I still think his misanthropy is problematic, and I don’t think his clear liking for and identification with his powerful women characters - a constant in his recent work, Showgirls included - necessarily excuses including a couple of rape fantasies in Hollow Man, even if both sequences are ambiguous and never get very far beyond voyeuristic preliminaries. In retrospect, I turned against Verhoeven mainly because of the way he combined misanthropy and potent eroticism - which I mistook for misogyny, a common error.
#Hollow man movie movie#
I declined to review Showgirls (1995) at length, noting somewhat puritanically toward the end of my capsule: “I suppose the overall theory is that male spectators will tolerate any amount of stupidity and unpleasantness for the sake of acres of tits and ass, but you’ve got to hand it to the filmmakers for putting such a theory to the ultimate test: if anyone emerges from this with a smile on his face he must hate women as much as this movie does.” More equivocally, I accorded two stars to Starship Troopers (1997) I was fascinated with what wasn’t American about this allegedly all-American blockbuster, but I may have underrated some of the ways it was actively anti-American in its ridicule of American clichés, tastes, racial preferences, and archetypes. I was pretty hospitable to Total Recall (1990), but I awarded a black dot to Basic Instinct (1992), mainly because I was incensed about the calculations of Joe Eszterhas’s $3 million script (I’m leaving aside Verhoeven’s Dutch movies because the only one I’ve seen is The 4th Man). For one thing, I’d hoped it would give me an opportunity to reassess his previous works, most of which I now think I underestimated when they were released. With Elisabeth Shue, Kevin Bacon, Josh Brolin, Kim Dickens, Greg Grunberg, Joey Slotnick, Mary Randle, and William Devane.Īpart from Space Cowboys, Clint Eastwood’s enjoyably auteurist swan song, Paul Verhoeven’s latest feature, Hollow Man, was the only summer Hollywood release I’d been looking forward to.
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