July 25, 2019

Dutch actor Rutger Hauer dies at age 75

Filed under: Film by Orangemaster @ 12:14 pm

Although only announced on 24 July, Dutch film and television actor and Hollywood regular Rutger Hauer passed away on Friday, July 19th at the age of 75. He is probably best known for his role as renegade replicant Roy Batty in Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic sci-fi film Blade Runner where he delivers the famous monologue that ends with “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” Hauer added ‘like tears in the rain’ himself because he thought it was poetic. In the 1980s, he also played Captain Etienne Navarre in Ladyhawke by Richard Donner; and John Ryder in The Hitcher by Robert Harmon, as well as many other roles in an acting career that would have spanned 50 years this October.

Hauer was one of the best and most prolific Dutch actors who, together with fellow Dutchman director Paul Verhoeven, made it to Hollywood. After many historical roles in Dutch, German and English, his leading role in the 1973 Dutch film Turkish Delight directed by Verhoeven still remains the top grossing Dutch film of all time. Hauer’s first appearance in a Hollywood film was alongside Sylvester Stallone in Nighthawks by Bruce Malmuth in 1981, and won a Golden Globe in 1988 for best supporting actor as Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky for Escape from Sobibor, the only Dutch actor ever to win a Golden Globe to this day. Verhoeven, who worked with Hauer on five occasions, told the Dutch press today that “he had lost his alter ego”.

This post was read on the Midnight’s Edge After Dark podcast on YouTube (1:20, see time stamp)

(Links: parool., indiewire, wikipedia.org, Photo of Rutger Hauer on Wikipedia as a screenshot of television show some rights reserved)

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April 7, 2019

Soldier of Orange set to make the London stage

Filed under: History,Shows by Orangemaster @ 4:54 pm

The Netherlands’ longest running musical, Soldaat van Oranje, known as Soldier of Orange in English, a Dutch musical based on the true story of resistance hero Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, is going to make it to the London stage in 2020.

A few days ago after the announcement, producer Fred Boot said it’s a dream come true. The production has been adapted ever so slightly, but the goal is to have the London crowd love it the same way the Dutch do. The story is not too Dutch, which is code for an international audience can enjoy it without knowing too much about the Netherlands – it is a universal story. As of 25 February, some 2,8 million people in this country have seen the musical.

In the 1970s, Hazelhoff Roelfzema wrote about his experiences in World War II in a book and Dutch director of Hollywood fame Paul Verhoeven made it into a feature film, starring actor Rutger Hauer.

(Links: nu.nl, rtlboulevard.nl, Photo of Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema by Willem van de Poll, some rights reserved)

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June 12, 2016

The strongest Dutch curse word in films [NSFW]

Filed under: Film by Branko Collin @ 2:30 pm

canon-godverdommes-youtube-small“That’s how they speak”, actor and comedian Michiel Romeyn opens a ‘canon of godverdommes’. “Let him go, let him go, idiot, godverdomme!”

The video, not safe for work for more than just a barrage of swearing, shows a litany of classic Dutch films in which actors pepper their speech with the word ‘godverdomme’, literally ‘God, damn me’ but the equivalent of ‘godammit’, and generally considered the big general purpose swear word in the Dutch language.

Eric Vonk, played by Rutger Hauer, uses the word while masturbating to a photo of his dead wife Olga in the classic Dutch film ‘Turks Fruit’. Comedian Wim de Bie plays a small time conman who finds out that his partner is letting him do the heavy lifting (“godver-de-godver”) and Monique van de Ven and Danny de Munk discover that acting is perhaps best left to the professionals, as using big words doesn’t make you a star if you do it tepidly.

The cutesy editing to the tune of Doe Maar’s ‘Heroïne, godverdomme’ is not too distracting.

It will surprise no-one that Paul Verhoeven is represented with three movies – besides the aforementioned Turks Fruit his ‘Spetters’ (also pre-Hollywood) makes an appearance, but perhaps the clip of his recent Dutch film ‘Zwartboek’ is the funniest. A man tries to kill Carice van Houten’s character while releasing a stream of verbal abuse, including the g-word (gvd if you want to keep it clean in Dutch), and gets promptly shot dead by his Christian helper: “You’re cursing, blasphemer!”

‘Godverdomme’, a word that can be made to sound like thunder on the horizon, also makes an appearance in the following memorable dialogues: “Godverdomme what a ride and I have cancer” and “Godverdomme, what is it between you and that woman? I saw her in a dream!”.

See also: ‘Cancer’ most hurtful word of abuse among Dutch youth

(Illustration: crop from a still from the video)

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July 13, 2012

Film director Paul Verhoeven’s bridge to Hollywood

Filed under: Architecture,Film by Orangemaster @ 6:35 am

After hearing from two curators of Amsterdam’s Eye Film Institute (white building on the left, the other is the delightfully retro former Shell building) that Queen Beatrix really liked Sokurov’s The Russian Ark, which is known for having been filmed in one go with no editing, I also find out more about Hollywood heavyweight Paul Verhoeven.

To the Dutch, Paul Verhoeven is a major director who launched the career of fellow Dutchman Rutger Hauer, starring in films such as the 1973 Dutch classic Turkish Delight, while to Hollywood he’s the guy that came up with blockbusters such as Robocop, Basic Instinct and Starship Troopers. Another face you may recognise in his films is Hollywood actor Jeroen Krabbé who played General Koskov in the Bond film The Living Daylights.

After 20 years of tinseltown Verhoeven came back to continue working on films in the Netherlands. In May he was present at the premiere screening of his restored 1980 film ‘Spetters’ (‘Hunks’ (male and female), but also meaning ‘spatter’ and even ‘ejaculation’). Lucky for some, it’s playing a few times with English subtitles in Amsterdam this month.

Spetters is being presented in its ‘uncut’ version, which means explicit sex scenes were put back in the way the film originally intended, including a blow job scene in the Rotterdam subway. Critics were very harsh on the film at the time, saying that it portrayed youth as amoral anti-gay bashers (one of the main character’s is gay) and the feminists had a field day with the blatant sexism and misogyny that actually makes the film amusing today and makes me wonder why the many women in Verhoeven films didn’t make it to Hollywood.

Here’s the Hollywood voice over trailer, with a wee bit of functional nudity:

And here’s the restored version of the trailer in Dutch. This one has explicit sex it in, which doesn’t need translation:

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April 24, 2008

Paul Verhoeven gives Jesus a stab

Filed under: Literature,Religion by Orangemaster @ 8:53 am
jesus1.jpg

According to Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, known for ‘epic’ films such as Basic Instinct and Robocop, Jesus Christ was probably the son of Mary and a Roman soldier who raped her during the Jewish uprising in Galilee. Oh and Judas didn’t betray Jesus.

This September, watch out for a book called “Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait” (in Dutch), which will eventually be translated into English by 2009. Lucky translator.

It apparently took him 20 years to reach these conclusions, which nobody is ready to believe.

But let’s be fair. I cannot wrap my brain around the ‘fact’ that Joseph was not Jesus’ biological father and started freaking out when someone explained to me that the immaculate conception was Anne (Mary’s mother) giving birth to Mary and not Mary giving birth to Jesus. And that that fish on Friday nonsense was made up by some pope no more than 100 years ago to put their stamp on history. And that Christians were against marriage because it was all Pagan and stuff way back when.

And the source got his degree wrong: they gave him a Ph.D. instead of the Master’s degree he has. So much for checking the facts.

(Link: foxnews.com)

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