First of all, the Global Days for Darfur are ongoing. If you can make it and think there’s something happening, stop reading this blog now and look here to find out what’s going on. Depending on where you are, there still may be time.

Like most of the world, I haven’t done enough about this or educated myself like I should. I’ve allowed doubts planted by a smug contrarian moral purist, plus my own despair about governments around the world ever doing the right thing, to put me off the subject entirely these last couple of months. That was wrong, and it’s also why seeing Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book was about the most inappropriate thing I could have done last night, except that it got me thinking about all this.

My take on the film is that, as someone else wrote — not sure who — the thing really does ultimately choke on its cynicism. It tries for Verhoeven’s ultraviolent/ultrasexual version of Renoir’s “we all have our reasons” ethos, but in its attempts at complexity it eventually abandons all good sense. I don’t see anything wrong with Sebastian Koch’s terrific turn as dashing local Gestapo head as a character, but the filmmakers need to be honest enough to at least reference him doing something less than sweet and kindly. Call me naive, but I don’t think you get to be an anythingfuhrer in the SS without being occasionally mean.

In any event, the film twists and turns were more confusing than thought-provoking, more unpleasant and despair-inducing than bracing. I don’t think that by showing that some members of the Dutch resistance were nasty or ridiculous characters the film is committing any sin, but if it induces despair and makes it seem like acts of courage in a good cause aren’t even worth attempting because of the inevitable moral gray areas, that is wrong. I’m not sure that’s what happens here, but it’s too close.

I think. I don’t completely agree with Ella Taylor’s jaundiced perspective on the film, and outright disagree with her even more jaundiced follow-up in which she brings in Grindhouse (though maybe she has a point if she’s thinking of Death Proof’s s final shot). I don’t think the positive critical response to either film is really much reason to become uncool.

On the other hand, in praising warmly Verhoeven’s latest, Jonathan Rosenbaum does the contrarian like the cineaste lord of the dance that he is:

As someone who undervalued the political smarts of Basic Instinct and Showgirls when they first appeared, I’m probably not the best one to fault others for not taking Verhoeven seriously, but I still have to say that, ethically speaking, Black Book seems far less vulgar than a feel-good Holocaust movie like Schindler’s List.

Okay, sue me, since I’ve been on a “I hate all things Verhoeven post Robocop” tear for decades, I haven’t seen Showgirls, even as the official campfest/guilty pleasure of the late 20th century, but now that I know it has political smarts….Still, it’s that Schindler’s List crack that inevitably got people going, with Rosenbaum doing the critical equivalent of Jerry Seinfeld’s make-out session. It certainly got commenters going at David Poland’s blog, though mostly in a pretty thoughtful way. Jeffmcm, whoever he is, actually summed up my Black Book problem better than I could:

There’s a big difference between illustrating moral complexity and surrenduring to moral ambivalence.

Once again, hat tip to Greencine and David Hudson for a good chunk of this.