Paul Verhoeven Has Been Knighted
Filed under: Awards
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Our colleagues at Twitch reported today that filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, who has directed a variety of movies from Robocop to Showgirls, was awarded a knighthood this week in his native country of The Netherlands. The honor is known as Knight in de Order of the Nederlandse Leeuw, which translates as Order of the Dutch Lion. I don't know much about Dutch tradition or history, but this particular knighthood seems to be awarded to notable entertainers and sports figures. Verhoeven's knighthood was one of over 3,500 honors given at the annual "Rain of Medals" in The Hague, and Expatica notes that most of the honorees were non-celebrities being recognized for volunteer work.Despite the Showgirls crack, and the inevitable snark about his having directed Starship Troopers as well, Verhoeven has certainly made enough notable films to deserve becoming Sir Paul (or whatever the Dutch equivalent might be). His Dutch films Soldier of Orange, Spetters and The Fourth Man are all critically praised, and there are a lot of people out there who love Robocop and Total Recall. Verhoeven's latest film, Black Book, was released in U.S. theaters this month -- I had seen it in December at Butt-Numb-a-Thon, and despite its being shown in the middle of the night, was completely riveted to the screen. In his review for Cinematical, Ryan Stewart calls it "the best film of 2007 so far," and considers it one of Verhoeven's top films. Stewart also interviewed Verhoeven during a junket for Black Book in February.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
4-28-2007 @ 1:11PM
George Myers said...
Congratulations! I once worked in the new (fledgling) close-range photogrammetry that he tested and discarded in "Starship Troopers" the Rolleimetric cameras and software (then on 80386 with 80387 math chip, the 486 and then Pentium predecessor) though in the archeology of the Cold Spring Foundry across from West Point Military Academy, NY for the EPA. He tried it to record a "tunnel" set then into a digitized "virtual reality" in order to CGI the "bugs" into the actors staged fight in the tunnel and switched to a laser system or "lidar" to digitize the tunnel as the feet of the bugs sometimes went through the photogrammetrically digitized set (tunnel). I was very happy to read of this use, I had taken many photos and had digitized the archeology of the site that had also produced the "Swamp Angel" a large R.P. Parrott rifled cannon and R.P. Parrott wooden gun platform (it and pintle recovered on grillage in Foundry Cove across from Constitution Island, NY. The island is where a famous overlooked Dutch-American patriot, Bernard Romans, the then colonists armed forces cartographer, drew up plans for the defense of Constitution Island in the Revolutionary War, the name said to predate that conflict) used in the incendiary bombardment of the civilians of Charleston, South Carolina in 1863 during the American Civil War. Herman Melville wrote a poem about "Swamp Angel" though I suspect it might have been over a "crime of passion" a American general shooting a D.C. Attorney General to death, (a descendant of Francis Scott Key, who wrote the adapted national anthem) on the White House grounds, over her, "Swamp Angel" he never married.
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