue, the Fox, Bloor Hotdocs, and Big Picture Cinema let you see an always-changing selection of art films, indies, retro, second-run and cult movies, at a reasonable price.
But there are other screens too. At one end, there’s the Great Digital Film 
Fest showing at Cineplex beginning next week. No rom-coms, but superheroes like Batman from the 80s, rare science fiction pics like Logan’s Run and Japanese anime like Akira.
Just 6 bucks a pop.
At the other end of the spectrum, there’s the Super 8 festival this weekend showing the best of Toronto’s art and indie cinema. Go to the8fest.com for details.
This week, I’m looking at a Canadian comedy/drama about a misanthrope doing errands; and a US documentary about a kid who wants to join a particular type of gang.
Mourning has Broken
Dir: Brett and Jason Butler
A neurotic, troubled man (Robert Nolan) leads a normal life in a Toronto suburb. He lives with his wife and his cat, Mignon. On this special day he has a list of errands to run: wash his car, return his wife’s dress, buy a red velvet cake – simple things like that. He has to do them all that day… or else. So he kisses his wife lying motionless in bed (she’s either asleep, ill, or dead) and sets off. But easier said than done.
He can’t stand small talk and is deeply irritated by almost everyone he sees. And in this movie, he meets an unusual selection of bottom-feeders, douches, nosy neighbours, nasty women, eye-rolling cashiers, know-it-all mechanics, and pushy salesmen. And like Peter Finch in Network, Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver or Michael Douglas in Falling Down, here’s another middle aged, middleclass guy on the brink.
We get to hear his internal stream-of-conscious, his muttered rants, and his 
occasional outbursts. Respect the big screen! he shouts in a movie theatre where people are talking and texting during a film. He stampedes a dad bullying his chubby son. And he goes to a sporting goods store to buy a bat. Uh-oh… looks like Ford Nation is out for revenge.
What’s so special about this day? Who’s the bat for? And what’s he bringing home to his wife?
Mourning Has Broken is very much a one-man show, and character actor Nolan generally carries it off, with the help of dozens of funny (or not-so-funny) side characters. The pace is a bit odd, with him going crazy one scene then back to muttering again the next. (He ends up losing it all and recovering more than once.)
What’s remarkable about this simple story? This feature dramady was made last year for 1000 bucks as part of Ingrid Veninger’s 1K Wave Feature Film initiative. That, friends, is very impressive.
12 0’Clock Boys
Dir: Lotfy Nathan
This is a documentary about three years in the life of an African-American kid named Pug. Pug goes to church in Sunday, has pet turtles and wears his hair in braids. His mom, Coco, is a former exotic dancer. Pugnacious Pug says he likes his life in Baltimore — it’s a city without earthquakes, hurricanes or collapsing buildings. He lives with Coco and his sibs in West Baltimore.
This is a neighbourhood where you learn “the right way to do the wrong things.” And in Baltimore, the thing to learn is dirt biking.
Dirt bikes, dune buggies, fat-tired cars and ATV are the bomb. They zoom down city streets, popping wheelies, revving engines and generally showing off and having fun. It’s a Baltimore tradition. And Pug really, really wants to join this gang.
The problem? It’s the popo, the turtles, 40, peaches… you know, the police. You get fifty or 100 young black men in one place and the cops see trouble, crime, danger. The guys in the group see freedom, fun, and flash. It’s unclear what is, exactly, the crime they’re committing (aside from potentially reckless driving), but the police don’t like it. And the TV news paints it as an epidemic, a horror, an out-of-control crime-fest leading to countless deaths.
So the cops chase down the dirt bikers using police cars and helicopters. Legally, the city has a no-chase policy, but chase accidents still happen. One of which really disturbs Pug’s life.
As his voice changes so does his vocabulary – he uses four-letter words, acts tough, Pug wants to earn his bonafides. But will he ever be allowed to join this group?
12 0’Clock Boys is a terrific slice-of-life doc, seen through a kid’s eyes. It’s filled with sublime, slow-motion dirtbike rallies paired with excellent beats. And rounded off with news clips, outdoor interviews and just people mouthing off. Worth seeing.
Mourning has Broken opens today, 12 O’Clock Boys starts next week in Toronto. Also opening today is the multifaceted French family drama The Past, as well the8fest.com .
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com
Daniel Garber talks with AHARON KESHALES about his new movie BIG BAD WOLVES
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
supposedly being used for good causes. The film is Big Bad Wolves — Quentin Tarantino calls it his favourite film of 2013. It follows Israeli co-directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s previous horror film RABIES.Big Bad Wolves is opening today in Toronto and across Canada. I speak with the film’s co-director AHARON KESHALES (by telephone) about comedy, revenge, torture, fear, the military, police corruption, fairytales… and more.
Sex vs Love. Movies Reviewed: The Past, The Stranger by the Lake, C*cksucker Blues
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Can there be love without sex… and sex without love? These movies say yes. This week I’m looking at a French drama about love tempered by divorce; another French drama about lust tinged with death; and a rarely-seen American doc about sex and drugs and rock and roll.
