I had wanted to see this film for awhile and I finally got around to ordering it off Amazon. I fucking love Paul Verhoeven, but I wasn't sure to think going in. This was not going to the same Verhoeven who gave me RoboCop, Basic Instinct, and Total Recall... No, this was a serious movie, one that had garnered the universal praise of international critics.

Well, it was awesome. In comparison to his other work, Black Book is much different in style and tone than anything he's done before. It does have some of the same noirish aspirations that Basic Instinct had, but it never comes close to taking them to same extremes. The story centers around Rachel, a Jewish singer living in Holland during WW2 who ends up becoming a spy for the Dutch Resistance after a failed attempt to flee to Belgium. She falls in love with one of the Nazis she's spying on and from there things just seem to spiral out of control. The movie is part war story, part spy movie, part film noir, and part tragic love story. It is complex and interesting and utterly fantastic.

Unfortunately, seeing this movie has made me irrevocably depressed. I looked at Verhoeven's IMDB page to see what his next project was. Is it another film of equal ambition? No. Is it a return to his violent sci-fi roots? No. It's fucking The Thomas Crown Affair 2. What in the fuck?

What makes it worse is that he was SUPPOSED to direct Beast of Bataan: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0893394/