PaulaVanDerOest Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Dutch phenom Carice van Houten has signed onto her next project, it was first reported a couple of weeks ago.The actress will shoot Smoke and Ochre, a biopic of South African poet Ingrid Jonker, who made her name in the 50s and 60s and is often compared to the American poet Sylvia Plath. The film will be directed by Paula van der Oest, a Dutch filmmaker who previously made Zus and Zo, which was nominated for an Oscar. van Houten is expected to jump immediately onto Ochre after she completes shooting the thriller she's working on now, in which she plays a Dublin psychiatrist who takes care of a young girl in a small village that suffers from multiple personality disorder.

With Ochre set to begin filming in 2008, its unclear how this affects van Houten's rumored involvement with Bond 22, which will begin shooting at Pinewood Studios in January 2008. Since both films will be shooting in Europe, something could obviously be worked out if the schedules conflict -- surely Barbara Broccoli sees that van Houten is too much of a prize to let slip away, so she won't let some commitment to an independent biopic get in the way of making Bond history. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- Daniel Craig and Carice van Houten, in a Bond film directed by Anthony Minghella -- Best Picture.

Even with a story that is contrived, implausible and filled with clichés, Paula van der Oest's Moonlight is an outstanding achievement. It shows us, very literally, that filmmakers may recycle as many plots as they like, for as long as they like, if they present them in a way that makes them seem original. As always, it is not what happens, but how it happens, that counts (I have revised Roger Ebert's oft-stated rule, because "what a film is about," thematically anyway, is in fact often important), and how Moonlight happens is through great visual storytelling.

Within the film's first few minutes, we are able to figure out how the whole story will play out, as it kicks off two familiar scenarios: drug dealers attempt to retrieve their product from the person who's run off with it, and a young girl falls for the boy she's nursed back to health. The two plots combine easily as they unfold into a basic couple-on-the-lam configuration, although not so much in the thriller sort of way. Moonlight isn't a suspenseful or action-driven film, although it isn't slow, either.