Word: underground
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Paul Verhoeven's Black Book is simultaneously a sexually charged, non-stop action movie about the Dutch resistance to German occupation in World War II and a bleak examination of the often morally dubious activities of the underground. Not all of the Germans are brutes; many of the oppressed are betrayers of their cause. It may be the most honest - and certainly the most exciting - movie about the secret war ever made. It also represents a comeback for Verhoeven, who left his native Holland in the mid-1980s for Hollywood, where he made big budget sci-fi movies like Starship...
...Perhaps it took some extra time for audiences to come to grips with the notion that people in the underground are often morally ambiguous. For example, there's an almost casual anti-Semitism among many of your underground fighters...
Black Book is different from the many other movies about the resistance during World War II. It is sexy where they tend to be romantically chaste and wistful. It is realistic - that is to say it shows the underground to be rife with morally ambiguous behavior instead of universally populated by idealist-martyrs. And in action terms it moves like a runaway train - murders, gun fights, chases, torture sessions, follow one another in dizzying succession - in contrast to most such films, which tend to focus on people standing around looking dour and anxious while moodily plotting to blow...
...film tells the story of a young Jewish woman named Rachel Steinn (Carice van Houten) whose resistance name is Ellis de Vries. After seeing her family betrayed and butchered as they attempt to flee Holland, she joins the underground and is asked to seduce the local Gestapo Leader (Sebastian Koch, lately of The Lives of Others). Soon she's planting a microphone in his office - and falling authentically in love with this civilized, slightly depressive man, who fastidiously ignores what's going on in the torture chambers beneath his headquarters...
...Nevertheless, the story continues to be told in places like the Plymouth Historical Museum in Plymouth, Mich., where an exhibition entitled "Quilts of the Underground Railroad" is up for the fifth year in a row. Over 6,000 school children have seen the exhibit, which presents the thesis of a quilt code. There are also smaller lectures taking place at local libraries, churches and quilt guilds all over the country. The story has also ended up in lesson plans and textbooks (TIME For Kids even published an article about Hidden in Plain View in a middle school art book published...