The Past (Le Passe)
Dir: Asghar Farhadi
Ahmad (Ali Mossafa) is an extremely gentle, middle-aged guy – a French-speaking Iranian. He has an intellectual beard and wears a jaunty scarf around his neck. Ahmad is met at the airport in Paris by his beautiful French wife, Marie (Bérénice Bejo). She’s in a foul mood. She asked him back to Paris to finalize their divorce. They’ve been living in two different countries since Ahmad moved back to Iran years ago.
Their relationship is finished… or is it? For some reason, she wants him to stay in her home, despite his request for a hotel room. He’s glad to see 
their two girls again. But then she makes him sleep in a kid’s bunk bed along with a bratty boy he’s never seen before. Hmmm…
That’s when the little boy’s father enters the picture. Samir (Tahar Rahim) is a smaller, less mature version of Ahmed. He’s a successful, bearded, small-businessman who owns a dry cleaner. His wife recently died and it looks like Marie and Samir now want to get married. But Marie’s older daughter is going through a crisis, Samir’s son is upset about something else, and there’s big trouble at work. And Ahmad and Samir have to work together with Marie holding all the cards.
This movie tells its story in a fascinating way. At first you think it’s about Ahmad – but it’s not. The point of view shifts from scene to scene, character to character, as the past is gradually revealed. Whose kids are whose? Why did Samir’s wife die? And what are all these unspoken secrets?
The Past is a fantastically subtle movie. It’s low-key, yet powerful (if that makes sense). It doesn’t shove the big revelations in your face; it lets them out slowly, gradually, over the course of a conversation. The three stars are all great – you may have seen Bejo in the French silent movie The Artist, and Rahim in the prison drama A Prophet (both of which won Best Foreign Film Oscars). I’m less familiar with Mossafa, but he’s also outstanding. (And director Farhadi also won for A Separation). The Past is a family drama well worth seeing.
Stranger by the Lake
Dir: Alain Guiardie
Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) is a young guy who hangs out at a gay nude beach. It’s a rocky lake surrounded by trees where men go for sex breaks. He makes friends with a shy, potato-faced man named Henri. Henri is confused about the whole place. He’s sure all the men there are cheating on their wives. He’s never heard of the concept of “full-time gays”. They chat about the sea monsters in the water and the guys on the beach. Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao) can tell Franck is attracted to a particular fit man with a Marlboro mustache – the stranger by the lake. And maybe that attraction is mutual. 
But Franck knows Marlboro Man is taken – he has a beach buddy.
But one night Franck sees the two of them frolicking out in the lake. The beach buddy goes down under water… and doesn’t come back up again. Is he dead? Did Marlboro man kill him?
Franck starts hanging with Marlboro Man – who he discovered is named Michel (Christof Paou). They tan together, have sex together… but only by the lake. At night Michel drives to somewhere mysterious – and he won’t say where.
When a body is found, a police inspector (Jérôme Chappatte) starts snooping around the beach. (He looks like Lt Colombo dying of cancer.) Franck is caught between lust and fear: is his mysterious lover also a serial killer?
This is a weird, eerie, almost surreal movie about casual sex, death and (in what might be an unspoken reference to HIV) the connection between the two. It’s sexually explicit but not always erotic. Stranger by the Lake is an excellent French art film.
Cocksucker Blues (1972)
Dir: Robert Frank
Robert Frank is a documentary photographer who was commissioned by the Rolling Stones to do a behind the scenes real-life documentary of their tour in 1972. He came up with this – a record of everything that happened – using small, hand-held cameras. You get to travel on board their private plane where everyone’s having sex, rolling around in the aisles. You get to see the hippy soundman giving Frank the hairy-eyeball every time he turns the camera toward him. Later you see the same guy shooting heroin.
You follow the entire entourage it takes to put on a show. Mick and Keith hunt for authenticity in the South. Groupies, hangers-on, bouncers, the make-up guy, the hair guy, the costume guy holding a single red rose. And the baby boomer fans are in clover and everywhere. The band bounces around the stage singing duets with Stevie Wonder. This is early behind-the-scenes celebrity culture, before it even had a name. Mick Jagger squeezing into his performance pantsuits. Andy Warhol and Truman Capote partying. Tina Turner showing off her voice. The unbelievably beautiful Bianca Jagger throwing shade at the camera…
In the end, the film was banned — the Stones thought the raw sex and drugs interfered with their rock star image – but it’s playing in Toronto, just once, as part of a Robert Frank retrospective called Hold Still.
Stranger by the Lake opens today, Cocksucker Blues has a free screening on the Free Screen tonight (but you have to pick up a ticket: go to tiff.net for details) and The Past opens next Friday (Jan 24).
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Everything. Films Reviewed: 12 Years a Slave, The Motherload, Starred up.
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, looking at high-brow and low-brow movies, indie, cult, foreign, festival, documentary, genre and mainstream films, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.
Welcome to an icy cold 2014! People tend to think in big terms with the New Year. They hope everything will improve. So, this week I’m looking at an historical drama about a man who loses everything, a documentary about women who want everything, and a prison drama about a guy with nothing to lose.
12 Years a Slave
Dir: Steve McQueen
Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a nice, middle-class guy in mid-nineteenth century America. He’s a professional (plays the violin) owns a home, is married with children and is an upstanding member of his community in New York state. And he’s black.
So when he’s offered a well-paying gig in Washington DC, he can’t resist and follows the recruiters south. But soon after, he finds himself kidnapped, thrown into a bare cell and beaten. His captors strip him of his fine clothes, his family, his dignity, his status, and even his name. Based solely on the colour of his skin, he’s sold as a slave. A slave!
He’s no longer considered a human being, now he’s just chattel.
And so begins his nightmare. The movie follows the next twelve years (it’s based on Northup’s own memoirs) as he is sold to various southern plantation owners. Some are relatively kind and humane, some monstrously cruel, but none consider that it is fundamentally wrong for one man to own another. He sees slaves being beaten, tortured, raped or even murdered at their owner’s whim. None of this is against the law. They have no rights, no legal standing, no recourse to justice.
On the way, he acquires a violin (from a kindly slave owner). But far from lightening his burden, music is shown as part of the whole slave system. Slaves driven to sing to a pounding drum as they pick cotton. And in one of the most painful scenes in the movie, he has to play ditties on his fiddle as the others are forced to perform grotesque high-stepping cake-walks to entertainer the planters.
Work is a constant danger. If he politely corrects an error or suggests a more efficient alternative he risks being beaten or lynched.
At a cotton plantation he meets a pretty young woman named Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o). She is the fastest worker in the cotton fields (most of the rest got flogged each day for not picking enough). She’s also a “favourite” of Epps, a cruel plantation owner (Michael Fassbender) and a captive to his wishes. But Patsey has to fear equally Epp’s, wife who has it in for her. Solomon observes it all.
Gradually they grind down his pride until he too walks hunched over, never looking a white man in the eyes. Will Solomon ever escape from this hell? And if so, how? And can he grant Patsey request to save her from her hopeless existence?
This is a great film, and you should definitely see it if you haven’t already. It’s painful, shocking, realistic and explicit. It gives a new visual meaning to slavery in most people’s minds. It’s also a tense but satisfying thriller about rescue and escape. Ejiofor and N’yongo are both amazing, as is director McQueen’s usual leading man Fassbender. It won the TIFF People’s Choice award and hopefully many others.
The Motherload
Dir: Cornelia Principe
Some recent books and articles ask “why can’t women have it all?” The “all” being a top job combined with raising kids. Anne-Marie Slaughter (policy advisor to Hillary Clinton) and Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook, COO) both wondered if woman can achieve both of these goals. Why aren’t women allowed the same opportunities to succeed as men?
These works received a lot of criticism. Is evening-out the playing field in the top 1% really the goal of feminism? And why should success be viewed in an acquisitive context of greed and possessiveness?
This documentary avoids some of these problems by looking at a broader range of subjects. In addition to the super-rich and powerful, it also shows middle-class women and one single mother with two jobs. It points out that paternity leave (in Canada, it’s routine only in Quebec) would help even out the discrepancies in the division of work by sex. And it shows how some 
families are thinking about redistributing roles.
The Motherload is an interesting doc dealing with a broad topic in less than an hour. And director Principe, who also produced the fantastic doc The World Before Her, clearly knows her stuff. Still, I’m a bit surprised that it never even touches on the issue of public daycare. While perhaps not an issue for CEOs, isn’t affordable daycare the crucial step in allowing mothers to work and raise children simultaneously?
And finally, I want to mention a fantastic movie — a sleeper that played at TIFF13 – that I really hope will open later this year in Canada. It’s called
Starred Up
Dir: David MacKenzie
Eric (Jack O’Connell) is an 18 year old who’s been “starred up”. That means he’s sent direct from juvie to a real, live adult prison. He seems at first like a vulnerable kid who’s going to die on his first day there. But things aren’t what they seem. His street smarts and prison savvy keep him safe but his high 
threshold for brutal violence and volatile temper could prove to be his undoing. So he joins a special therapy group within the prison walls to help him handle his anger. But he keeps running into trouble with an older, “head” prisoner called Neville (played by Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn). Neville keeps taking charge, instead of discussing and compromising. And here’s the twist – Neville is Eric’s real-live father serving a life sentence! O’Connell and Mendelsohn give unbelievably dynamic performances as the fractious father and son. This is a fantastic movie – look out for it.
12 Years a Slave is now playing in Toronto, The Motherload will air on CBC TV’s Doc Zone next Thursday, and Starred Up should open in 2014. Check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
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